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

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

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

From Mr. F. H. Bradley we have the emphatic declarations that the principle of dialectical opposition or the principle of "Non-Contradiction" "does not settle anything about the nature of reality"; that "truth" is an "hypothesis," and that "except as a means to a foreign end it is useless and impossible"; and "when we judge truth by its own standard it is defective because it fails to include all the facts," and because its contents "cannot be made intelligible throughout and entirely"; that "no truth is idle," and that "all truth" has "practical" and aesthetic "consequences"; that there is "no such existing thing as pure thought"; that we cannot separate truth and practice; that "absolute certainty is not requisite for working purposes"; that it is a "superstition to think that the intellect is the highest part of us," and that it is well to attack a one-sided "intellectualism"; that both "intellectualism" and "voluntarism" are "one-sided," and that he has no "objection to identifying reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as this does not mean merely practical satisfaction." Then from this same author comes the following familiar statement about philosophy as a whole: "Philosophy always will be hard, and what it promises in the end is no clear vision nor any complete understanding or vision, but its certain reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its complexities and all its unity and all its worth."

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

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

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

To be sure, both the extent and even the reality of all this supposed cession of ground in philosophy to the pragmatists has been doubted and denied by the representatives of Rationalism. They would be questioned, too, by many sober thinkers and scholars who have long regarded Hegelian intellectualism and pragmatist "voluntarism" as extremes in philosophy, as inimical, both of them, to the interests of a true and catholic conception of philosophy. The latter, as we know from Aristotle, should be inclusive of the realities both of the intellectual and the practical life.

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

The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an undue emphasis upon volition and action and upon merely practical truth.

We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy. These are the repudiation of the "correspondence view" of the relation of truth to reality, the rejection of the idea of there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between "appearance" and "reality," and the reaffirmation of the "teleological" point of view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.

Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its insistence that the truth is not a "datum" or a "presentation," not something given to us by the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a "construction" on the part of the mind, an attitude of our "expectant" consciousness, into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in a later chapter to this idea of truth as a construction of the mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the correspondence notion.

The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction between "appearance" and "reality." This is a still broader rejection than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already "fixed" and "determined," but rather, something that is "plastic" and "modifiable," something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.

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

And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of Absolutism "to some people" fail to "satisfy our nature's demands." "Am I," he indignantly asks, "to understand that we are to have all we want, and have it just as we want it?" adding that he "understands," of course, that the "views" of Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are to be compared "only with views" that aim at "theoretical consistency" and not with mere practical beliefs. Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands of the intellect and the demands of emotion--to use the term most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely intellectual satisfaction?

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

PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

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

For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons, the phenomenon that we call "action" and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality as if either of these things were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the "iron laws" of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under heaven, and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific outlook.

We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism--a view that should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment, and by activities and processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out, been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real happenings that constitute the world of our experience.

If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point to such considerations as the following: The fact of its having sought to advance from the stage of a mere "instrumentalist" view of human thought to that of an outspoken "humanism" or a socialized utilitarianism. The fact of its seeking to leave us with all our more important "beliefs," with a general "working" view of the world in which such things as religion and ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man to the world in which he finds himself. Its main object is to establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is "everywhere in the making," as that which signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being most vitally interested. In the spirit of the empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it. And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become a true "dynamic" or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human thought. It would "consult moral experience directly," finding in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual reality that raises the individual out of and above and beyond himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect manner to the autonomous element in our human personality that, in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the generalizations of science and of history.

Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this pragmatist glorification of "action" and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.

Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation. "Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of typical protozoons do we find 'activities' that imply volition of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc., indicate this." Then again, "there are such things as the diversities in secondary sexual characters , the endless shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex 'internal stimuli' of the higher animals in their breeding periods and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called struggle for life has been in the animal world."...

On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy may it be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the only object in nature that we know "on the inside." And do or think what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with concepts like the " Ideas," "form," "matter," "energy," "ether," "atom," "substance," "the individual," "the universal," "empty space," "eternity," "the Absolute," "value," "final end," and so on.

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

Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism . No system either of thought or of practice, no supposed "world-view" of things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual human being.

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

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

Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy that a thinker's "study" doubts about his actions and about some of the main instinctive beliefs of mankind should have come to be regarded--as they have been by Rationalism--as considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the refraining from activity, in the absence of adequate reason and motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of things.

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

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACTIVITY-EXPERIENCE

CRITICAL

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

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

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

Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter, for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the "nominalism" and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the "voluntarism" and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the "anti-intellectualism" already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the "sensualized sphere" of our duty, the "experience" philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a "romantic" element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called "romantic utilitarianism." We can understand this if we think of M. Berthelot's association of it not only with Poincar?, but with Nietzsche, or of Dr. Schiller's famous declaration that the genius of a man's logical method should be loved and reverenced by him as is "his bride."

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

Then again we might take up the point of the relations of Pragmatism to doctrines new and old in the history of philosophy, to the main points of departure of different schools of thought, or to fundamental and important positions in many of the great philosophers. The writer finds that he has noticed in this connexion the doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the "probability" philosophy of Locke and Butler, and Pascal, the ethics and the natural theology of Cicero, the "voluntarism" of Schopenhauer, Aristotle's philosophy of the Practical Reason, Kant's philosophy of the same, the religious philosophy of theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, Duns Scotus, and so on--to take only a few instances. The view of man and his nature represented by all these names is, in the main, an essentially practical, a concrete, and a moral view as opposed to an abstract and a rationalistic view. And of course even to Plato knowledge was only an element in the total spiritual philosophy of man, while his master, Socrates, never really seemed to make any separation between moral and intellectual inquiries.

And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of Hume to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a rationalistic basis; or Comte's idea of the error of separating reason from instinct; or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that "will" is implied in the notion of "exteriority"; or the idea of Descartes that the senses teach us not so much "what is in reality in things," as "what is beneficial or hurtful to the composite whole of mind and body"; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer that the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist that reality is the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on.

Another typical book of to-day, again , definitely gives up, for example, the "correspondence" notion of truth, holding that it is meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention. So also is the same writer's rejection of the notion of "absolute truth," and his confession of the "faith" that is always involved in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge. "We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic," he says, "that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which will be the truth."

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

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

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

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

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

That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen, in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability to prove its own philosophy--that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term. That it should have made this confession is, of course, only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses, the development of concepts and judgments in the "thought-process," and so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction, it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no effort to connect its discoveries in "genetic logic" and in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine. Nor, as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.

The case is similar in regard to the "theory of knowledge" of the pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter of the systematization of first principles, and little too that is satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They sometimes admit the importance of general points of view like the "causal," the "temporal," "end," and "purpose," and so on. At other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, seeing that "actual knowing" always starts from the "existing situation."

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

There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as Schiller puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are "points of view" about reality that are incidental to the stage of our natural life , others to the stage of conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of experience adequately from one another.

References have already been made to the failures of our Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller as an "original, plastic sub-stratum," or as the reality that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that the universe is essentially "incomplete," and that the truth of God, as James puts it, "has to run the gauntlet of other truths." One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially "acosmistic," meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable lack of an "objective," or rational, order that renders the whole pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of "subjectivism," and irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality, and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be termed an intelligible theory of reality. "You see," says James, "how differently people take things. The world we live in exists diffused and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to take them at that valuation. They can stand the world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity."

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

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