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NOTE ON THE MEANING OF "PRAGMATISM" 21

CONCLUDING REMARKS 262

INDEX 267

PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

INTRODUCTORY

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

As far as the external signs of any such vital relation between Pragmatism and our recent academic philosophy are concerned, the reader may be aware, to begin with, that there have been many important concessions made to pragmatists by such representative rationalists as Mr. Bradley and Professor Taylor, not to speak of others, and Pragmatism has certainly had a very powerful effect upon the professional philosophy of both England and Germany, judging at least from the extent to which many of the more prominent representatives of philosophy in these countries have apparently been compelled to accord to it at least an official recognition.

Pragmatism, again, in consequence of the different receptions that it has met with at the hands of its friends and its foes, has undergone various phases of exposition and of modification, although it has not yet, nor is it on the whole likely to have, a philosophical output comparable to that of Idealism. It has become more and more conscious of its own affiliations and relations to older, and to broader doctrines, declaring itself, in the hands of Professor James and his friends, to be but a new name for older ways of thinking. And it has succeeded, in a measure, in clearing itself from liability to the superficial interpretation that it met with a few years ago, when it was scoffed at for teaching that you may believe "what you like," for speaking, for example, as if the "theoretical" consequences of truth were not to be considered as well as the "practical." Although still resting in the main upon an outspoken declaration of war against Rationalism, it is no longer blind to the place and the value of thought or the "concept," in the matter of the interpretation of our experience.

Whether this be so or not, it has been in the main the work of James to set forth the meaning of Pragmatism as a philosophy of everyday life, as the theory of the attitude of man as man to the world in which he finds himself. Dr. Schiller, again, it is claimed, has done much to set forth Pragmatism to the world as an essentially humanistic philosophy, recognizing and providing for the rights of faith and of feeling in determining our beliefs and our theories about things. This philosophy has "much in common with what in other quarters is called Personalism." It cannot, however, be differentiated so sharply as Dr. Schiller apparently would have us believe from the many manifestations of this philosophy that abound in modern times, from Fichte, and from Lotze, down to men who are still living--Eucken and others. The ingenious Professor Dewey, moreover, is the champion of the scientific, or the empirical, or the "instrumental" method in philosophy, and has worked hard and successfully at the reform which he thinks must take place in logical and philosophical conceptions when interpreted as simply tools or devices for the economy of our thought.

When, in pragmatist fashion, we seek to judge of Pragmatism by this last-mentioned matter of its results, by the things it has enabled its advocates to accomplish, we find that we may, to begin with, speak in the following terms of the work of Professor James. He has certainly indicated how the pragmatist method may be applied to the solution of some of the ordinary difficulties of reflective thought; about, for example, the nature of matter or the nature of the soul, or about the old opposition between the "one" and the "many," about such concepts as "thing," "kinds," "time," "space," the "fancied," the "real," and so on. In all such cases an answer, he holds, is obtained by putting, say, the initial difficulty in the following form: "What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit?"

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

Then again, James has written a great many pages upon the so-called deeper view of human nature taken by Pragmatism in comparison with that entertained by Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return to this point.

He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, raised the question of the nature of Truth, attaining to such important results as the following: there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-made truth; the "copy-theory" of truth is unintelligible. We shall later be obliged to examine the more controversial positions that truth is not an end in itself, but a means towards vital satisfaction; truth is the "expedient" in the way of thinking, as the right is the expedient in the way of acting, and so on.

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

In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first his frequent and successful exhibition of the extent to which human activity enters into the constitution not only of "truth," but of "reality," of what we mean by reality. This is interwoven in his books with his whole philosophy of truth as something merely human, as "dependent upon human purposes," as a "valuation" expressive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory, nature of the contents of "primary reality." It is interwoven, too, with his doctrine that reality is essentially a ???, something that is still in the making, something that human beings can somehow re-make and make perfect. Then this position about truth and reality is used by him, as by James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism, with its notion of a "pre-existing ideal" of knowledge and reality, as already existing in a super-sensible world, that descends magically into the passively recipient soul of man. There is no such thing, he claims, as absolute truth, and the conception of an "absolute reality" is both futile and pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity to Solipsism, the difficulties of which it can escape only by self-elimination.

Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, "essentially irreligious," although it was fostered at first in England for essentially religious purposes. It has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a powerful left wing which, as formerly in Germany, has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolutism, the two phases of Deity--God as moral principle, and God as an intellectual principle--"fall apart," and absolutist metaphysic has really no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism can "renew Hegelianism" by treating the making of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom is real, and may possibly "pervade the universe." All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really essential and integral features in real knowing, and if knowing, as above, really transforms our experience, they must be treated as "real forces," which cannot be ignored by philosophy.

The main result of pragmatist considerations in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that reconsideration of the problems of logic and knowledge in the light of the facts of genetic and functional psychology which has now become fairly general on the part of English and American students of philosophy. It is through his influence generally that pragmatists seem always to be talking about the way in which we "arrive at" our beliefs, about ideas as "instruments" for the interpretation and arrangement of our experience, about the "passage" from cognitive expectation to "fulfilment," about ideas as "plans of action" and mental habits, about the growth and the utility of the truth, about the "instrumental" character of all our thinking, about beliefs as more fundamental than knowledge, and so on.

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

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

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

We shall immediately see, however, that this summary description of the growth of Pragmatism has to be supplemented by a recognition of some of the different phases Pragmatism has assumed on the continent of Europe, the different phases that may be detected in the reception or criticism accorded to it in different countries, and some of the results of the pragmatist movement upon contemporary philosophy. All these things have to do with the making of the complex thing that we think of as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.

A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF "PRAGMATISM"

"The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for obtaining clearness of apprehension: 'Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object'" .

"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 consequences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequence, then it must be really only the first conception under a different name. In methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different conceptions" .

PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

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

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

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

And as for the philosophy of science, it has been shown that our English-speaking pragmatists cannot exactly pride themselves in the somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and Schiller upon the supposed support for their "hypothetical" conception of science and philosophy to be found in the work of their French associates upon the logic of science. "The men of great learning who were named as sponsors of this new philosophy have more and more testified what reservations they make, and how greatly their conclusions differ from those which are currently attributed to them." Both Brunschvicg and Poincar?, in fact, take the greatest pains in their books to dissociate themselves from anything like the appearance of an acceptance of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science, as far as it goes, gives us a true revelation of the nature of reality.

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

We shall meantime take leave of French Pragmatism with the reflection that it is thus obviously as complex and as confusing and confused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other countries. It is now almost a generation since we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism and idealism in France in connexion not merely with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and Lachelier and Fouill?e and Boutroux, but with men of letters like De Vogu?, Lavisse, Faguet, Desjardins and the rest, and some of the French Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more specialized phases of the broader movement.

As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany, there is, as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The genius of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been "born again" of the "spirit" before obtaining official recognition. So much even might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition accorded to the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken and Stein and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in the broad light of the "humanism" that has always characterised philosophy, when properly appreciated, and understood in the light of its true genesis. Pragmatism has in fact been long known in Germany under the older names of "Voluntarism" and "Humanism," although it may doubtless be associated there with some of the more pronounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent insistence of the "G?ttingen Fries School" upon the importance of the "genetic" and the "descriptive" point of view in regard even to the matter of the supposed first principles of knowledge, the hypothetical and methodological conception of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists like Mach and Ostwald and their followers, the "empiricism" and "realism" of thinkers like the late Dr. Avenarius of Zurich.

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

What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the California address, and in connexion with Deweyism or "Instrumentalism." Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of "ideas as instruments of thought," and of the "consequences" by which ideas were to be "tested," was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a "theory of knowledge," and as a "philosophical generalization." The upshot of the whole preliminary discussion was the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the "approach" to philosophy, would probably soon "dissolve itself" back again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen, and the discovery that all that this early "methodological" pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.

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

What is now taking place in America in this second decade of the pragmatist movement is apparently the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a merely "subjective" and a highly unsystematic philosophy; the appearance of a number of instructive booklets upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement, some of them expository and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, some of them condemnatory and even contemptuous, and some of them attempts at further constructive work along pragmatist lines; indications here and there of the acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer doctrines antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism--some of them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism itself.

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

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

Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent English philosophy with which Pragmatism has special affinities. Among these may be mentioned: the various general and specific criticisms that have been made there for at least two generations on the more or less formal and abstract character of the metaphysic of our Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians; the concessions that have recently been made by prominent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, or "teleological," character of our human thinking, and to the connexion of our mental life with our entire practical and spiritual activity. Many of these concessions are now regarded as the merest commonplaces of speculation, and we shall probably refer to them in our next chapter. Then there is the well-known insistence of some of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout, upon the reality of activity and "purpose" in mental process, and upon the part played by them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and of our adjustment to the world in which we find ourselves. And the ethical and social idealism of such well-known members of our Neo-Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie, and Muirhead. These scholars and thinkers are just as insistent as the pragmatists upon the idea that philosophy and thought are, and should be, a practical social "dynamic"--that is to say, "forces" and "motives" making for the perfection of the common life. A great deal of the philosophy of science and of the philosophy of axioms and postulates to be found in British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick and many others.

SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and philosophy; its progress from the stage of a mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy itself becomes merely an important "dynamic" element in human culture; its preference in the matter of first principles for "faith" and "experience" and a trust in our instinctive "beliefs"; its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of "freedom," and the "hypothetical method" of science, modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.

And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being "made" truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty of reconciling God's supposed absolute knowledge of reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.

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

We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement and for "consequences." And, as far as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism itself in this regard. "No pragmatist," he holds, "can warrant the objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only believe it." There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of volition in all "affirmation" and "judgment," seeing that in every case of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.

Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of Pragmatism.

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

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

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

To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude to reality than does either the perception of the senses or the critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of things. As Bergson reminds us, we "desire" and "will" with the "whole" of our past, but "think" only with "part" of it. Small wonder then that James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of the unconscious factors in the depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.

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

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

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