PENGUIN 00i-01 CLASSICS

PRAGMATISM AND OTHER WRITINGS

William James was born to Henry James, Sr., the peripatetic nineteenth-century religious philosopher and devotee of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and his wife, the former Martha R. Walsh, in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the eldest of five children, his siblings including the novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James.

James attempted for a time to become a painter before commencing an education at Harvard in 1861 that would lead him by way of studies in chemistry, comparative anatomy, and physiology toward an M.D. degree in 1869. But Jamesâ€™s first love was always philosophy. After an initial appointment at Harvard in 1873 as an instructor in physiology and anatomy, he was invited three years later to begin offering courses in psychology and philosophy. In 1878, the year he signed a contract with Henry Holt to publish a textbook on psychology that eventuated as his two-volume masterwork The Principles of Psychology (1890), he married Alice Howe Gibbens, with whom he was to have five children. In 1880 he assumed a new position as assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard.

Because of his early artistic inclinations as well as his later scientific training, James was always a committed but wary empiricist who sought to thread his way between the emergent new materialisms of his day and the thick legacy of religious and philosophical idealism that suffused so much post-Civil War American intellectual culture. The Principles of Psychology and his later The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) helped up to a point to secure Jamesâ€™s reputation as a tough-minded lover of facts who was nonetheless intent on complicating, even humanizing, our notions of the real. In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, published in 1897, and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, which appeared ten years later, together with The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, and A Pluralistic Universe, published in 1909, and Essays in Radical Empiricism, published posthumously in 1912, James sought to make idealisms of all kinds â€” moral, philosophical, religious, and social â€” more critical of themselves. James died of heart failure on August 26, 1910.

Giles Gunn is professor of English and of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author and editor of a dozen volumes, the most recent of which are Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (1992) and the anthologies (with Stephen Greenblatt) Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992) and Early American Writing (1994), he has written and lectured widely on American literature, culture, and thought, as well as on cultural theory and criticism, in the United States and abroad.

PRAGMATISM AND OTHER WRITINGS

WILLIAM JAMES

EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
GILES GUNN

PENGUIN BOOKS

INTRODUCTION

William James is a thinker whose charm as well as importance derives at least in part from his ability to appeal to different readers in different eras and for different reasons. This remarkable availability for repossession by such varied readers in so many eras would be less likely, perhaps, if James were not so protean a philosopher. Indeed, to call him a âphilosopherâ in the traditional sense is to risk doing him an injustice.

Jamesâs first book â which some still consider his greatest â was entitled The Principles of Psychology and was published in two volumes in 1890. This pioneering study, which was immediately received with wide acclaim and adopted as a text in many British and American universities, was then followed seven years later by a collection of essays in what appeared to be moral and religious thought entitled The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. The essays comprised in this volume, a volume James almost immediately wished he had called instead The Right to Believe, turned out in some respects to prepare him for the prestigious Gifford Lectures that he was invited to give in May and June of 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and which were published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religions Experience. However, it was not until five years later, in 1907, that James published the lectures in âpractical philosophy,â as he termed it, that would ever after provide his thinking with its signature description.

First delivered as a set in Boston to a large and receptive audience at the Lowell Institute in November and December 1906, and then later to a much larger and still more enthusiastic audience at Columbia University in January and February 1907, the essays gathered under the title Pragmatism, and dedicated to one of the great exponents of liberty, John Stuart Mill, were almost immediately to define Jamesâs reputation in the public mind, even as they produced widespread consternation in more specialized philosophical circles. Preceded by several additional texts in practical, indeed popular, philosophy such as his one-volume condensation of The Principles entitled Psychology: Briefer Course, published in 1892, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Lifeâs Ideals, based on a lecture series he frequently gave at Harvard, published in 1899, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking was quickly followed by a succession of other volumes. These include The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to âPragmatism,â in which he attempted to clarify some of the misinterpretations that the earlier text immediately produced (and still does), and the posthumously published and unfinished Essays in Radical Empiricism, in which he sought to flesh out the lineaments of his metaphysics. Taken together with such additional works as A Pluralistic Universe, which appeared in 1909, and Some Problems in Philosophy, published in 1911, the year after James died, these many volumes, along with more than a hundred essays he wrote on similar or related subjects, as well as a plethora of articles on issues of more topical concern, describe a thinker who was a master not only of philosophy, as it classically defined itself in his age around questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the theory of truth, but also of critical thinking generally, as it was seeking to reconstitute itself as a form of public discourse capable of reflecting on such philosophically nontraditional subjects as psychology, religion, educational theory, social thought, politics, cultural experience, and contemporary morals and manners.

Yet what sets all of Jamesâs writing apart, rendering it simultaneously so attractive and so accessible, are his immense and varied gifts not only as a thinker but also as a writer. James was brilliantly adept at producing an American middle style that makes up in suppleness, wit, grace, and fluidity for what it sometimes lacks, at least for certain kinds of readers, in coherence, rigor, and internal consistency. James writes always out of the decencies and commonplaces and reasonableness of ordinary experience, which he welcomes into his thinking not only as an old and trusted if also frequently amusing friend but also as an ever-renewing and renewable source for reflection. Thought should never rise so far above the plane of common life, James seems to say, that it forgets where it came from and to what it must finally be accountable.

There is, moreover, a cordiality as well as a warmth to his prose because of the way it functions to draw readers in rather than hold them off. James clearly wanted to communicate and convince, but he also hoped to bring his readers into the processes and play of his own reflections. The mind is not a passive receptor of information that it then simply translates into another medium, James believed; it is a creative, inventive, imaginative instrument that responds to previous descriptions of reality not as existing simply for themselves but as stimulants to further thought. âWe add,â James wrote in one of his most famous formulations, âboth to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willinglyâ (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 112).

This is what James wanted his readers to experience in his own prose: not just the creativity of his own reflections but the stimulation of their own minds in response and the accompanying sense that such stimulations actually âenhance the universeâs total valueâ (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 112). In this he was assisted by a feeling for vernacular language and the rhythms of everyday speech that was as âgame-flavored,â to quote another of his famous figures of speech, âas a hawkâs wingâ (Preface to The Will to Believe, p. 194). Jamesâs colleague at Harvard and sometime fellow pragmatist, the philosopher George Santayana, got it just about right when he described James the writer as âan impulsive poet: a master in the art of recording or divining the lyric quality of experience as it actually came to him or to me.â

Beyond that, however, there was the sheer vitality, brilliance, edginess, unconventionality, and disarming candor of the man. To his students, James was ready for almost anything and hated any system that closed off further possibilities for thought. âWe must never set up boundaries that exclude romantic surprises,â Santayana again remarked. âHe retained the primitive feeling that death might open new worlds to us â¦; also the primitive feeling that invisible spirits might be floating about among us, and might suddenly do something to hurt or to help us.â How was one to resist such a man who so perfectly fit the description he provided in A Pluralistic Universe of the German philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner?

The power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he gives of a man who doesnât live at secondhand, but who sees, who in fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.³

Little wonder, then, that just as Jamesâs own contemporaries turned again and again to him for illumination of their own quandaries, so subsequent generations of readers have inevitably brought to him their own very different questions and concerns. Jamesâs earliest readers sought him out either as one of the first â and still one of the greatest â psychologists of the inner life, or as a moral thinker who could adumbrate the experiential grounds of reasonable belief, or as an anatomist of religious experience. Later admirers during the middle part of the twentieth century valued him instead for developing a simpler calculus for weighing the merits of ideas, or as the proponent of a worldview that was radical in the seriousness with which it took the relational character of existence, or as an advocate of the social theory known as democratic pluralism. Now, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, we find still other things to value in James, whether it be his conviction that most of our certainties (even about matters of fact) are susceptible to correction in the light of future experience, or his emphasis on contingency, chance, and novelty, or his sensitivity to what he calls, in the title of one of his most famous essays, âa certain blindness in human beings.â But this only confirms what James would have anticipated himself. If philosophy is, as Jamesâs fellow pragmadst John Dewey later contended, merely the history of its own time in thought, then it should surprise no one to discover that different historical eras put very different queries to themselves, or at least find themselves confronted by very different challenges and conundrums.

James was living at a moment when the spirit of the âmodernâ was beginning to break free of the ethos of the âVictorian.â The latter era had been marked by a strong belief in the permanence and validity of certain moral values associated with words like âtruth,â âduty,â âselflessness,â and âdecency.â It also assumed that such values are inscribed nowhere more deeply than in the texts and practices associated with high culture, and that as long as such values are permitted to influence the course of the present, then human history will continue to display a record of steady progress.4. The new era described as âmodern,â on the other hand, and particularly modernism of the sort that James helped stimulate in America, assumed that values are, like life itself, more unstable, provisional, and circumstantial, that the monuments of high culture have lost touch with their roots in the soil of vernacular experience, and that history refuses to present us with a spectacle of uninterrupted advancement and enlightenment. T. S. Eliot captured this benighted side of Jamesâs modernism perfectly when he remarked that it is in the struggle for cultural and spiritual values that we fight to keep something alive, rather than in the belief that anything is certain to prevail. Or, as James put it for himself at the end of his essay âIs Life Worth Living?â what matters is not having won but having tried

But there was a good deal more than this â and a good deal that was more radical â to Jamesâs American modernism, much of which is proleptically present in the great early essay James wrote on the nature of human consciousness entitled âThe Stream of Thought.â I refer not simply to his view that life confronts us with a series of obstacles to be overcome, of problems to be addressed, but to his belief that consciousness comes before sensation, that thinking can be likened to the behavior of a stream, that thought can therefore be differentiated into moments that are substantive and moments that are transitive, that the relations between such moments are as much a part of experience as the moments they connect, that we can have feelings about those moments as well as about the things conjoined by them, that thought is therefore a kind of algebra that does not need to translate all its operations into images in order to perform its work, and that, as a result, consciousness should be reconceived as a process and not a substance. I also mean that âThe Stream of Thoughtâ gives early expression to Jamesâs belief that modern philosophy needs to redirect its efforts toward the reinstatement of the elements of the vague and the indeterminate in our mental life; that it foreshadows his later opinion that philosophical history is to a large extent a conflict of different dispositions rather than merely of different opinions; and, finally, that it reveals his lifelong penchant for meliorism, for exploring the middle ground between extremes. In all these ways â and one could name others â James was already in possession of some of the most radical elements of his own modernism, to say nothing of many of his most recurrent themes, by the time he had published his first major book, which was not a work of philosophy but a work of psychology!

James has now of course been rediscovered in a historical and cultural moment that is somewhat different from the one he first helped to energize. This is the moment we have come to call âpost-modern,â if only because it seems to exist both in continuity with and in disjunction from the cultural moment just preceding it. By âcultural momentâ I simply mean a time whose general intellectual framework and emotional tone possess a distinctive and discriminable feel for those who live in it. While such structures may be difficult to define, precisely because they are composed of nothing more palpable than patterns of impulse, restraint, aspiration, foreboding, confidence, or distress, they nonetheless lend an unmistakable ethos and coloration, whether consciously or subconsciously, to oneâs experience of the social world. Viewed in these terms, the contrast between Jamesâs so-called modernist moment and our so-called postmodernist one might be reconceived as the difference between an era in which belief in lifeâs fundamental unity and coherence has been seriously eroded, or at least fundamentally questioned, without loss of a nostalgic desire for its recovery, and an era that, in one of its bleaker versions, acknowledges that life seems to lack any sense of underlying unity or purpose at all beyond, perhaps, the pursuit of pleasure and the creation of a therapeutic culture to sustain it, but that, in one of its more robust expressions, insists that bricolage, parody, irony, playfulness, anarchy, and jouissance may provide new avenues to the sublime.

The American poet Wallace Stevens can help us sharpen one side of this distinction, just as the French philosopher Jean-FranÃ§ois Lyotard can assist us in honing the other. Stevens associates modernism with an age of disbelief in which people who have experienced the disappearance of many if not all of the gods are forced to look elsewhere for the consolations once provided by religious faith. Such consolations, which included above all the mediation of a reality not their own, a âsomething âwholly other,ââ as Stevens refers to it in Opus Posthumous, âby which the inexpressive loneliness of thinking [and feeling] is broken and enriched,â⁵ must now be sought in secular forms such as literature, painting, dance, and philosophy itself. Here spiritual survival depends on what, in âOf Modern Poetry,â Stevens describes as âthe finding of a satisfaction, and may/Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman/Combing.â6

Lyotard, on the other hand, finds such spiritual substitutes ineffective at best, self-deceiving at worst. The great metanarratives of the past, which once taught us, if not exactly what the world is really like, then at least in what direction to think about the world and how to care for it, have collapsed, or at any rate have been outgrown, and there is little to console the self but the endless recirculation, often narcissistic, of outmoded images of such things. This means that all storytelling, all narrativizing, is plural, provisional, sentimental, and genealogical: an attempt out of the various, fragmentary plots at hand to rewrite the story of the past in light of the outcome we would like it to have. In such a cultural climate, Jamesâs pragmatism presents itself less as a simple philosophical and moral alternative to postmodernism than as an intellectual correction and deepening of some of postmodernismâs own preoccupations with the fluidity, open-endedness, belatedness, randomness, and undecidability of experience itself.

Such terms, which have come to be regarded almost as hallmarks of the postmodern, should serve to remind us that pragmatism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon or movement. Long before James had settled on the vocation of philosopher, much less developed any sense of the pragmatist project, he had undergone, while reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvierâs writings on the will, a kind of âconversionâ that would stay with him through much of his life, and once Jamesâs range of intellectual interests acquired sharper philosophical focus, he was to find himself in extended conversation with two other pragmatist philosophers from abroad, F.C.S. Schiller in England and Giovanni Papini in Italy. But almost as soon as Jamesâs ideas began to circulate beyond the shores of the Atlantic, following the publication of The Principles of Psychology and particularly The Will to Believe, people were detecting European precedents for his thinking in the work of everyone from Fichte, Nietzsche, and Schelling in Germany to Bergson in France (who denied a connection), and were moreover claiming that it communicates in interesting and important ways with the writings of Simmel, Husseri, Vaihinger, and even members of the Vienna Circle such as Mach and Wittgenstein.

At the time of his death in 1917, for example, the great French sociologist Ãmile Durkheim was preparing to deliver a major series of lectures on pragmatism, while soon thereafter pragmatism began to attract a good deal of attention, most of it negative, in Germany. But if German philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer (Georg Simmel, father of German sociology, being a notable exception) assumed before mid-century that pragmatism represented technological reason at its worst, JÃ¼rgen Habermas, Germanyâs greatest philosopher after midcentury, found in pragmatism the key to his reconstruction of reason as a mode of communicative action. However, Habermas is only one of a number of European and world philosophers who have more recently discovered themselves in dialogue with ideas that were first developed by James. Others would include, in France, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva; in Germany, Hans-Otto Appel and Hans Joas; in Greece, Cornelius Castiodoris; in Brazil, Roberto Unger; and in Belgium, now Paris, Luce Irigaray.

James first employed the term pragmatism in a lecture entitled âPhilosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,â delivered before the Philosophical Union at the University of California at Berkeley in August 1898. He was borrowing the term from his friend and sometime colleague Charles Sanders Peirce, who had first developed it in an essay that appeared in Popular Science Monthly in 1878 entitled âHow to Make Our Ideas Clear.â Peirce had in turn reported discovering the term in Kantâs Metaphysic of Morals, where, interestingly enough, it is contrasted with the term âpracticalâ â Kant associates the âpracticalâ with a priori moral laws, the âpragmaticâ with rules of art and technique derived from experience â but for both Peirce and James pragmatism was essentially a new name for some older ways of thinking that could be found in everyone from Socrates and Aristotle to Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Mill. John Dewey associated pragmatismâs roots in the past with Francis Bacon and his new theory of knowledge.

But H. S. Thayer has warned that the genealogical impulse can also be carried too far. When the pragmatic becomes merely another name for the practicable, its orgins can be pushed back to the beginnings of primitive magic and early religion, from which it can then be said to have moved into ancient Greek literature, eventually became associated with certain Hellenistic schools of salvation, was subsequently discovered by early Christianity, later was picked up and re-expressed during the Middle Ages by the Franciscans, eventually found its way into definitions of the ânew knowledgeâ propounded by modern science, and was ultimately picked up by American colonists who threaded it through Puritanism, the American Enlightenment, the opening of the West, and a host of other âAmericanâ moments since. If the contexts differ, the effect is the same. Linking knowledge with results, throught with power, ideas with action may produce little that is new but also yields little that is distinctive: âThe dictum holds for any interpretation of practical uses, sacred or profane, whether it be taken as recommending the subservience of all things to a moral aim or to material gain.â⁷

Peirceâs interests centered more narrowly than Deweyâs, or, for that matter, Jamesâs, on the problem of meaning: the pragmatic method, which he was at one point tempted to call âpracticalism,â and at another âpragmaticism,â the latter being an ugly enough term to keep it from being stolen by James and his followers, addressed this problem by proposing that all distinctions of thought can ultimately be reduced to differences in practice. Assuming further that our conceptions of things are no more than our idea of their sensible effects, Peirce devised the following pragmatic rule: âConsider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is our whole conception of the object.â9 ⁹What Peirce wanted was a procedure for determining the rational meaning of a word or concept, which for him lay âexclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of experience.â Hence the ârational meaning of every proposition,â said Peirce, âlies in the future,â its meaning being âthat form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special design, but in that form which is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose.â

This was Peirce speaking like a scientist intent on establishing a rule for intellectual clarity that was sufficiently rigorous to stand up to laboratory conditions of exactitude, consistency, and logical coherence. Ideally, Peirce felt that scientific investigation should operate like a force of destiny, carrying the most radically antagonistic minds toward the same inevitable conclusion. âNo modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion.â Truth is no more than âthe opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,â Peirce maintained, âand the object represented in this opinion is the real.â¹⁰ That, and that alone, is what we should mean by reality.

By contrast, James was convinced from very early on that reality definitely exceeds the conclusions on which reasonable people can logically agree. Reality constantly overflows our intellectual formulas and findings and may be, as James observed only much later in A Pluralistic Universe, âif not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution.â¹¹ James therefore wanted a less scientifically scrupulous or psychologically sanitized method for clarifying the meaning of principles, ideas, and language. Even scientists possessed needs, desires, biases, and preferences, after all, and however laudable and necessary it was to submit them to scrutiny and possible modification and improvement through scientific investigation, one could not do away with them entirely. Oneâs subject position, as we would now call it, is not irrelevant to oneâs investigative presuppositions and techniques. More to the point, most of Jamesâs potential readers were not scientists, and the issues and concerns with which they were confronted did not, for the most part, lend themselves to scientific analysis. What they wanted were answers to larger, more unwieldy and amorphous questions, such as why to go on living, what constitutes the moral life, how to reconcile the many with the one, why truth matters, and what makes one view of the world better or truer than another. Consequently, philosophy needed to stop concentrating all of its attention on its own problems and begin asking itself, as James put it in Pragmatism, âwhat definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true oneâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 27).

Thus when James decided, in his Berkeley lecture to the Philosophical Union, to borrow the pragmatic method from Peirce (he had actually heard Peirce invoke it in the early 1870s and had himself employed less developed versions of it in his earlier writing), he sought to give it much more general application. While remaining in complete agreement with Peirce that beliefs are guides for action and that truth must be measured by the consequences to which it leads, James nonetheless felt that the pragmatic principle should be opened up. If the ultimate test of any truth is the conduct it produces, James reasoned in âPhilosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,â then one must grant that it produces or inspires this conduct only because it initially âforetells some particular turn to cur experience which shall call for just that conduct from us.â James was thus prepared to revise Peirceâs principle to say that âthe effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, 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.â12

The upshot of this expansion of Peirceâs original definition is, first, that it permitted James to apply the method to a vastly larger terrain of experience than Peirce had considered. He was not interested in a method that works only under the controlled conditions afforded by laboratory apparatus or the classroom. He wanted a method that could be employed across the board, in all concrete cases. Second, it enabled James to turn pragmatic reasoning into an exercise that was less severely rational or deductive and more loosely interpretive and conjectural, one involving a good deal of mental guesswork as well as more stringent intellectual calibrations. To attain intellectual clarity, then, as James paraphrased Peirce both in his University of California address and, as here, in his chapter from Pragmatism entitled âWhat Pragmatism Means,â âwe need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve â what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive sign ficance at allâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 25). In Some Problems of Philosophy, James simplified the method still further:

The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make. Test every concept by the question âWhat sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?â and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means and for discussing its importance.¹³

Jamesâs definition of the pragmatic method, however phrased, clearly opened up Peirceâs formulation to more comprehensive use while at the same time rendering it, much to Peirceâs displeasure, a good deal less precise. The new imprecision of Jamesâs description of the method derived partly from some of the phrases it left open for further elucidation â âconceivable effects,â âpractical kind,â âmay involve,â âsensations â¦ to expect,â âreactions â¦ may prepare,â or, in the phrasing from Some Problems of Philosophy, âsensible differenceâ and âcourse of human experienceâ â but it also stemmed from the way James put imagination back into the operations of rationality. To determine âsome particular difference in the course of human experience which [a conceptâs] being true will make,â as in the latter definition, or, to calculate, as in the former,âwhat sensations we are to expect from [the object], and what reactions we must prepare,â was to put much greater reliance on the inferential and the projective capacities of the mind than Peirce had done. âPragmatism unstiffens all our theories,â James proclaimed,âlimbers them up and sets each one at workâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 28), and the work our theories do is suppositional, hypothetical, and presumptive as well as analytic. Assessing notions in terms of their practical consequences often entailed reflection on matters that had not taken place yet, that could only be surmised rather than substantiated, imagined rather than corroborated. Where theories and beliefs had been for Peirce merely precepts, templates for action, for James they became instruments for imaginative speculation as well as catalysts for change.

Pragmatism could thus be said to coincide with, and reinforce, many philosophical orientations. âIt agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractionsâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 28). It could also be seen as continuous with the practice of everyone from Socrates to Hume. But all of these forerunners had practiced it piecemeal. James was recommending that pragmatism be applied more universally and in a form that was intellectually more supple, accessible, and predictive. Even if it seemed to lack any presuppositions of its own and stood for no particular results, the pragmatic method could nonetheless serve as the solvent of all other philosophical theories, as the medium in which they conducted their investigations. Giovanni Papini, the Italian pragmatist, had caught exactly this dimension of the pragmatic method when, in a particularly apt metaphor, he likened its operations among all theories to the way a corridor functions in a hotel. While innumerable philosophical chambers open off of and onto this corridor, each housing a particular way of thinking, and all of them having rights to it, the corridor itself is philosophically neutral. It merely serves as the conduit that all schools of thought must use if they are to exit their rooms, much less circulate among one another.

If this was to say that the pragmatic method lacks an intellectual agenda, it did not mean that it is bereft of any philosophical presuppositions or, more to the point, that its adoption was without consequences. James, in fact, was convinced that its broad-scale employment would spell the end of many of the practices to which philosophers had become habituated over the centuries. More specifically, it meant âlooking away from first things, principles, categories/ supposed necessities,â and âtowards last things, fruits, consequences, factsâ (italics Jamesâs) (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 29). More generally, it meant âthe open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, ardficiality, and the pretence of finality in truthâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 27). If pragmatism was a method only, then it was a method with, as we now say, an âattitude.â James considered the implementation of the pragmatic method nothing short of revolutionary and even imagined for a time that he might be launching a new Protestant reformation.

It should come as little surprise that, with ambitions such as these, James shared with the British writer G. K. Chesterton the belief that the most important and practical thing one can know about individuals is their philosophy or worldview. By philosophy or worldview he did not refer to anything derived chiefly from books but rather to oneâs âmore or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply meansâ (âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophy,â p. 7). Something acquired from the whole course of oneâs experience, oneâs philosophy is in this sense simply âour individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmosâ (âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophyâ p. 7). James was prepared to concede that most of us have no very clear idea of such matters; indeed, he was persuaded that on large issues the great majority of us rarely know our own minds at all. But he was also of the opinion that no individuals, professional philosophers included, are indifferent to their âBinnenleben,â as he called it in âIs Life Worth Living?â that mute âregion of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fearsâ (âIs Life Worth Living?â p. 240). âThe history of philosophy,â he therefore boldly proclaimed, âis to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperamentsâ (âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophy,â p. 8).

That philosophical divisions can to a large degree be reduced to no more than a difference in temperament is a claim that philosophers were no more prepared to hear then than they are now. Violating all their preconceptions of and pretensions about their work as reasonable, objective, and disinterested, it provoked, not surprisingly, a torrent of criticism. But if philosophers remained for the most part adamant in defending themselves against such a charge, James was no less adamant in pressing it. Temperament might well be the last thing that philosophers wanted to admit into their practices, much less admit about them, but it was the first thing they trusted, James was certain, when it came to reaching their conclusions. Temperament âloads the evidence â¦ just as this fact or that principle would.â (âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophy,â p. 9). The philosopher wants a universe that matches his or her temperament and rejects those that donât. â[The philosopher] feels men of opposite temper,â James argues, âto be out of key with the worldâs character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and ânot in it,â in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical abilityâ (âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophy,â p. 9). In âA Pluralistic Universe,â James goes even further:

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by oneâs total character and experience, and on the whole preferred â there is no other truthful word â as oneâs best working attitude.¹⁴

The conflict of temperament that marked his own period, James believed, set rationalists, as he called them, against empiricists. Rationalists were committed to abstract or timeless principles and tended to be intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, and dogmatic. Empiricists, on the other hand, were committed to facts and thus tended to be materialistic, sensationalistic, positivist, pessimistic, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical. While neither type was pure â traces of these differences can be found in some mixture in most of us â the clash between them could be discerned throughout literature, government, art, religion, social thought, and contemporary manners, as well as philosophy, and seemed to be reducible to a basic distinction between two types of personality. On the one side are the âtender-minded,â who cling to the belief that facts should be related to values and values should be seen as predominant; on the other are the âtough-minded,â who want facts to be dissociated from values and left to themselves. Just as the âtough-mindedâ find such things as idealism and intellectualism laid too heavily over the path of life, so the âtender-mindedâ complain that the path of life is choked with the weeds of positivism, relativism, utilitarianism, and naturalistic determinism. The âtender-mindedâ find the âtough-mindedâ callous and unfeeling, the âtough-mindedâ charge the âtender-mindedâ with sentimentality and fuzzy thinking. This clash has produced what James describes as âthe dilemma in philosophy,â a dilemma that has left thoughtful people who seek a philosophy for the whole person suspended between two seemingly irreconcilable and equally unattractive alternatives: either an empirical philosophy that leaves too little room for values and principles, or a rationalistic or intellectualistic philosophy that has lost touch with the concrete facts of human experience.

James offered pragmatism as a solution to this dilemma. Pragmatism could reconcile the ideal with the material, the rational with the concrete, because in addition to being a theory of meaning, pragmatism was also a theory of truth. As a theory of truth, James argued, pragmatism holds that ideas are not only abstractions from experience and generalizations about it but also aspects or components of it. Ideas, that is, do not simply comment on experience but actually constitute important elements of it. For example, ideas are the forms that life takes for us when we are living under the sway of ideologies or experience a feeling of solidarity with others who belong to those âimagined communitiesâ called nationalities, religions, ethnicities, and so forth. More than that, ideas are what, for us, experience consists of when, even temporarily, our sensibilities undergo the reshapings of art and serious thought. Were this better understood, James assumed (and Dewey never tired of remarking), the importance of education, and the directions it should take, would be much more apparent to most people than they currently are.

But if ideas are in fact aspects of experience and not simply interpretations of it, then ideas become true, James reasoned, or at any rate become true instrumentally, just insofar as they help place us in more constructive, more effectual, more valuable relations with other parts of our experience â just to the extent that they exhibit what James termed, borrowing an unfortunate metaphor from business, âcash-value.â Jamesâs use of such commercial metaphors was not intended to imply, as he has been crudely misinterpreted to mean, that the truth of ideas or concepts is determined solely by, or reducible to, what they are good for in the intellectual or cultural or any other marketplace. He was merely restating and reaffirming what he thought Dewey and other members of the Chicago School had established, and what other disciplines as various as geology, biology, and philology now routinely accepted: that truth is not an inherent property of ideas as such but rather a property of their working connection with other things that already belong to the assemblage of the true.

James was here drawing from a familiar theory of how individuals typically acquire new opinions and establish their veracity. Truth normally lives on what James elsewhere refers to as a âcredit systemâ: âOur thoughts and beliefs âpass,â so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses themâ (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â p. 91). When some new experience emerges that unsettles the stock of already accepted opinions and thereby creates discomfort, the mind seeks to escape from this discomfort by attempting initially to modify the mass of already accepted opinion as much as possible. If this doesnât relieve the sense of inward unease, then one must await the discovery of some new idea that can be grafted onto the stock of older opinions with a minimum of difficulty, âsome idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expedientlyâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 31). New truth functions as a kind of âgo-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuityâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 31).

One of Jamesâs chief interests in this subject is the part played by older truths in the acquisition of new truths. Even as knowledge grows, it only grows in spots and leaves most of what is already known completely intact. The greatest enemy of a new truth is thus likely to be the rest of our other truths. And even when a new truth can get itself grafted onto the stock of the old, it almost always comes âcookedâ rather than ârawâ: âNew truths â¦ are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one anotherâ (âPragmatism and Common Sense,â pp. 75â76). In this connection, Jamesâs most startling assertion is that the body of truth that strikes most of us as no more than ordinary common sense may actually represent the distilled wisdom of some ancient genius whose discoveries have survived the long night of history to form a kind of âstage of equilibrium in the human mindâs developmentâ (âPragmatism and Common Sense,â p. 76), a level that later stages of knowledge supplement without ever completely replacing. Thus, even if common sense does not represent the most complex or advanced stage of human understanding â James reserves this for science and critical philosophy â it shows us how knowledge increases and why truth is always relational. Truth is relational because it is never encountered alone or in isolation; it always emerges in association with its antecedents and allies, its previous models and affiliated figurations.

James deduced from this that truth is not so much found as made, and made in part out of former truths constantly remade because they prove useful both as material for such remaking and as beliefs that do something for us.

We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 112).

Truth therefore ceases to be a category distinct unto itself and becomes for James a species of the good. âThe true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasonsâ (italics Jamesâs) (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 38). In purely functional terms, truth is, whatever else it is, what we say about it; âthe reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for âto be trueâ means only to perform this marriage-functionâ (âWhat Pragmatism Means,â p. 33). We accept things as true, then, not because of what, in and of themselves, they say about the real but rather because of what saying this about the real does to and for our relations with it.

Such views were, of course, bound to arouse a windstorm of criticism, since they put James on a collision course with all those philosophers and laypeople who maintained instead that truth represents a correspondence with reality. In this more conventional notion of truth â which, as it happens, is the same notion that common sense holds, even if common sense portrays truth as something else â truth is a reflection of what is already there in existence prior to our perception of it. And what is already there in experience prior to our perception of it is simply the realm of the real that our ideas are supposed to copy. Empiricists in Jamesâs time, no less than in our own, supposed that the realm of the real is composed essentially of material facts. The rationalists and idealists who opposed them in Jamesâs time insisted instead that the real also includes our perception of purely mental notions like goodness and beauty and the relations between them. In Jamesâs estimation, however, both overlooked the fact that the real is also composed, as James had shown in his discussions of common sense, of the whole funded tradition of experience already accepted as true.

If this latter claim, even if not original with him, was one of the distinctive contributions of Jamesâs theory of truth, it immediately created problems for any who wanted to champion the view that truth is simply a matter of correspondence. The problem was how to square the idea of truth as correspondence or agreement with this threefold conception of the real as relating to facts, to ideas, and to history. Jamesâs answer was simple. Inasmuch as the idea of copying never worked in the first place for many of the things we already take for reality â Jamesâs examples include such things as âpower,â âspontaneity,â and âtime pastâ â he concluded that truth as âagreementâ between an idea of something and the thing itself could only in the widest sense mean âto be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreedâ (italics Jamesâs) (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â p. 93).

Jamesâs phrasing here is very important. Without disputing the fact that some ideas do indeed copy the reality they name, and thus coincide with reality more or less perfectly, he wishes to indicate that âagreementâ in this literal sense is far from essential to what is most salient in our working notion of truth. For many purposes of truth â and particularly those we can never corroborate, so to speak, face-to-face â it is sufficient for ideas to lead us in the direction of reality and to aid us in our dealings with it. James speaks of this process of worthwhile leading as one by which an ideaâs truth is verified. Truth is not, in other words, an ingredient in ideas from the outset but is acquired by them. Truth is what happens to an idea when it is put into the relations that confirm it. More than a description of the agreement that obtains between an idea and its referent, then, truth is an action, an event, a process, by which an ideaâs âagreementâ or âcorrespondence,â in only this widest sense James is talking about, is verified, validated. An ideaâs verity, however, is not to be confused with the process of its, as James called it, âveri-ficationâ (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â p. 88). Truths are verified only retrospectively, and are always subject to further revision by later experience.

James was willing to admit that others might find this way of talking about âagreementâ confusing, if not disturbing, but it was necessary if âagreementâ was to apply to âany process of conductionâ by which a present idea moves constructively, or, to use Jamesâs term, âprofitably,â to a future conclusion. In any case, what all truths have in common is that, James was convinced, âthey pay. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processesâ (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â p. 96).

Describing truth as but another name for verification processes was scarcely likely to silence Jamesâs critics, because verification processes so often occur only at second or third hand. Their belated nature derives from the fact that thinking is so wholly âdiscursified,â as James put it, anticipating the insights of philosophers from our own time such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. By âdiscursified,â James means that thinking is thoroughly mediated through intertextual systems of communication and exchanges. Thus, as truth âgets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for every one,â and verifications are lent and borrowed through textualized âsocial intercourse,â fewer and fewer of these ideas receive direct verification but are instead confirmed or disconfirmed by their relations with other discourses and discursive regimes (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â p. 94).

Jamesâs notion of truth thus contains several elements that must be kept in view if one is not to be misled by its somewhat informal and digressive articulation. Predicating his argument on the assumption that truth involves agreement with reality only in the most general sense, James is careful to resist any imputation that âagreementâ involves âone and the same relation in all casesâ or that âagreementâ is ultimately achievable only in some infinite mind that transcends the limitations of all human points of view.¹⁵ Moreover, while truth involves for him something that works, that has practical effects, that is conducive to change, Jamesâs theory also owes something to Peirceâs association of truth with reasoned consensus. James may have come closest to clearly sorting out these various elements in an interview he gave to the New York Times the same year that Pragmatism was published. Countering the charges that pragmatism denies any possibility of a theoretical knowledge of reality or truth, and that it functions for too many people as a practical substitute for philosophy itself, he insists, a bit defensively, that pragmatism has âproved so over-subtle that even academic critics have failed to catch its question, to say nothing of their misunderstanding of its answerâ:

Whatever propositions or beliefs may, in point of fact, prove true, it says, the truth of them consists in certain definable relations between them and the reality of which they make report.Â â¦ Philosophers have generally been satisfied with the word âagreementâ here, but pragmatists have seen that this word covers many different concrete possibilities.â¦Â Thus the vague notion of âagreementâ with reality becomes specified into that of innumerable ways in which our thoughts may fit reality, ways in which the mindâs activities cooperate on equal terms with the reality producing the fit resultant truth.¹⁶

Statements such as this â or his more famous claim that ââThe trueâ â¦ is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as âthe rightâ is only the expedient in the way of our behavingâ (âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â pp. 97â98) â have always furnished Jamesâs opponents with an excuse to brand him as an irresponsible subjectivist, and little he said later in The Meaning of Truth, where he attempted to address the strongest arguments of his best critics, has fully silenced his detractors. Indeed, when James tries to explain, as in the chapter entitled âHumanism and Truthâ in The Meaning of Truth, some of the implications of his theory by describing truth as âa relation, not of our ideas to non-human realities, but of conceptual parts of our experience to sensational parts,â he only aroused his critics the more by maintaining that the âtruth-relation,â as he terms it, describes something that works, whether physically or intellectually, actually or merely possibly, in establishing relations within concrete experience (âHumanism and Truth,â p. 159).

Critics have taken this as further evidence that James denied the existence of real objects outside of or independent of the mind. James considered this malicious nonsense. Neither he nor any other pragmatist (he pointed to Schiller and Dewey) had ever denied that the object in a truth relation, if it be experienceable at all, is transcendent to the subject. How otherwise, he asked, to explain Deweyâs insistence, with which he himself concurred emphatically, that the whole purpose of thinking is to intervene in and attempt to change the world outside the mind? â[Deweyâs] account of knowledge is not only absurd, but meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But because he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations âtranscendentâ in the sense of being altogether trans-experiential, their critics pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that they deny the existence within the realm of experience of objects external to the ideas that declare their presence thereâ (Preface, The Meaning of Truth, p. 140).

While it seemed incredible to James that his most intelligent critics could have gotten him so far wrong, some of their misunderstanding was at least partially intelligible. Part of the problem was that James was not writing primarily for professional philosophers but for members of an educated public which was more in need of intellectual encouragement and moral support than of precise definitions and logical arguments. In addition to being a source of irritation for some, this was also a source of bewilderment to others. A second factor was Jamesâs talent for vivid expression. If this produced a continuously ambulatory prose style that was rich in figurative maneuvers and surprises, it frequently yielded metaphorical analogies that left much room for alternative and sometimes discrepant interpretations. Still a third reason for his problems with critics had to do with some of his formulations themselves. Many of his essays were written to meet publisherâs deadlines, before he had time to think through all of the implications of their arguments, and others were constructed with an eye to reconciling his theory of truth with his only slowly evolving metaphysics.

Jamesâs metaphysics, partially evolved or not, clearly shadows some of the claims he makes about truth in Pragmatism and momentarily comes to the fore in his chapter entitled âPragmatism and Humanism.â In the latter, he contrasts the edition of the universe pragmatism provides â âunfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at workâ (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 113) â with the edition rationalism or idealism affords â âthe infinite folio, or Ã©dition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own wayâ (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 113) â only to conclude that the choice between them must inevitably have a good deal to do with temperament. The pragmatist, James cheerfully admits, is no exception. In addition to being something of a happy-go-lucky anarchist, or at least an opportunist, the pragmatist is a pluralist who rejects the idea that truth is imposed on experience from a position outside in favor of the belief that truth emerges from within experiences that lean on each other without leaning on anything beyond them. âAll âhomesâ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope [for] salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies (âPragmatism and Humanism,â p. 114).

James had been interested in what holds experience together since his ruminations on âThe Stream of Thoughtâ in The Principles of Psychology, and he had returned to this theme in various essays on the same subject that he had published in the first decade of the new century. In the essay âDoes Consciousness Exist?â for example, he had continued to challenge dualistic thinkers who severed the mind from the body and viewed consciousness as an entity rather than a function. Insisting that consciousness refers to an âexternal relationâ rather than âa special stuff or way of being,â James had asserted that âthe peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their conscious quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations â these relations themselves being experiences â to one another. â¹⁷ But it was in the Preface to The Meaning of Truth that James gave the most succinct expression to his metaphysics, or view of how the whole of life hangs together. He chose the name âradical empiricismâ for his metaphysics because it starts with parts rather than with wholes, with particulars rather than unities, and then goes on to explain how the relations between parts relate to the parts themselves. Expanding on this series of assumptions, James said that radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized conclusion. Its postulate is that philosophers can find the terms necessary to define all the things worthy of debate within experience itself. Its statement is that the relations between things are just as capable of being directly experienced as the things themselves. And its generalization is that the parts of experience are held together by relations that are no less elements of experience than the parts themselves. From this James concluded that the universe as we know it needs âno extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structureâ {The Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. 138).

Jamesâs commitment to radical empiricism did not deter him from writing at length about religion. As early as his essay âThe Will to Believe,â James had concluded that we have a right to choose any options, religious or otherwise, that appear to be âliveâ as opposed to âdead,â âforcedâ as opposed to âavoidable,â and âmomentousâ as opposed to âtrivialâ since, even if we canât prove them, we would lose the possibility of their being true at all if we postponed a decision about them indefinitely (pp. 199â200). In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James had attested to the consciousness of a sense of a âMoreâ continuous with the self, but operative outside the self, with the power to save the self from possible spiritual shipwreck. James was here at least prepared to call himself a âpiecemeal supernaturalistâ who âadmits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together.â¹⁹ Such a sense of the âMoreâ is also close to what James described about the self in a later essay on âThe Continuity of Experience,â where he speaks of the margin or horizon of consciousness that surrounds its center and âshades insensibly into a subconscious more.â¦Â What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any given time is the centre; but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze.â¹⁹

In both cases, James was careful not to step outside of experience to find the terms to describe something he sensed to extend beyond its conceptual boundaries. And so he resisted the temptation again, when he came to examine religion in the final chapter of Pragmatism. Here he utilizes the analogy of the relation our pets occupy to human life to evoke a religious sense of the relation that human beings occupy to the whole of the universe:

They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things (âPragmatism and Religion,â p. 131).

Jamesâs critics, primarily from philosophy, who have based their case against him on problems with his theory of truth have clearly done him a disservice. Even if he thought of his contribution to philosophy as primarily epistemological, he put his theory of meaning and truth to work on an extraordinary range of issues that were by turns psychological, moral, social, political, historical, and religious. Nor did James see this as in any way an adulteration or betrayal of the essential pmgmatist enterprise. James not only hoped that its adoption heralded a new dawn in philosophy but was unapologetic about the fact that pragmatism carried along with it certain intellectual entailments and predilections. We can perhaps best gauge the range and depth of his achievement by putting them in summary form.

To begin with, Jamesian pragmatism is, if not completely anti-foundational, then at least thoroughly skeptical about neutral starting points for thought. Second, it is empirical not simply because of its stress on the concrete and the particular but because of its radical commitment to parts rather than wholes and its belief that the parts of experience must include feelings and ideas, as well as facts, whose relations are as fully experienceable as anything else. Third, it is pluralist in its affirmation of a universe whose parts are not only multiple and diverse but always changing and often untidy. Fourth, it is realistic in that it acknowledges that there are real gains and real losses in life and that what survives, as Jamesâs sister Alice once wrote in her Diary, âis the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life brings to us.â²⁰ Fifth, it is, to use Peirceâs word, âfallibilist,â in the sense that it regards all conclusions and certainties as open to further question even if not all at once. Sixth, it also holds with Peirce that philosophy needs to shift its model of argumentation from a chain that is no stronger than its weakest link to a cable whose strength derives from the multitude and interconnectedness of its fibers, and thereby learn to trust in the number and variety of its arguments rather than in the decisiveness of any one of them. Seventh, and finally, it is democratic in that its central public aim is not only to dissolve the hierarchical protocols and formalities that define the topics and styles of traditional philosophical disputation, but also to enact in its own speech the informality, directness, and frankness of a conversation between equals. In short, by encouraging ideas to follow the irregular and unpredictable logics of dialogue rather than the more formal, systematic logics of disquisition and debate, James succeeded, as no other philosopher in the American tradition, in turning philosophy into a mode of answerable discourse.

NOTES

George Santayana, âA Brief History of My Opinions,â in The Philosophy of Santayana, ed. Irwin Edman (New York: Charles Scribnerâs Sons, 1936), 16.

George Santayana, Persons and Places (London: Constable, 1944), 249.

Quoted, Richard J. Bernstein, âIntroduction,â in Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971), xxvâxxvi.

For a further discussion of these assumptions, see Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (1959, Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1964), 3â51.

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 237.

Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 175.

H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1968), 6.

C. S. Peirce, âHow to Make Our Ideas Clear,â in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 30,31.

C. S. Peirce, âThe Essentials of Pragmatism,â in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 261.

C. S. Peirce, âHow to Make Our Ideas Clear,â 38.

William James, âA Pluralistic Universe,â in Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Ralph Barton Perry, 222.

William James, âPhilosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,â in William James, Writings, 1879â1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 1080.

William James, âSome Problems of Philosophy,â in William James, Writings 1902â1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 1013.

Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Ralph Barton Perry, 131â32.

Hilary Putnam, âJamesâs Theory of Truth,â in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 183.

William James, Interview, New York Times, Nov. 3, 1907.

William James, âDoes Consciousness Exist?â in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 178.

William James, The Varieties of Religions Experience (1902; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 410.

William James, âThe Continuity of Experience,â in The Writings of William James, 296.

Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 96.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

EDITIONS

The Works of William James, gen. ed., Frederick H. Burkhardt; textual ed., Fredson Bowers; assoc. ed., Ignas K. Skrupskelis; 17 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975â88.

The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

William James, Writings, 1902â1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

William James, Writings, 1879â1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers. New York: The Library of America, 1992.

BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

Alien, Gay Wilson. William James. New York: Viking, 1967.

Feinstein, Howard. Becoming William James. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

James, Henry. Notes of a Son and Brother. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914.

ââ . A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner, 1913.

James, William. The Correspondence of William James. 12 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992â.

Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.

Matthiessen, F. O. The James Family. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936.

Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.

Simon, Linda, comp. William James Remembered. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1996.

GENERAL HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Ayer, A. J. The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1968.

Bauerlein, Mark. The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

Browning, Don S. Pluralism and Personality: William James and Some Contemporary Cultures of Psychology. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980.

Diggins, John Patrick. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1977.

Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Gunn, Giles. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Hocks, Richard A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship Between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974.

Hollinger, David. In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Kloppenberg, James T. âPragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?â Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996), 100â138.

ââ . Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870â1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860â1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Lentricchia, Frank. âPhilosophers of Modernism at Harvard, Circa 1900,â South Atlantic (Quarterly 89, no. 4 (Fall 1990), 787â834.

Lovejoy, Arthur 0. The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963.

McDermott, John. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Moore, Edward C. American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

OâConnell, Robert J. William James on the Courage to Believe. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997.

Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Royce, Josiah. William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Ryan, Judith. The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Santayana, George. Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America. New York: Scribner, 1920.

West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

SPECIALIZED STUDIES

Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Bjork, Daniel W. William James and the Center of His Vision. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1988.

Coon, Deborah J. âOne Moment in the Worldâs Salvation: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James,â The Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996), 70â99.

Cotkin, George, William James: Public Philosopher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Edie, James M. William James and Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Ford, Marcus Peter. William Jamesâs Philosophy: A New Perspective. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

Gale, Richard M. The Divided Self of William James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Gavin, William Joseph. William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Kazin, Alfred. âWilliam James: To Be Born Again,â Princeton University Library Chronicle 54 (Winter-Spring 1993), 244â58.

Lentricchia, Frank. âThe Return of William James,â Cultural Critique (Fall 1986), 5â31.

Levinson, Henry Samuel. Science, Metaphysics, and the Chance of Salvation: An Interpretation of the Thought of William James. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978.

ââ . The Religious Investigations of William James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Reck, Andrew J. Introduction to William James. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967.

Roth, John K. Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969.

Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. Chaos and Context: A Study in William James

Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978.

ââ . William Jamesâs Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Strout, Cushing. âWilliam James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul,â Daedalus 97 (Summer 1968), 1962â82.

Taylor, Eugene. William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Thomas, Joseph M. âFigures of Habit in William James,â New England Quarterly 66 (March 1993), 3â26.

Wild, John. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Wilshire, Bruce W. William James and Phenomenology. New York: AMS Press, 1979.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking began as a course of lectures that James delivered as early as 1905 at Wellesley College, at the University of Chicago, and at Glenmore in Keene, New York. These lectures were then expanded into a set of eight lectures James delivered, first at the Lowell Institute in Boston in late November and early December 1906, and then at Columbia University in New York City at the end of January and in early February 1907. Several of the lectures were published as essays in 1907 before James submitted them all as the manuscript Longmans, Green, and Co. published in June of that year. They include Lecture I, âThe Present Dilemma in Philosophy,â published in Popular Science Monthly (March 1907) as âA Defence of Pragmatism: I. Its Mediating Office,â Lecture II, âWhat Pragmatism Means,â published in Popular Science Monthly (April 1907) as âA Defence of Pragmatism: II. What Pragmatism Means,â and Lecture VI, âPragmatismâs Conception of Truth,â published in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods (March 1907). Lecture III, âSome Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered,â was published much earlier, in December 1904, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, itself a revision of his lecture before the Philosophical Union at the University of California at Berkeley on âPhilosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,â which appeared in September 1898 in The University of California Chronicle. In his own copy of the first edition, James indicated seventy-eight changes that he wanted made in subsequent printings, but only six of these found their way into the series of reprintings, no less than eight in Jamesâs own lifetime, that immediately followed. This reprinting of the text, made in April 1921, incorporates those minor changes but in every other respect is identical with the first edition published in June 1907.

The texts from The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism were, with the exception of the Preface, all published earlier. âThe Tigers in Indiaâ represents excerpts from a presidential address James delivered before the American Psychological Association that was published in the Psychological Review, Vol. II, in 1895. âHumanism and Truthâ is a slightly revised reprint of an essay published in Mind, Vol. XIII (October 1904). As reprinted here, they are taken from the first edition of The Meaning of Truth, which was published by Longmans, Green and Co. in October 1909.

âThe Stream of Consciousnessâ is taken from Psychology: Briefer Course, a condensed and revised version of Jamesâs two-volume work The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, which includes the much longer âparent essayâ of this text as the chapter entitled âThe Stream of Thought.â This text is taken from the first edition of Psychology: Briefer Course, published by Henry Holt and Company in 1892, but reflects authorial corrections and alterations that found their way into the second, third, and fourth printings of the work, all of which appeared in 1893.

Essays from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, which include the Preface, âThe Will to Believe,â âIs Life Worth Living?â and âThe Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,â are taken from the first edition, published by Longmans, Green and Co. in March 1897.

The two essays reprinted here from Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Lifeâs Ideals come from the âTalks to Studentsâ section of the book and were originally prepared as lectures James delivered between 1896 and 1898. An earlier version of âOn a Certain Blindness in Human Beingsâ was delivered in 1898 at an unnamed Episcopal theological school; earlier versions of âWhat Makes a Life Significantâ were given at Bryn Mawr College in April 1898 and at Stanford in September 1898. Originally published in April 1899 by Henry Holt and Company, this edition of Talks to Teachers â¦ And to Students was published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1904.

Among the miscellaneous essays, âAddress at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emersonâ was delivered in Concord, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1903, and published in the Harvard Graduate Magazine in September of that year. âA World of Pure Experienceâ was published in two numbers of The Journal ofPhilosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, the first September 29,1904, the second October 13, 1904. âIs Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?â was published in the same journal on April 27, 1905.

PRAGMATISM

A NEW NAME FOR
SOME OLD WAYS OF THINKING

to the memory of John Stuart Mill ¹

from whom I first learned the

pragmatic openness of mind

and whom my fancy likes to picture as

our leader

were he alive to-day

Preface

THE LECTURES THAT FOLLOW were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called â€” I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it â€” seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.

If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.

In America, JOHN DEWEYâ€™s â€˜Studies in Logical Theoryâ€™ are the foundation.² Read also by DEWEY the articles in the Philosophical Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.

Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F.C.S. SCHILLERâ€™s in his â€˜Studies in Humanism,â€™ especially the essays numbered i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix.³ His previous essays and in general the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.

Furthermore, see J. MILHAUD: le Rationnel, 1898,⁴ and the fine articles by LE ROY in the Revue de MÃ©taphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9.⁵ Also articles by BLONDEL and DE SAILLY in the Annales de Philosophic ChrÃ©tienne, 4 me SÃ©rie, vols. 2 and 3.⁶ PAPINI announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French language, to be published very soon.⁷

To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as â€˜radical empiricism.â€™ The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

April, 1907.

LECTURE I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

IN THE PREFACE to that admirable collection of essays of his called âHeretics,â Mr. Chesterton⁸ writes these words: âThere are some people â and I am one of them â who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemyâs numbers, but still more important to know the enemyâs philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.â

I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism⁹himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title, â flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood all that he said â yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew â they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or Godâs omniscience, or good and evil, and see how every one in the place pricks up his cars. Philosophyâs results concern us all most vitally, and philosophyâs queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity.

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas,¹⁰ to try to impart to you some news of the situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It âbakes no bread,â as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the worldâs perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the worldâs character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and ânot in it,â in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.

Of course I am talking here of very positively, marked men, men of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato,¹¹ Locke,¹² Hegel,¹³ Spencer,¹⁴ are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of manâs beliefs.

Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government, and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms ârationalistâ and âempiricist,â âempiricistâ meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, ârationalistâ meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in menâs ways of taking their universe, by talking of the âempiricistâ and of the ârationalistâ temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.

More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms âintellectualismâ and âsensationalismâ used as synonyms of ârationalismâ and âempiricism.â Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection â is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist â I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.

I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles âtender-mindedâ and âtough-mindedâ respectively.

T HETENDER-MINDED.

THE TOUGH-MINDED.

Rationalistic (going by âprinciplesâ),

Empiricist (going by âfactsâ),

Intellectualistic,

Sensationalistic,

Idealistic,

Materialistic,

Optimistic,

Pessimistic,

Religious,

Irreligious,

Free-willist,

Fatalistic,

Monistic,

Pluralistic,

Dogmatical.

Sceptical.

Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not â I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek¹⁵ Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course â give us lots of facts. Principles are good â give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many â let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of freewill determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but the whole canât be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth â your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours.

But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing in-compatibles from opposite sides of the line.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort.

Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the âconflict between science and religionâ in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel¹⁶with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a âgaseous vertebrateâ; or it is Spencer treating the worldâs history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door: â she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple.

For a hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of manâs importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman though it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of ânothing butâ â nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.

If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find?

Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green,¹⁷ the Cairds,¹⁸ Bosanquet,¹⁹ and Royce.²⁰This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large.

That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the âAbsolute,â on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau,²¹ Professor Bowne,²² Professor Ladd²³ and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi²⁴ above all things. It accepts the facts of Darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absoludstic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.

You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum²⁵ hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.

I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.

I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I can not read them to you now. Thisyoung man, who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether ârefinedâ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophyâs dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.

Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz²⁶ was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written âThÃ©odicÃ©eâ of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean.

Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely greater, in our human case, than that of those saved, he assumes as a premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even then, he says:

âThe evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus Curio has written a little book, âDe Amplitudine Regni Coelestis,â which was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God.â¦Â It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns may be inhabited by none but happy creatures; and nothing obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is very great; for a very few instances and samples suffice for the utility which good draws from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great space beyond the region of the stars? And this immense space, surrounding all this region, â¦ may be replete with happiness and glory.â¦Â What now becomes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since our Earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of the Universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit; and all the evils that we know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be almost-nothing in comparison with the goods that the Universe contains.â

Leibnitz continues elsewhere:

âThere is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Socinians²⁸ and Hobbes²⁹ objected to this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice, and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures.â¦Â It is always founded in the fitness of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn any one away from sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness, â¦ for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said.â

Leibnitzâs feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of âsamplesâ of the genus âlost-soulâ whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.

And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete.

I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift.²⁹Mr. Swiftâs anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on âHuman Submissionâ with a series of city reporterâs items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation, and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance:

âAfter trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east-side tenement-house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow-shovelers, but he was too weak from illness, and was forced to quit after an hourâs trial with the shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door. On the following morning he drank the poison.

âThe records of many more such cases lie before me [Mr. Swift goes on]; an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the Universe. âWe are aware of the presence of God in his world,â says a writer in a recent English review. [The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce (The World and the Individual, II, 385).] âThe Absolute is the richer for every discord and for all the diversity which it embraces,â says F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 204).³⁰ He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience is Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those best qualified in our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. Now what does thinking about the experience of these persons come to, compared to directly and personally feeling it as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind â not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary class â but of the great mass of the silently thinking men and feeling men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have hitherto permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to judge them.â¦Â 

âThis Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself [another of the cited cases] is one of the elemental stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this worldâs life, after millions of years of opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the mental world what atoms or sub-atoms are in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is the imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such events the consummate factor of all conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human time. Its time is up; its probation is ended; its own record ends it. Mankind has not asons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited systems.¹

Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an absolute âNo, I thank you.â âReligion,â says Mr. Swift, âis like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank.â And such, tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his natureâs needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion âactual things are blank.â He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run.

It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said.

If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of realityâs surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which the intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without an architectâs plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing thatâs true?

Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the forest for the single tree. But when the labor is accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing, with that strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.

Not only Walt Whitman could write âwho touches this book touches a man.â³¹ The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is, â and oh so flagrantly! â is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.

âStatt der lebendigen Natur/ we say, âa Gott die Menschen schuf hinein,â³² â that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick manâs dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! Impossible! Impossible!

Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our resultant Impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost every one has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They donât just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of âwhack,â and have no business to speak up in the universeâs name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza,²³ Mill, Caird, Hegel â I prudently avoid names nearer home! â I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of failing short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were actually true.

We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.

One word more â namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are fat, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in itself is meagre, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meagre thing. It is the essential meagreness of what is suggested by the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencerâs system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of Insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards â and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey.

Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey notwithstanding?

Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right place philosophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of this particular worldâs carcase. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.

The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my next lecture preserves as cordial a relation with facts, and, unlike Spencerâs philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious constructions out of doors â it treats them cordially as well.

I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that you require.

¹ Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4â10.

LECTURE II

What Pragmatism Means

SOME YEARS AGO , being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel â a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the treeâs opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: âWhich party is right,â I said, âdepends on what you practically mean by âgoing roundâ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb âto go roundâ in one practical fashion or the other.â

Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English âround,â the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.

I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? â fated or free? â material or spiritual? â here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the otherâs being right.

A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word , meaning action, from which our words âpracticeâ and âpracticalâ come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled âHow to Make Our Ideas Clear,â in the âPopular Science Monthlyâ for January of that year,¹ Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thoughtâs meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve â what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by any one for twenty years, until I, in an address before Professor Howisonâs philosophical union at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion.³⁴ By that date (1808) the times seemed ripe for its reception. The word âpragmatismâ spread, and at present It fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On all hands we find the âpragmatic movementâ spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that it has âcome to stay.â

To take in the importance of Peirceâs principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science; though he had not called it by that name.³⁵

âAll realities influence our practice,â he wrote me, âand that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way: In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.â

That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called âtautomerous.â Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. âIt would never have begun,â says Ostwald, âif the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a âbrownie,â while another insisted on an âelfâ as the true cause of the phenomenon.²

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesnât make a difference elsewhere â no difference in abstract truth that doesnât express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it.³⁷ Aristotle used it methodically.³⁸Locke, Berkeley,³⁹and Hume⁴⁰⁴¹made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are âknown as.â But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.

At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the âtemperamentâ of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universeâs principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. âGod,â âMatter,â âReason,â âthe Absolute,â âEnergy,â are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We donât lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a bodyâs properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, âcategories,â supposed necessities;and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way, so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures.

One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid.⁴²He made Keplerâs laws for the planets to follow;⁴³ he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.

But as the sciences have developed farther the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.

The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.

Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart,⁴⁴ Mach,⁴⁵ Ostwald, Pearson,⁴⁶Milhaud, Poincare,⁴⁷ Duhem,⁴⁸Ruyssen,⁴⁹ those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names.

Riding now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Messrs. Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say, âtruthâ in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the âinstrumentalâ view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to âwork,â promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.

Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually observable in operation â as denudation by weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations â and then to generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrÃ©e explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individualâs beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and oneâs own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this âproblem of maxima and minima.â But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves-it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic.

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism levelled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle â in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

You doubtless wish examples of this process of truthâs growth, and the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts, or of new single facts of old kinds, to our experience â an addition that involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula.

But often the dayâs contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. âRadiumâ came the other day as part of the dayâs content, and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature, that order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected âpotentialâ energy, pre-existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of âheliumâ as the radiationâs outcome, opened a way to this belief. So Ramsayâs view is generally held to be true, because, although it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature.50

I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as âtrueâ just in proportion as it gratifies the individualâs desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing this, is a matter for the individualâs appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truthâs addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.

Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for âto be trueâ means only to perform this marriage-function.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly â or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then It means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology, and its âprescription,â and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation.

Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of âHumanism,â but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures.

Such then would be the scope of pragmatism â first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two things must be our future topics.

What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of its brevity. I shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on âcommon senseâ I shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity. In another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function. In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in Truthâs development. You may not follow me wholly in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with respectful consideration.

You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schillerâs and Deweyâs theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they âwork,8217; etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think unconditionally. The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.

I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of âcorrespondenceâ (what that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.

But enough of this at present. The justification of what I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human beings.

Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous âattributesâ; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the âscientific,â theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders.

But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esopâs fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum.⁵¹ You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absoluteâs aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.

Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesnât suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricismâs needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real worldâs richness. It is dapper, it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is ânoble,â that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.

What I said just now about the Absolute, of transcendental idealism, is a case in point. First, I called it majestic and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds, and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility. But so far as it affords such comfort, it surely is not sterile; it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. As a good pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute true âin so far forth,â then; and I unhesitatingly now do so.

But what does true in so far forth mean in this case? To answer, we need only apply the pragmatic method. What do believers in the Absolute mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since, in the Absolute, finite evil is âoverruledâ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the donât care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order, â that, if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is âknown as,â that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes, for us, that is his cash-value when he is pragmatically interpreted. Farther than that the ordinary lay-reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions. He can use the Absolute for so much, and so much is very precious. He is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the Absolute, therefore, and disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow.

If the Absolute means this, and means no more than this, who can possibly deny the truth of it? To deny it would be to insist that men should never relax, and that holidays are never in order.

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is âtrueâ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word âtruth,â you will say, to call ideas also âtrueâ for this reason?

To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schillerâs, Deweyâs and my own doctrine of truth, which I can not discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in lifeâs practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.

âWhat would be better for us to believeâ! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying âwhat we ought to believeâ: and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?

Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this worldâs affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete that complicates the situation.

I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it, â and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person, â it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle.

If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute to its bare holiday-giving value, it wouldnât clash with my other truths. But we can not easily thus restrict our hypotheses. They carry supernumerary features, and these it is that clash so. My disbelief in the Absolute means then disbelief in those other supernumerary features, for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays.

You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that she âunstiffensâ our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.

In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact â if that should seem a likely place to find him.

Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experienceâs demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny Godâs existence? She could see no meaning in treating as ânot trueâ a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality?

In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion. But you see already how democratic she is. Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.

¹ Translated in the Revue Pbilosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).

² âTheorie und Praxis,â Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u. Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwaldâs in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin: âI think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is âthe science of masses, molecules, and the ether/ And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them!â (Science, January 2, 1903.)³⁶

LECTURE III

Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered

I AM NOW to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of Substance. Every one uses the old distinction between substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents, or affections, â use which term you will, â are whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk, which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere. So the attributes of this desk inhere in the substance âwood,â those of my coat in the substance âwool,â and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which are space-occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance âspirit.â

Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc., all we know of the wood is the combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each substance here is known as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual experience. The substance is in every case revealed through them; if we were cut off from them we should never suspect its existence; and if God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we never could detect the moment, for our experiences themselves would be unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in groups â the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc., â and each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come from something called the âclimate.â Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day, and in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere in anything. They adhere, or cohere, rather, with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.

Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer donât change in the Lordâs supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But tho these donât alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.

This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the âreal presenceâ on independent grounds.

Material substance was criticised by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeleyâs treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeleyâs criticism of âmatterâ was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesnât deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations.

Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Lockeâs treatment of our âpersonal identity.â He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much âconsciousness,â namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, should we, as we realize ourselves, be any the worse for that fact? In Lockeâs day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic:

âSuppose,â he says, âone to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor â¦ In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable?â

Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely curious speculation. Locke, compromiser that he was, passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness. But his successor Hume, and most empirical psychologists after him, have denied the soul, save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way of âideasâ and their peculiar connexions with each other. As I said of Berkeleyâs matter, the soul is good or âtrueâ for just so much, but no more.

The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of âmaterialism,â but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in âmatter,â as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a phenomenalist like Huxley,⁵² and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better be called naturalism. Over against it stands âtheism,â or what in a wide sense may be termed âspiritualism.â Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element.

Treated as it often is, this question becomes little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration for one kind, and of dislike for another kind, of abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist professor who always referred to materialism as the âmud-philosophy,â and deemed it thereby refuted.

To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a âmatterâ so infinitely subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals hitherto have framed It, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of natureâs facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.

To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as oneâs opposition to materialism springs from oneâs disdain of matter as something âcrass,â Mr. Spencer cuts the gr6und from under one. Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all lifeâs purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matterâs possibilities.

But now, instead of resting in principles, after this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the question. What do we mean by matter? What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different character.

And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author.

Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for

46 all irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if a world is already completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be no more experience and no possible differences can now be looked for. Both theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am supposing, of course, that the theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is.]

For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the worth of a God if he were there, with his work accomplished and his world run down. He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power could attain but go no farther. And since there is to be no future; since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now go with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance (such as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something yet to come; why then, by it we take Godâs measure, as it were. He is the Being who could once for all do that; and for that much we are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what is once for all, would Godâs presence in it make it any more living or richer?

Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, âthe same, for our praise or blame,â as Browning says.⁵³ It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which canât be taken back. Calling matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are the God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do â appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak â and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.

Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same thing â the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make just this completed world â and the wise man is he who in such a case would turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly, most men instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly.

Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we live in, in the world that has a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst we speak. In this unfinished world the alternative of âmaterialism or theism?â is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.

How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed, there is no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are captured; and the good thatâs in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that, if matter could give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean by God. Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of these terms, with their outgrown opposition. Use a term free of the clerical connotations, on the one hand; of the suggestion of grossness, coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the one and only power, instead of saying either God or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us; and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist.

But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has been and done, and yielded, still asks the further question âwhat does the world promise?â Give us a matter that promises success, that is bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for righteousness up to date, but It will make for righteousness forever; and that is all we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its function is a Godâs function, and in a world in which a God would be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be missed. âCosmic emotionâ would here be the right name for religion.

But is the matter by which Mr. Spencerâs process of cosmic evolution is carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death tragedy; and Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of the controversy, has really contributed nothing serious to its relief. But apply now our principle of practical results,and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires.

Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively, point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, though they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe, which evolutionary science foresees. I can not state it better than in Mr. Balfourâs words.⁵⁴ âThe energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. âImperishable monumentsâ and âimmortal deeds,â death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is, be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.¹

That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved â even as our world now lingers, for our joy â yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains, to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as any one; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly Ã¦sthetic objections to the âgrossnessâ of âmatter and motion,â the principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results?

No, the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it is, for âgrossness.â Grossness is what grossness does â we now know that. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is not â not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes.

The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante⁵⁵ and Wordsworth,⁵⁶ who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism â not in hair-splitting abstractions about matterâs inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for any one who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.

But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of the worldâs future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimÃ¦ras as the latter end of the world. Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.

The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialismâs sun sets in a sea of disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science: we can study our God only by studying his Creation. But we can enjoy our God, if we have one, in advance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to âdownâ each other.The truth of âGodâ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi!

Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the question of design in nature. Godâs existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpeckerâs bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees, with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.

The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existe.Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness, and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They are evidently made for each other. Vision is the end designed, light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth âfitâ results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here, all depends upon the point of view. To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpeckerâs organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism, of one or the other. It was as if one should say âMy shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.â We know that they are both: they are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only stretch similarly the designs of God. As the aim of a football-team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get up on some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions â the gameâs rules and the opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of natureâs vast machinery. Without natureâs stupendous laws and counter-forces, manâs creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have proposed them.

This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The what of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for them becomes of very little conse quence in comparison. We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find in this actual worldâs particulars. Or rather we cannot by any possibility comprehend it..The mere word âdesignâ by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle. The teal question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer â and that can be revealed only by the study of all natureâs particulars.

Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been fitted to that production. The argument from fitness to design would consequently always apply, whatever were the productâs character. The recent Mont-PelÃ©e eruption,⁵⁷ for example, required all previous history to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous configuration of positions. France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there. If God aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it, showed exquisite intelligence. And so of any state of things whatever, either in nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to produce it.

Pragmatically, then, the abstract word âdesignâ is a blank cartridge. It carries no consequences, it does no execution. What design? and what designer? are the only serious questions, and the study of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile, pending the slow answer from facts, any one who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a divine one, gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term â the same, in fact, which we saw that the terms God, Spirit, or the Absolute, yield us. âDesign,â worthless tho it be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes It into something theistic, a term of promise. 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 confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at present discernible in the terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a most important meaning. That much at least of possible âtruthâ the terms will then have in them.

Let me take up another well-worn controversy, the free-will problem. Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, diminish man. He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free-will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity.

But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. You know how large a part questions of accountability have played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological leaven, the interest in crime and sin and punishment abide with us. âWhoâs to blame? whom can we punish? whom will God punish?â â these preoccupations hang like a bad dream over manâs religious history.

So both free-will and determinism have been inveighed against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its enemies, has seemed to prevent the âimputabilityâ of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomy this! Free-will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the free-willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be âagentsâ only, not âprincipals,â and where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility?

But where would it be if we had free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a âfreeâ act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent character that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton⁵⁸ and McTaggart⁵⁹ have recently laid about them doughtily with this argument.

It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts we shall punish him, â anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of âmeritâ is a piteous unreality â God alone can know our merits, if we have any. The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which has made such a noise in past discussions of the subject.

Free-will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That imitation en masse is there, who can deny? The general âuniformity of natureâ is presupposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only approximately uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the worldâs past has bred pessimism (or doubts as to the worldâs good character, which become certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally welcome free-will as a melioristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.

Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those speculations, if the world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness already. Our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe, and needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free-will? Who would not say, with Huxley, âlet me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom,â âFreedomâ in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse, and who could be so insane as to wish that? To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the last touch of perfection upon optimismâs universe. Surely the only possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.

Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief. As such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower: âWatchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise bear,â and the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.60

Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into lifeâs thicket with us the darkness there grows light about us. If you stop, in dealing with such words, with their definition, thinking that to be an intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham! âeus est Ens, a se, extra et supra omne genus, necessarium, unum, infinite perfectum, simplex, immutabile, immensum, aeternum, intelligens,â⁶¹ etc., â wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means less than nothing, in its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist point of view altogether. âGodâs in his heaven; allâs right with the world!â â Thatâs the real heart of your theology, and for that you need no rationalist definitions.

Why shouldnât all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the worldâs remotest perspectives.

See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, upon their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnisstheoretische Ich⁶² a God, a KausalitÃ¤tsprinzip,⁶³ a Design, a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above facts, â see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in âthe seat of authorityâ that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same, and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity.

¹ The Foundations of Belief, p. 30.

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LECTURE IV

The One and the Many

WE SAW IN THE LAST LECTURE that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the perspective by their means. Design, freewill, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this worldâs outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called âotal reflexionâ in Optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its surface â or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No ray, under these circumstances gets beyond the waterâs surface: every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch it, we turn back into the water with our course re-determined and re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists are indispensable for life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and only active in their redirecting function. All similes are halting, but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows how something, not sufficient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere.

In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of âthe one and the many.â I suspect that in but few of you has this problem occasioned sleepless nights, and I should not be astonished if some of you told me it had never vexed you at all. I myself have come, by long brooding over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than If you give him any other name ending in ist. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in this problem.

Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the worldâs unity. Few persons ever challenge this definition, which is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs, we quickly see that unity is only one of them. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. Your âscholarlyâ mind, of encyclopedic, philological type, your man essentially of learning, has never lacked for praise along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly, but totality.¹ In this, acquaintance with realityâs diversities is as important as understanding their connexion. Curiosity goes pari passi⁶⁴ with the systematizing passion.

In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been considered more illustrious, as it were, than their variety. When a young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact, with all its parts moving abreast, as it were, and interlocked, he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight, and looks superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one, the monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually. Yet probably every one in this audience in some way cherishes it. A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world not co-ordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of course the world is One, we say. How else could it be a world at all? Empiricists as a rule, are as stout monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are.

The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesnât blind them to everything else, doesnât quench their curiosity for special facts, whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a principle; to admire and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop intellectually.

âThe world is One!â â the formula may become a sort of number-worship. âThreeâ and âsevenâ have, it is true, been reckoned sacred numbers; but, abstractly taken, why is âoneâ more excellent than âforty-three,â or than âtwo million and tenâ? In this first vague conviction of the worldâs unity, there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean by it.

The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically. Granting the oneness to exist, what facts will be different in consequence? What will the unity be known as? The world is One â yes, but how one. What is the practical value of the oneness for us.

Asking such questions, we pass from the vague to the definite, from the abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which a oneness predicated of the universe might make a difference, come to view. I will note successively the more obvious of these ways.

1. First, the world is at least one subject of discourse. If its manyness were so irremediable as to permit no union whatever of its parts, not even our minds could âmeanâ the whole of it at once: they would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions. But in point of fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term âworldâ or âuniverse,â which expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse carries obviously no farther monistic specifications. A âchaos,â once so named, has as much unity of discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when pluralists say âthe universe is many.â ââThe Universeâ!â they chuckle â âhis speech bewrayeth him. He stands confessed of monism out of his own mouth.â Well, let things be one in so far forth! You can then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them, but what matters it? It still remains to be ascertained whether they are one in any further or more valuable sense.

2. Are they, for example, continuous? Can you pass from one to another, keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In other words, do the parts of our universe hang together, instead of being like detached grains of sand?

Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are embedded, and if you can in any way move through such space, you can pass continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are thus vehicles of continuity by which the worldâs parts hang together. The practical difference to us, resultant from these forms of union, is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them.

3. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things. Lines of influence can be traced by which they hang together. Following any such line you pass from one thing to another till you may have covered a good part of the universeâs extent. Gravity and heat-conduction are such all-uniting influences, so far as the physical world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences follow similar lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity here, so that you have to step round them, or change your mode of progress if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universeâs unity, so far as it was constituted by those first lines of influence.

There are innumerable kinds of connexion that special things have with other special things; and the enseinble of any one of these connexions forms one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus men are conjoined in a vast network of acquaintanceship. Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc.; and by choosing your farther intermediaries rightly you may carry a message from Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to any one else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short, as by a non-conductor, when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What may be called love-systems are grafted on the acquaintance-system. A loves (or hates) B; B loves (or hates) C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the great acquaintance-system that they presuppose.

Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems, all the parts of which obey definite influences that propagate themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result is innumerable little hangings-together of the worldâs parts within the larger hangings-together, little worlds, not only of discourse but of operation, within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type or grade of union, its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of relation, and the same part may figure in many different systems, as a man may hold various offices and belong to several clubs. From this âsystematicâ point of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the worldâs unity is that all these definite networks actually and practically exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so; they are superposed upon each other; and between them all they let no individual elementary part of the universe escape. Enormous as is the amount of disconnexion among things (for these systematic influences and conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths), everything that exists in influenced in some way by something else, if you can only pick the way out rightly. Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other somehow, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or âintegratedâ affair. Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one, so far as you can follow it from next to next. You may then say that âthe world is One,â â meaning in these respects, namely, and just so far as they obtain. But just as definitely is it not One, so far as they do not obtain; and there is no species of connexion which will not fail, if, instead of choosing conductors for it you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure many from that particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, philosophy would have equally successfully celebrated the worldâs disunion.

The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what comes home to us most, so, in our general dealings with the world of influences, we now need conductors and now need non-conductors, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment.

4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the general problem of the worldâs causal unity. If the minor causal influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the past, one great first cause for all that is, one might then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. Godâs fiat on creationâs day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute cause and origin. Transcendental Idealism, translating âcreationâ into âthinkingâ (or âwilling to thinkâ) calls the divine act âeternalâ rather than âfirstâ; but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same â the many would not be, save for the One. Against this notion of the unity of origin of all things there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning, but perhaps, as far as these lectures go, we had better leave the question of unity of origin unsettled.

5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their generic unity. Things exist in kinds, there are many specimens in each kind, and what the âkindâ implies for one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say âthe world is One.â Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. âBeings,â âthinkables,â âexperiences,â would be candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now.

6. Another specification of what the phrase âthe world is oneâmay mean is unity of purpose. An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture, may have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually know in this world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or great, or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different.

Our different purposes also are at war with each other. Where one canât crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what any one distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally, much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its unification better organized.

Whoever claims absolute teleological unity, saying that there Is one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own risk. Theologians who dogmatize thus find it more and more impossible, as our acquaintance with the warring interests of the worldâs parts grows more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did â Godâs ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words the âAbsoluteâ with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.

7. Ãsthetic union among things also obtains, and is very analogous to teleological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax. They play into each otherâs hands expressively. Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end; and here again the point of view of a many is the more natural one to take. The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his readerâs attention.

It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to see the worldâs history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. We have indeed the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one solid whole. But the great worldâs ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem, like the ropeâs fibres, to be discontinuous, cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist, when he follows the development of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. Absolute Ã¦sthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears as something more epic than dramatic.

So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and dramas. That there is more union in all these ways than openly appears is certainly true. That there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis. All I say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than we possess at present.

8. The great monistic denkmittel⁶⁶ for a hundred years past has been the notion of the one Knower. The many exist only as objects for his thought â exist in his dream, as it were; and as he knows them, they have one purpose, form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an all enveloping noetic unity in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the Absolute, as the all-knower is termed, usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers can not evade. The Absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, to some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being true. I can not here enter into all the logical proofs of such a Beingâs existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once. âGodâs conscience,â says Professor Royce,² âforms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious momentâ â this is the type of noetic unity on which rationalism insists. Empiricism on the other hand is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything gets known by some knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: â he may be liable to forget. Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung along and overlapped.

The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower â either adjective here means the same thing â is, as I said, the great intellectualist achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that conception of âSubstanceâ which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done â universal substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms, the very forms in which we finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect; and it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the âinherenceâ of its parts â whatever that may mean â in an unimaginable principle behind the. scenes.

âThe world is One,â therefore, just so far as we experience it to be concatenated, One by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But then also not One by just as many definite disjunctions as we find. The oneness and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately named. It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. And its various manners of being One suggest, for their accurate ascertainment, so many distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question âWhat is the oneness known as? What practical difference will it make?â saves us from all feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more connexion and union than we now suspect, but we are not entitled on pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance.

It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean, that probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union that stops at non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next, and means in many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal bond, union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to you a halfway stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their manyness, you think must also be more deeply true, must be the more real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us a universe imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of being, something consolidated, with its parts co-implicated through and through. Only then could we consider our estate completely rational.

There is no doubt whatever that this ultramonistic way of thinking means a great deal to many minds. âOne Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good, One Godâ â I quote from a Christian Science leaflet which the dayâs mail brings into my hands â beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically an emotional value, and beyond doubt the word âoneâ contributes to the value quite as much as the other words. But if we try to realize intellectually what we can possibly mean by such a glut of oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations again. It means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower. In point of fact it always means one knower to those who take it intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated in the one logical-Ã¦sthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his eternal dream.

The character of the absolute knowerâs picture is however so impossible for us to represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably always will possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily, be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history, usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism, but I will quote one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean. The paragon of all monistic systems is the VedÃ¢nta philosophy of Hindostan, and the paragon of VedÃ¢ntist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekananda who visited our land some years ago.⁶⁷ The method of VedÃ¢ntism is the mystical method. You do not reason, but after going through a certain discipline you see, and having seen, you can report the truth. Vivekananda thus reports the truth in one of his lectures here:

âWhere is there any more misery for him who sees this Oneness in the universe, this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything? â¦ This separation between man and man, man and woman, man and child, nation from nation, earth from moon, moon from sun, this separation between atom and atom is the cause really of all the misery, and the VedÃ¢nta says this separation does not exist, it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In the heart of things there is unity still. If you go inside you find that unity between man and man, women and children, races and races, high and low, rich and poor, the gods and men: all are One, and animals too, if you go deep enough, and he who has attained to that has no more delusion.Â â¦ Where is there any more delusion for him? What can delude him? He knows the reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where is there any more misery for him? What does he desire? He has traced the reality of everything unto the Lord, that centre, that Unity of everything, and that is Eternal Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease nor sorrow nor misery nor discontent is There â¦ In the Centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to every one what he deserves.â

Observe how radical the character of the monism here is. Separation is not simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we undeniably are, it must be that each of us is the One, indivisibly and totally. An Absolute One, and I that One, â surely we have here a religion which, emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it imparts a perfect sumptuosity of security. As our Swami says in another place:

âWhen man has seen himself as One with the infinite Being of the universe, when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all angels, all gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into that oneness, then all fear disappears. Whom to fear? Can I hurt myself? Can I kill myself? Can I injure myself? Do you fear yourself? Then will all sorrow disappear. What can cause me sorrow? I am the One Existence of the universe. Then all jealousies will disappear; of whom to be jealous? Of myself? Then all bad feelings disappear. Against whom shall I have this bad feeling? Against myself? There is none in the universe but me â¦ kill out this differentiation, kill out this superstition that there are many. âHe who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who, in this mass of insentiency, sees that One Sentient Being; he who is this world of shadow, catches that Reality, unto him belongs eternal peace, unto none else, unto none else.ââ

We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures. We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness overcomes moral separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary place.

I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the question in this lecture. When I come to my final lecture there will be something more to say.

Leave then out of consideration for the moment the authority which mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess; treat the problem of the One and the Many in a purely intellectual way; and we see clearly enough where pragmatism stands. With her criterion of the practical differences that theories make, we see that she must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is One just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain. And finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on.

It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction âand.â Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives. The spaces and times of your imagination, the objects and events of your day-dreams are not only more or less incoherent inter se,⁶⁹69 but are wholly out of definite relation with the similar contents of any one elseâs mind. Our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without influencing or interfering. They coexist, but in no order and in no receptacle, being the nearest approach to an absolute âmanyâ that we can conceive. We can not even imagine any reason why they should be known all together, and we can imagine even less, if they were known together, how they could be known as one systematic whole.

But add our sensations and bodily actions, and the union mounts to a much higher grade. Our andita et visa⁶⁹ and our acts fall into those receptacles of time and space in which each event finds its date and place. They form âthingsâ and are of âkindsâ too, and can be classed. Yet we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist. Everything there might be inert towards everything else, and refuse to propagate its influence. Or gross mechanical influences might pass, but no chemical action. Such worlds would be far less unified than ours. Again there might be complete physico-chemical interaction, but no minds; or minds, but altogether private ones, with no social life; or social life limited to acquaintance, but no love; or love, but no customs or institutions that should systematize it. No one of these grades of universe would be absolutely irrational or disintegrated, inferior tho it might appear when looked at from the higher grades. For instance, if our minds should ever become âtelepathicallyâ connected, so that we knew immediately, or could under certain conditions know immediately, each what the other was thinking, the world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior grade.

With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to range in, it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems evolving in consequence of human needs. If such an hypothesis were legitimate, total oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin. In other words the notion of the âAbsoluteâ would have to be replaced by that of the âUltimate.â The two notions would have the same content â the maximally unified content of fact, namely â but their time-relations would be positively reversed.³

After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my friend G. Papini, that pragmatism tends to unstiffen all our theories. The worldâs oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only, and as if any one who questioned it must be an idiot. The temper of monists has been so vehement, as almost at times to be convulsive; and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions. The theory of the Absolute, in particular, has had to be an article of faith, affirmed dogmatically and exclusively. The One and All, first in the order of being and of knowing, logically necessary itself, and uniting all lesser things in the bonds of mutual necessity, how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity? The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees, â as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.

Pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic temper. Provided you grant some separation among things, some tremor of independence, some free play of parts on one another, some real novelty or chance, however minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any amount, however great, of real union. How much of union there may be is a question that she thinks can only be decided empirically. The amount may be enormous, colossal; but absolute monism is shattered if, along with all the union, there has to be granted the slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, or the most residual trace, of a separation that is not âovercome.â

Pragmatism, pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the balance of union and disunion among things may be, must obviously range herself upon the pluralistic side. Some day, she admits, even total union, with one knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in every conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses. Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This latter hypothesis is pluralismâs doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids its being even considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism, and follow pluralismâs more empirical path.

This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined. âThings,â then, and their âconjunctionsâ â what do such words mean, pragmatically handled? In my next lecture, I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as Common Sense.

¹ Compare A. Bellanger: Les concepts de Cause, et IâactivitÃ© intentionelle de IâEsprit. Paris, Alcan, 1905, p. 79 ff. ⁶⁵

²The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.

³ Compare on the Ultimate, Mr. Schillerâs essay âActivity and Substance,â in his book entitled Humanism, p. 204.

LECTURE V

Pragmatism and Common Sense

IN THE LAST LECTURE we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universeâs oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real. âHow far am I verified?â is the question which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragmatists we have to turn our face towards experience, toward âfacts.â

Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate; and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held. Some bits of information always may escape.

This is the hypothesis of noetic pluralism, which monists consider so absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism, until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism, the originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It may be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula and. They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of additive constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete âeternally,â as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss.

It is at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very fact that we debate this question shows that our knowledge isincomplete at present and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks on the way in which our knowledge completes itself â when it does complete itself â will lead us very conveniently into our subject for this lecture, which is âCommon Sense.â To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications are apt to be gradual. To take the nearest possible example, consider these lectures of mine. What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you âline upâ your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instill, and modify to some slight degree their mass.

You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing âWe wonât go home till morningâ in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently, and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas. Your mind in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.

New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in menâs opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our other âvestigialâ peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum,70 but the ground-plan of the first architect persists â you can make great changes, but you can not change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you canât get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.

My thesis now is this, that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mindâs development, the stage of common sense. Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it. Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.

In practical talk, a manâs common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from excentricity, his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we can not dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us today, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.

If this sounds paradoxical to any one, let him think of analytical geometry. The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined by Descartes⁷¹ by the relations of their points to adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling curves. All our conceptions are what the Germans call Denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesnât come ticketed and labelled, we have first to discover what it is. Kant⁷² speaks of it as being in its first intention a gewÃ¼hl der erscheinnn-gen, a rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen,⁷³ a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by which we âkeep tabâ on the impressions that present themselves. When each is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby âunderstood.â This notion of parallel âmanifoldsâ with their elements standing reciprocally in âone-to-one relations,â is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions. There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense manifold is also such a system. Find a one-to-one relation for your sense-impressions anywhere among the concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.

The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of which the most important are these:

Thing;

The same or different;

Kinds;

Minds;

Bodies;

One Time;

One Space;

Subjects and attributes;

Causal influences;

The fancied;

The real.

We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston is discontinuous, and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it may change three times a day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather episodic. It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.

Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather. They know no more of time, or space, as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones. A babyâs rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It has âgone outâ for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit. The idea of its being a âthing,â whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty evident that they have no general tendency to interpolate âthings.â Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayanaâs book:⁷⁴

âIf a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees his master arriving after a long absence â¦ the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase â all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favor, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life.Â â¦ [But] the figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events.â¦Â In proportion as such understanding advances, each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest. The calm places In life are filled with power and Its spasms with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own adventures and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole.¹

Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably. The categories of âthoughtâ and âthingsâ are indispensable here â instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only âthoughts.â There is not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread.

That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men! Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal âmoreâ that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander.⁷⁵

Permanent âthingsâ again; the âsameâ thing and its various âappearancesâ and âalterationsâ; the different âkindsâ of thing; with the âkindâ used finally as a âpredicate,â of which the thing remains the âsubjectâ â what a straightening of the tangle of our experienceâs immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of terms suggest! And it is only the smallest part of his experienceâs flux that any one actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments. Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of âthe same again.â But even then if you had asked them whether the same were a âthingâ that had endured throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in that light.

Kinds, and sameness of kind â what colossally useful denkmittel for finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no application; for kind and sameness of kind are logicâs only instruments. Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of that kindâs kind, we can travel through the universe as if with seven-league boots. Brutes surely never use these abstractions, and civilized men use them in most various amounts.

Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: âWho, or what, is to blame?â â for any illness, namely, or disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre the search for causal influences has spread. Hume and âScienceâ together have tried to eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the entirely different denkmittel of âlaw.â But law is a comparatively recent invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common sense.

The âpossible,â as something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. Criticise them as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed. âSelf,â âbody,â in the substantial or metaphysical sense â no one escapes subjection to those forms of thought. In practice, the common-sense denkmittel are uniformly victorious. Every one, however instructed, still thinks of a âthingâ in the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that âsupportsâ its attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.

Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think. âThingsâ do exist, even when we do not see them. Their âkindsâ also exist. Their âqualitiesâ are what they act by, and are what we act on; and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light on every object in this room. We intercept it on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen. It is the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life; and, among our race even, it is only the highly sophisticated specimens, the minds debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true.

But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to Democritus,⁷⁶ Berkeley, or Darwin,⁷⁷ achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have been successfully discovered by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have spread, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and near.

For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice; but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually spread from one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their application to-day. We assume for certain purposes one âobjectiveâ Time that aequabiliter fluit, but we donât livingly believe in or realize any such equally-flowing time. âSpaceâ is a less vague notion; but âthings,â what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or an army? or is an ens rationis⁷⁹ such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed the âsameâ? Is the âchangeling,â whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the human âkindâ? Is âtelepathyâ a âfancyâ or a âfactâ? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case) to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking, you find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one of them shall apply.

The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically and articulately. A âthingâ for instance is a being, or ens. An ens is a subject in which qualities âinhere.â A subject is a substance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of discourse they are indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means.

But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering function. So it comes about that intellects sibi permissi,79 intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for what in general terms may be called the âcriticalâ level of thought. Not merely such intellects either â your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels; but practical observers of facts, your Galileos,⁸⁰ Daltons,⁸¹ Faradays,⁸² have found it impossible to treat the naifs sense-termini of common sense as ultimately real. As common sense interpolates her constant âthingsâ between our intermittent sensations, so science extrapolates her world of âprimaryâ qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world. The âthingsâ are now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole naif conception of thing gets superseded, and a thingâs name is interpreted as denoting only the law or regel der verbindung⁸³ by which certain of our sensations habitually succeed or coexist.

Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense. With science naif realism ceases: âSecondaryâ qualities become unreal; primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of everything. The common-sense categories one and all cease to represent anything in the way of being; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensationâs irremediable flow.

But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new medicines and dye-stuffs; AmpÃ¨re⁸⁴ and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and Marconi⁸⁵ with telegrams. The hypothetical things that such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who can not turn it off.

The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power. Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeleyâs tar-water nor with Kantâs nebular hypothesis had their respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to confess that there is a large minus-side to the account.

There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more true than any other. Common sense is the more consolidated stage, because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally. Whether it or science be the more august stage may be left to private judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves, and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and activities into laws of âfunctional variationâ? Vainly did scholasticism, common senseâs college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and Descartes, with his ânew philosophy,â gave them only a little later their coup de grÃ¢ce.

But now if the new kinds of scientific âthing,â the corpuscular and etheric world, were essentially more âtrue,â why should they have excited so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held for literally real. It is as if they existed; but in reality they are like co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us from one part to another of experienceâs flux. We can cipher fruitfully with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.

There is no ringing conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused. Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be truer absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their use. The only literally true thing is reality; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass. âEnergyâ is the collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever it may be) when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are sovereign triumphs of economy in thought.

No one can fail to admire the âenergeticâ philosophy. But the hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too economical to be all-sufficient. Profusion, not economy, may after all be realityâs key-note.

I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing and in which my own competence is small. All the better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the divers types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I shall face that task in my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing the present one.

There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present lecture. The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their being so universally used and built into the very structure of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically discovered or invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes,⁸⁶ Galileo, Berkeley, and of other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.

The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma? I expressed this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others decisively, suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the next lectures may soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all be a possible ambiguity in truth?

¹ The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.

LECTURE VI

Pragmatismâs Conception of Truth

WHEN CLERK-MAXWELL⁸⁷ WAS A CHILD it is written that he had a mania for having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying, âYes; but I want you to tell me the particular go of it!â Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject, sending subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic philosophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is the point where a clear and simple statement should be made.

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theoryâs career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their âagreement,â as falsity means their disagreement, with âreality.â Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term âagreement,â and what by the term âreality,â when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.

In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and painstaking, the intellectualists more offhand and irreflective. The popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience. Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial. But your idea of its âworksâ (unless you are a clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality. Even though it should shrink to the mere word âworks,â that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the âtime-keeping functionâ of the clock, or of its springâs âelasticity,â it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.

You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absoluteâs eternal way of thinking.

These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation. When youâve got your true idea of anything, thereâs an end of the matter. Youâre in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. âGrant an idea or belief to be true,â it says, âwhat concrete difference will its being true make in any oneâs actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truthâs cash-value in experiential terms?â

The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.

This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement-formula â just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas âagreeâ with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while â such feeling being among our potentialities â that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an ideaâs verification. Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.

Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a âstuntâ self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.

The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that âit is useful because it is trueâ or that âit is true because it is useful.â Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.

From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while. When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that thoughtâs guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connexion with them. This is a vague enough statement, but I beg you to retain it, for it is essential.

Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities. One bit of it can warn us to get ready for another bit, can âintendâ or be âsignificant ofâ that remoter object. The objectâs advent is the significanceâs verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our part. Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions.

By ârealitiesâ or âobjectsâ here, we mean either things of common sense, sensibly present, or else common-sense relations, such as dates, places, distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house along the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the imageâs full verification. Such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes ofthe truth-process. Experience offers indeed other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being primary verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another.

Take, for instance, yonder object on the wall. You and I consider it to be a âclock,â altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one. We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truths mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we can go without eye-witnessing. Just as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it works to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, so we assume that thing to be a clock. We use it as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption here means its leading to no frustration or contradiction. Verifiability of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of nascency. They turn us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs âpass,â so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses, them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each otherâs truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure.

Another great reason â beside economy of time â for waiving complete verification in the usual business of life is that all things exist in kinds and not singly. Our world is found once for all to have that peculiarity. So that when we have once directly verified our ideas about one specimen of a kind, we consider ourselves free to apply them to other specimens without verification. A mind that habitually discerns the kind of thing before it, and acts by the law of the kind immediately, without pausing to verify, will be a âtrueâ mind in ninety-nine out of a hundred emergencies, proved so by its conduct fitting everything it meets, and getting no refutation.

Indirectly or only potentially verify ing processes may thus be true as well as full verification-processes. They work as true processes would work, give us the same advantages, and claim our recognition for the same reasons. All this on the common-sense level of matters of fact, which we are alone considering.

But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. Relations among purely mental ideas form another sphere where true and false beliefs obtain, and here the beliefs are absolute, or unconditional. When they are true they bear the name either of definitions or of principles. It is either a principle or a definition that 1 and 1 make 2, that 2 and 1 make 3, and so on; that white differs less from gray than it does from black; that when the cause begins to act the effect also commences. Such propositions hold of all possible âones,â of all conceivable âwhitesâ and âgraysâ and âcauses.â The objects here are mental objects. Their relations are perceptually obvious at a glance, and no sense-verification is necessary. Moreover, once true, always true, of those same mental objects. Truth here has an âeternalâ character. If you can find a concrete thing anywhere that is âoneâ or âwhiteâ or âgrayâ or an âeffect,â then your principles will everlastingly apply to it. It is but a case of ascertaining the kind, and then applying the law of its kind to the particular object. You are sure to get truth if you can but name the kind rightly, for your mental relations hold good of everything of that kind without exception. If you then, nevertheless, failed to get truth concretely, you would say that you had classed your real objects wrongly.

In this realm of mental relations, truth again is an affair of leading. We relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true in advance of special verification, if we have subsumed our objects rightly. Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure of our thinking. We can no more play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our sense-experiences. They coerce us; we must treat them consistently, whether or not we like the results. The rules of addition apply to our debts as rigorously as to our assets. The hundredth decimal of 093-01the ratio of the circumference to its diameter, is predetermined ideally now, tho no one may have computed it. If we should ever need the figure in our dealings with an actual circle we should need to have it given rightly, calculated by the usual rules; for it is the same kind of truth that those rules elsewhere calculate.

Between the coercions of the sensible order and those of the ideal order, our mind is thus wedged tightly. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

So far, intellectualists can raise no protest. They can only say that we have barely touched the skin of the matter.

Realities mean, then either concrete facts, or abstract kinds of thing and relations perceived intuitively between them. They furthermore and thirdly mean, as things that new ideas of ours must no less take account of, the whole body of other truths already in our possession. But what now does âagreementâ with such threefold realities mean? â to use again the definition that is current,

Here it is that pragmatism and intellectualism begin to part company. Primarily, no doubt, to agree means to copy, but we saw that the mere word âclockâ would do instead of a mental picture of its works, and that of many realities our ideas can only be symbols and not copies. âPast time,â âpower,â âspontaneityâ â how can our mind copy such realities?

To âagreeâ in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically! And often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesnât entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the realityâs whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold true of that reality.

Thus, names are just as âtrueâ or âfalseâ as definite mental pictures are. They set up similar verification-processes, and lead to fully equivalent practical results.

All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for every one. Hence, we must talk consistently just as we must think consistently: for both in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to. We mustnât now call Abel âCainâ or Cain âAbel.â If we do, we ungear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from all its connexions with the universe of speech and fact down to the present time. We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and fact may embody.

The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face verification â those of past history, for example, as of Cain and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius CÃ¦sar,⁸⁹ so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed by its coherence with everything thatâs present. True as the present is, the past was also.

Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of lending â leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking. The untrammelled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences somewhere, which somebodyâs ideas have copied.

Such is the large loose way in which the pragmatist interprets the word agreement. He treats it altogether practically. He lets it cover any process of conduction from a present idea to a future terminus, provided only it run prosperously. It is only thus that âscientificâ ideas, flying as they do beyond common sense, can be said to agree with their realities. It is, as I have already said, as if reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons, but we mustnât think so literally. The term âenergyâ doesnât even pretend to stand for anything âobjective.â It is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to string their changes on a simple formula.

Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we can not be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical level. We must find a theory that will work; and that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To âworkâ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial; we follow âeleganceâ or âeconomy.â Clerk-Maxwell somewhere says it would be âpoor scientific tasteâ to choose the more complicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree with him. Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant.

I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut. Our rationalist critics here discharge their batteries upon us, and to reply to them will take us out from all this dryness into full sight of a momentous philosophical alternative.

Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus,⁸⁹ and having only this quality in common, that they pay. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.

Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a rationalist to talk as follows:

âTruth is not made,â he will say; âit absolutely obtains, being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every time. Our belief that you thing on the wall is a clock is true already, altho no one in the whole history of the world should verify it. The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be verification. You pragmatists put the cart before the horse in making truthâs being reside in verification-processes. These are merely signs of its being, merely our lame ways of ascertaining after the fact, which of our ideas already has possessed the wondrous quality. The quality itself is timeless, like all essences and natures. Thoughts partake of it directly, as they partake of falsity or of irrelevancy. It canât be analyzed away into pragmatic consequences.â

The whole plausibility of this rationalist tirade is due to the fact to which we have already paid so much attention. In our world, namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem,⁹⁰ pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification. Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the name of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessingâs:

Sagt HÃ¤nschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz,

âWie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,

Dass gradâ die Reichsten in der Welt,

Das meiste Geld besitzen?â⁹¹

HÃ¤nschen Schlau here treats the principle âwealthâ as something distinct from the facts denoted by the manâs being rich. It antedates them; the facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich manâs essential nature.

In the case of âwealthâ we all see the fallacy. We know that wealth is but a name for concrete processes that certain menâs lives play a part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller⁹² and Carnegie,⁹³ but not in the rest of us.

Like wealth, health also lives in rebus. It is a name for processes, as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the man digests and sleeps so well because he is so healthy.

With âstrengthâ we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.

With âtruthâ most people go over the border entirely, and treat the rationalistic account as self-evident. But really all these words in th are exactly similar. Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as the other things do.

The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status of âhabitsâ between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals.

âThe true,â to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as âthe rightâ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight wonât necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

The âabsolutelyâ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic astronomy,⁹⁴ euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience. âAbsolutelyâ they are false; for we know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.

When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even tho no past thinker had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker⁹⁵ has said, but we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the worldâs previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story.

This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.

I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of previous truths. Menâs beliefs at any time are so much experience funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the worldâs experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next dayâs funding operations. So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation â mutation towards a definite goal, it may be â but still mutation.

Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables. On the Newtonian⁹⁶ theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also varies with acceleration. In the realm of truth-processes facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally. But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence. Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The âfactsâ themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

The case is like a snowballâs growth, due as it is to the distribution of the snow on the one hand, and to the successive pushes of the boys on the other, with these factors co-determining each other incessantly.

The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation â so much rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or truth itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from all eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas with it is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has already told us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely. It doesnât exist, it holds or obtains, it belongs to another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in short, to the epistemological dimension â and with that big word rationalism closes the discussion.

Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to âprinciples,â and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.

The tremendous pregnancy in the way of consequences for life of this radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalismâs sublimity does not save it from inanity.

When, namely, you ask rationalists, instead of accusing pragmatism of desecrating the notion of truth, to define it themselves by saying exactly what they understand by it, the only positive attempts I can think of are these two:

1. âTruth is the system of propositions which have an unconditional claim to be recognized as valid.¹

2. Truth is a name for all those judgments which we find ourselves under obligation to make by a kind of imperative duty.²

The first thing that strikes one in such definitions is their unutterable triviality. They are absolutely true, of course, but absolutely insignificant until you handle them pragmatically. What do you mean by âclaimâ here, and what do you mean by âdutyâ? As summary names for the concrete reasons why thinking in true ways is overwhelmingly expedient and good for mortal men, it is all right to talk of claims on realityâs part to be agreed with, and of obligations on our part to agree. We feel both the claims and the obligations, and we feel them for just those reasons.

But the rationalists who talk of claim and obligation expressly say that they have nothing to do with our practical interests or personal reasons. Our reasons for agreeing are psychological facts, they say, relative to each thinker, and to the accidents of his life. They are his evidence merely, they are no part of the life of truth itself. That life transacts itself in a purely logical or epistemological, as distinguished from a psychological, dimension, and its claims antedate and exceed all personal motivations whatsoever. Tho neither man nor God should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as that which ought to be ascertained and recognized.

There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from.

Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The âsentimentalist fallacyâ is to shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street, because the circumstances make them vulgar. Thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic mind: âIt was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for beautiful painting, or for flowers.â And in almost the last philosophic work I have read, I find such passages as the following; âJustice is ideal, solely ideal. Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but experience shows that it can not.â¦Â Truth, which ought to be, can not be.â¦Â Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience it becomes contrary to reason.â

The rationalistâs fallacy here is exactly like the sentimentalistâs. Both extract a quality from the muddy particulars of experience, and find it so pure when extracted that they contrast it with each and all its muddy instances as an opposite and higher nature. All the while it is their nature. It is the nature of truths to be validated, verified. It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. The payments true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them. Identical whys exist in the case of wealth and health.

Truth makes no other kind of claim and imposes no other kind of ought than health and wealth do. All these claims are conditional; the concrete benefits we gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty. In the case of truth, untrue beliefs work as perniciously in the long run as true beliefs work beneficially. Talking abstractly, the quality âtrueâ may thus be said to grow absolutely precious and the quality âuntrueâ absolutely damnable: the one may be called good, the other bad, unconditionally. We ought to think the true, we ought to shun the false, imperatively.

But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work ourselves into.

We can not then take a step forward in our actual thinking.

When shall I acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be loud? â or silent? If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which now? When may a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it come out for battle? Must I constantly be repeating the truth âtwice two are fourâ because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is it sometimes irrelevant? Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them? â or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology?

It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned. Truth with a big T, and in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as falsehood. If you ask me what oâclock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you donât see why it is my duty to give it. A false address would be as much to the purpose.

With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract imperative, the pragmatistic treatment of truth sweeps back upon us in its fulness. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.

When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that he denied matterâs existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying its existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schillerâs doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.

I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in, as the pragmatist more than any one else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson.⁹⁹We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which âworks.â Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives âsatisfaction.â He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant.

Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities. I have honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still completely baffles me. The notion of a reality calling on us to âagreeâ with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is âunconditionalâ or âtranscendent,â is one that I can make neither head nor tail of. I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I would âclaimâ if I were allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and copy me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me, if further consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I can not fathom. When the Irishmanâs admirers ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, âFaith, if it wasnât for the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot.â So here: but for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate); but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the what of the âagreementâ claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it. Neither content nor motive can be imagined for it. It is an absolutely meaningless abstraction.³

Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universeâs rationality.

¹A. E. Taylor, Philosophical Review, vol. xiv, p. 288.⁹⁷

²H. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, chapter on âDie Urtheilsnothwendigkeit.â⁹⁹

³ I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality. Reality according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachimâs¹⁰⁰ candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls âRelativismus.â I can not discuss his text here. Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.

LECTURE VII

Pragmatism and Humanism

WHAT HARDENS THE HEART of every one I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the worldâs riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to men consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter â from a gifted friend who died too young â these words: âIn everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong.â How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question âwhat is the truth?â is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law.

Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and schoolmasters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of menâs experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up. Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste; â and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts: â and our mind finds a new truth.

All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous justice, grammar or truth are simply fulgurating and not being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his abstract notion of âtheâ law, or a censor of speech let loose among the theatres with his idea of âtheâ mother-tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of âthe Truthâ with a big T, and what progress do they make? Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact. These things make themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made things. Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of âHumanismâ for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist. This element is so in extricable in the products that Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be anything else. âThe world,â he says, âis essentially 106-01¹⁰¹ it is what we make it. It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is apart from us; it is what is made of it. Hence â¦ the world is plastic.¹ He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.

This is Mr. Schillerâs butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at this point.

Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as any one the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to âagree.â All our truths are beliefs about âRealityâ; and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing found, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.

âRealityâ is in general what truths have to take account of;² and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.

The second part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of is the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception. Both are âfacts.â But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge. Inner relations namely are âeternal,â are perceived whenever their sensible terms are compared; and of them our thought â mathematical and logical thought so-called â must eternally take account.

The third part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions of reality as at all times controlling our beliefâs formation, I am only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour.

Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. That they are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but which we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests; and according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently. âWaterloo,â with the same fixed details, spells a âvictoryâ for an Englishman; for a Frenchman it spells a âdefeat.â So, for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.

What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the which depends on us. Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb; they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.

Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the fieldâs extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.

This applies to the âeternalâ parts of reality as well: we shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely. We read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometrics, or arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.

Thus, to say nothing of the new facts which men add to the matter of reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called âprevious truths.â Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole of our past dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths. It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there. As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the absence of a preconception of what impressions there may possibly be.

When we talk of reality âindependentâ of human thinking, then, it seems a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already faked. This is what Mr. Schiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting 109-01, which is only to be made over by us.

That is Mr. Schillerâs belief about the sensible core of reality. We âencounterâ it (in Mr. Bradleyâs words) but donât possess it. Superficially this sounds like Kantâs view; but between categories fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming themselves in natureâs presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and empiricism yawns. To the genuine âKantianerâ Schiller will always be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.

Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality. They may think to get at it in its independent nature, by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings. They may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true. The transcendental idealists say there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is âmatter.â Professor Bergson,¹⁰² Heymans,¹⁰³ Strong,¹⁰⁴ and others believe in the core and bravely try to define it. Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a âlimit.â Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory? On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which it proves impossible to better or to alter. If the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be absolute. Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere. If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heavenâs sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!

Not being reality, but only our belief about reality, it will contain human elements, but these will know the non-human element, in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything. Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience.

Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position. Does it seem paradoxical? If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject.

In many familiar objects every one will recognize the human element. We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception. You can take the number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 plus 1, or 100 minus 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another. You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one.

You can treat the adjoined figure as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc. All these treatments are true treatments â the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them. You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.

We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so, â though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them. We name the same constellation diversely, as Charlesâs Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable.

In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition. All the additions âagreeâ with the reality; they fit it, while they build it out. No one of them is false. Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it. If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of inches in a board which I wish to insert as a shelf into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there, âCharlesâs Wainâ would be more true than âDipper.â My friend Frederick Myers¹⁰⁵ was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.

What shall we call a thing anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes. For me, this whole âaudienceâ is one thing, which grows now restless, now attentive. I have no use at present for its individual units, so I donât consider them. So of an âarmyâ of a ânation.â But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you âaudienceâ is an accidental way of taking you. The permanently real things for you are your individual persons. To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.

We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.

We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings. Such predicates of course are human additions. CÃ¦sar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace to Romeâs freedom. He is also an American schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.

You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you canât weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation.

We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else but three human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the stars âGreat Bearâ; one calls them âCharlesâs Wainâ; one calls them the âDipper.â Which human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material? If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in âturning downâ the American witness.

Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion.¹⁰⁶We naÃ¯vely assume, he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universeâs total value. âDie erhÃ¶hung des vorgefundenen daseinsâ is a phrase used by Professor Eucken¹⁰⁷ somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotze.

It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it.

No one can deny that such a rÃ´le would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring notion. Signore Papini, the leader of Italian pragmatism, grows fairly dithyrambic over the view that it opens of manâs divinely-creative functions.

The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.

We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being a doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he understood his own doctrine, would have to âhold any end, however perverted, to be rational, if I insist on it personally, and any idea, however mad, to be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will have it so.â The humanist view of âreality,â as something resisting, yet malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken âaccountâ of incessantly (tho not necessarily merely copied) is evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on our right to believe, which I unluckily called the Will to Believe. All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The âwill to deceive,â the âwill to make-believe,â were wittily proposed as substitutes for it.

The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism, in the shape in which we now have it before us, is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself.

On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work.

On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or Ã©dition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way.

So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come back upon us. I will develope their differences during the remainder of our hour.

And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase âmust beâ is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes¹⁰⁹ he wouldnât mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.

Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists in much the same way as âfreedom of the pressâ might affect a veteran official in the Russian bureau of censorship; or as âsimplified spellingâ might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as backboneless and devoid of principle as âopportunismâ in politics appears to an old-fashioned French legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of the people.

For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All âhomesâ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies.

To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of âthe State,â and that of an absolute âmoral law,â have resolved themselves into expediencies, and holy church has resolved itself into âmeeting-houses.â Not so as yet within the philosophic classrooms. A universe with such as us contributing to create its truth, a world delivered to our opportunisms and our private judgments! Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. Weâre no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos are âfit for self-government.â Such a world would not be respectable philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar in the eyes of most professors of philosophy.

What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the professors?

Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable. The mutable in experience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de facto world, our world in act, there must be a de jure duplicate fixed and previous, with all that can happen here already there in posse,¹⁰⁹every drop of blood, every smallest item, appointed and provided, stamped and branded, without chance of variation. The negatives that haunt our ideals here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real. This alone makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples rocky bottom. This is Wordsworthâs âeternal peace abiding at the heart of endless agitation.â This is Vivekanandaâs mystic One of which I read to you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that makes the timeless claim, reality to which defeat canât happen. This is what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged to postulate.

And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture find themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. The tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are facts. Behind the bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old friend Chauncey Wright,¹¹⁰ the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is nothing. When a rationalist insists that behind the facts there is the ground of the facts, the possibility of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham grounds are often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I once heard a bystander ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply. âBecause ether is a respiratory stimulant,â the doctor answered. âAh!â said the questioner, as if that were a good explanation. But this is like saying that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a âpoison,â or that it is so cold tonight because it is âwinter,â or that we have five fingers because we are âpentadactyls.â These are but names for the facts, taken from the facts, and then treated as previous and explanatory. The tender-minded notion of an absolute reality is, according to the radically tough-minded, framed on just this pattern. It is but our summarizing name for the whole spread-out and strung-along mass of phenomena, treated as if it were a different entity, both one and previous.

You see 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 keep them at that valuation. They can stand that kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity. Not so the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find ourselves born into by âanother and a betterâ world in which the eaches form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates, and secures each each without exception.

Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded? or can we treat the absolute edition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is certainly legitimate, for it is thinkable, whether we take it in its abstract or in its concrete shape.

By taking it abstractly I mean placing it behind our finite life as we place the word âwinterâ behind to-nightâs cold weather. âWinterâ is only the name for a certain number of days which we find generally characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line, for our thermometer to-morrow may soar into the 70âs. Nevertheless the word is a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our experience. It cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others. You can put away your straw hats; you can unpack your aretics. It is a summary of things to look for. It names a part of natureâs habits, and gets you ready for their continuation. It is a definite instrument abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality that you must take account of, and which reflects you totally back into sensible realities. The pragmatist is the last person to deny the reality of such abstractions. They are so much past experience funded.

But taking the absolute edition of the world concretely means a different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and oppose it to the worldâs finite editions. They give it a particular nature. It is perfect, finished. Everything known there is known along with everything else; here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want there, there also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process; that world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world; in the absolute world, where all that is not is from eternity impossible, and all that is is necessary, the category of possibility has no application. In this world crimes and horrors are regretable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for âthe existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order.â

Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for either has its uses. Abstractly, or taken like the word winter, as a memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future, the notion of the absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is also indispensable, at least to certain minds, for it determines them religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by, and by changing their lives, to change whatever in the outer order depends on them.

We can not therefore methodically join the tough minds in their rejection of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as such and prefers a sort of wolf-world absolutely unpent and wild and without a master or a collar to any philosophic classroom product whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against the over-tender forms of rationalism, that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here, but I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic hypotheses, so far as these re-direct you fruitfully into experience.

For instance I receive this morning this question on a post-card: âIs a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic?â One of my oldest friends,¹¹¹ who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-Ã -terre naturalism. Let me read you some extracts from it.

âIt seems to me,â my friend writes, âthat the pragmatic objection to pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of narrow minds.

âYour call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of course inspiring. But altho it is salutary and stimulating to be told that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and profit of dwelling also on remoter bearings and issues, and it is the tendency of pragmatism to refuse this privilege.

âIn short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers, of the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary followers of the ânatural sciences.â Chemistry and physics are eminently pragmatic; and many of their devotees, smugly content with the data that their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain for all students of philosophy and metaphysics whomsoever. And of course everything can be expressed, â after a fashion, and âtheoretically,â â in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, everything except the vital principle of the whole, and that, they say, there is no pragmatic use in trying to express; it has no bearings â for them. I for my part refuse to be persuaded that we can not look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest.â

How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible, after my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning works, it will have some truth that ought to be held to through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism.

The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously. To examine how, will be the subject of my next and final lecture.

¹ Personal Idealism, p. 60.

² Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic definition.

LECTURE VIII

Pragmatism and Religion

A T THE CLOSE OF THE LAST LECTURE I reminded you of the first one, in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively rejects tender-mindednessâs hypothesis of an eternal perfect edition of the universe coexisting with our finite experience.

On pragmatic principles we can not reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions, as things to take account of, may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are. They have, indeed, no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if they have any use they have that amount of meaning. And the meaning will be true if the use squares well with lifeâs other uses.

Well, the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of menâs religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember Vivekanandaâs use of the Atman â not indeed a scientific use, for we can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and spiritual altogether.

It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples. Let me read therefore some of those verses entitled âTo Youâ by Walt Whitman â âYouâ of course meaning the reader or hearer of the poem whosoever he or she may be.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you that you be my poem;

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many men and women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb;

I should have made my way to yon long ago;

I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you;

None have understood you, but I understand you;

None have done justice to you â you have not done justice to yourself;

None but have found you imperfect â I only find no imperfection in you.

O I could sing such glories and grandeurs about you;

You have not known what you are â you have slumbered upon yourself all your life;

What you have done returns already in mockeries.

But the mockeries are not you;

Underneath them and within them, I see you lurk;

I pursue you where none else has pursued you.

Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me;

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me;

The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;

There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;

No pluck nor endurance in others, but as good is in you;

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!

These shows of the east and west are tame, compared with you;

These immense meadows â these interminable rivers â you are immense and interminable as they;

You are he or she who is master or mistress over them,

Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles â you find an unfailing sufficiency;

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest whatever you are promulges itself;

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

Verily a fine and moving poem, in any case, but there are two ways of taking it, both useful.

One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, lie back, on your true principle of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication.

But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that gloryâs partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.

In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves. Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. Both paint the portrait of the you on a gold background. But the background of the first way is the static One, while in the second way it means possibles in the plural, genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that conception.

Noble enough is either way of reading the poem; but plainly the pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of future experience to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at work. Altho this second way seems prosaic and earth-born in comparison with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists, you should positively set up the second way against the first way, you would very likely be misunderstood. You would be accused of denying nobler conceptions, and of being an ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense.

You remember the letter from a member of this audience from which I read some extracts at our previous meeting. Let me read you an additional extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before us which I think is very widespread.

âI believe,â writes my friend and correspondent, âin pluralism; I believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do this it will be in so far left undone.

âYet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be incurably sick and suffering (as they are not) and I myself stupid and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only on one condition, namely, that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning, of a rational unity of all things, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and my troubles as supplemented by all the other phenomena of the world, and as forming â when thus supplemented â a scheme which I approve and adopt as my own; and for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we can not look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest or stock.â

Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer. But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of the worldâs poem? His troubles become atoned for when thus supplemented, he says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that the other phenomena may supply. Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars of experience, which he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way.

But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls the rational unity of things, when all the while he really means their possible empirical unification. He supposes at the same time that the pragmatist, because he criticises rationalismâs abstract One, is cut off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the worldâs perfection as a necessary principle, and taking it only as a possible terminus ad quem.¹¹²

I regard the writer of the letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a pragmatist sans le savoir.¹¹³ He appears to me as one of that numerous class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as wishing to have all the good things going, without being too careful as to how they agree or disagree. âRational unity of all thingsâ is so inspiring a formula, that he brandishes it off-hand, and abstractly accuses pluralism of conflicting with it (for the bare names do conflict), altho concretely he means by it just the pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world. Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we should; but in the interest of clearheadedness it is well that some of us should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular religious point.

Is then this you of yous, this absolutely real world, this unity that yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value, to be taken monistically or pluralistically? Is it ante rem or in rebus? Is it a principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worth while not to clump the two things together, for if discriminated, they have decidedly diverse meanings for life.

Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the notion of the worldâs possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes its absolute principle of unity, as a ground of possibility for the many facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who insist that the world must and shall be, and those who are contented with believing that the world may be, saved. The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility. It is necessary therefore to begin by focusing upon that word. What may the word âpossibleâ definitely mean? To unreflecting men it means a sort of third estate of being, less real than existence, more real than non-existence, a twilight realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities ever and anon are made to pass.

Such a conception is of course too vague and nondescript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to extract a termâs meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you say that a thing is possible, what difference does it make? It makes at least this difference that if any one calls it impossible you can contradict him, if any one calls it actual you can contradict him, and if any one calls it necessary you can contradict him too.

But these privileges of contradiction donât amount to much. When you say a thing is possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of actual fact?

It makes at least this negative difference that if the statement be true, it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract sense.

But most possibles are not bare, they are concretely grounded, or well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here. Thus a concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken contains no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or other enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists. Possible chicken means actual egg â plus actual sitting hen, or incubator, or what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness the chicken becomes a better-and-better-grounded possibility. When the conditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility, and turns into an actual fact.

Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of the conditions of the worldâs deliverance do actually exist. The more of them there are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find, the better-grounded is the salvationâs possibility, the more probable does the fact of the deliverance become.

So much for our preliminary look at possibility.

Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the worldâs salvation. Any one who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the universe; we are and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the worldâs salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant doctrine in European philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer¹¹⁴ and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither necessary nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism. Some conditions of the worldâs salvation are actually extant, and she can not possibly close her eyes to this fact: and should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word âsalvationâ in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.

Take, for example, any one of us in this room with the ideals which he cherishes and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the worldâs salvation. But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are live possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things. What now are the complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of things as will in the fulness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring into, and, finally, our act.

Does our act then create the worldâs salvation so far as it makes room for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the whole worldâs salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers of the worldâs extent?

Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask why not? Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world â why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?

Irrational! we are told. How can new being come in local spots and patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of the rest? There must be a reason for our acts, and where in the last resort can any reason be looked for save in the material pressure or the logical compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but one real agent of growth, or seeming growth, anywhere, and that agent is the integral world itself. It may grow all-over, if growth there be, but that single parts should grow per se is irrational.

But if one talks of rationality â and of reasons for things, and insists that they canât just come in spots, what kind of a reason can there ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of logic and necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole philosophical machine-shop as you will, the only real reason I can think of why anything should ever come is that some one wishes it to be here. It is demanded, â demanded, it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a fraction of the worldâs mass. This is living reason, and compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral things.

In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absoluteâs own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it is, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing â the world is rationally organized to do the rest.

But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the worldâs author put the case to you before creation, saying: âI am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own âlevel best.â I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?â

Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempterâs voice?

Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer â âTopp! und schlag auf schlag!â¹¹⁵ It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem ârationalâ to us in the most living way.

Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our fatherâs neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea.

The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life.

And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: âAll is needed and essential â even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one with God, and with God all is well. The everlasting arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearance you seem to fail or to succeed.â There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart within their breast.

So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough. Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender, and moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought.

We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my fourth lecture that I believed the monistic-pluralistic alternative to be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can it be that the disjunction is a final one? that only one side can be true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that, if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were already âtaken upâ beforehand and eternally âovercomeâ? If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or the other. We could not say âyes, yesâ to both alternatives. There would have to be a ânoâ in our relations with the possible. We should confess an ultimate disappointment: we could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act.

Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought. In particular this query has always come home to me: May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all âyes, yesâ in the universe? Doesnât the fact of ânoâ stand at the very core of life? Doesnât the very âseriousnessâ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?

I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying âno play.â I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind for ever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even though the lost element might be oneâs self:

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,

Bids yon set sail.

Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,

Weathered the gale.¹¹⁶

Those puritans who answered âyesâ to the question: Are you willing to be damned for Godâs glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it âaufgehoben,â or preserved in the whole as an element essential but âovercome.â It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name.

It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the element of âseriousnessâ is not to be expelled. Whose does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames.

What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to cooperate with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said âthere is no God but Godâ; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of classroom instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares,¹¹⁷ in the midst of all the shapers of the great worldâs fate.

I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I can not start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on menâs religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dogâs and catâs ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.

But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.

From THE MEANING OF TRUTH

A SEQUEL TO âPRAGMATISMâ

Preface

THE PIVOTAL PART of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the relation called âtruthâ which may obtain between an idea (opinion, belief, statement, or what not) and its object. âTruth,â I there say, âis a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. Pragmatists and in-tellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course.

âWhere our ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? â¦ Pragmatism asks its usual question. âGrant an idea or belief to be true,â it says, âwhat concrete difference will its being true make in any oneâs actual life? What experiences [may] be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truthâs cash-value in experiential terms?â The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.

âThe truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation.¹

âTo agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically.â¦Â Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesnât entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the realityâs whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will be true of that reality.

âThe true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion, and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight wonât necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.â

This account of truth, following upon the similar ones given by Messrs. Dewey and Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest discussion. Few critics have defended it, most of them have scouted it. It seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand, under its apparent simplicity; and evident also, I think, that the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning-point in the history of epistemology, and consequently in that of general philosophy. In order to make my own thought more accessible to those who hereafter may have to study the question, I have collected in the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears directly on the truth-question. My first statement was in 1884, in the article that begins the present volume. The other papers follow in the order of their publication. Two or three appear now for the first time.

One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their âfeeling goodâ to us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse for this charge, by the unguarded language in which, in the book Pragmatism, I spoke of the truth of the belief of certain philosophers in the absolute. Explaining why I do not believe in the absolute myself (p. 39), yet finding that it may secure âmoral holidaysâ to those who need them, and is true in so far forth (if to gain moral holidays be a good).² I offered this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my enemies. But they, as is only too common with such offerings, trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver. I had counted too much on their good will â oh for the rarity of Christian charity under the sun! Oh for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also! I had supposed it to be matter of common observation that, of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects are equal, but of which the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had shown the concept of the absolute to mean nothing but the holiday giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. Oneâs objective deliverance, when one says âthe absolute exists,â amounted, on my showing, just to this, that âsome justification of a feeling of security in presence of the universe,â exists, and that systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of security would be to do violence to a tendency in oneâs emotional life which might well be respected as prophetic.

Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their own minds in any such picture, so all that I can do is to apologize, and take my offering back. The absolute is true in no way then, and least of all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I assigned!

My treatment of âGod,â âfreedom,â and âdesignâ was similar. Reducing, by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these concepts to its positive experienceable operation, I showed them all to mean the same thing, viz., the presence of âpromiseâ in the world. âGod or no God?â means âpromise or no promise?â It seems to me that the alternative is objective enough, being a question as to whether the cosmos has one character or another, even though our own provisional answer be made on subjective grounds. Nevertheless christian and non-christian critics alike accuse me of summoning people to say âGod exists,â even when he doesnât exist, because forsooth in my philosophy the âtruthâ of the saying doesnât really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but only that to say so feels good.

Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the word âtruthâ shall be held to signify, and not over any of the facts embodied in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti-pragmatists believe in existent objects, just as they believe in our ideas of them. The difference is that when the pragmatists speak of truth, they mean exclusively something about the ideas, namely their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to mean something about the objects. Since the pragmatist, if he agrees that an idea is âreallyâ true, also agrees to whatever it says about its object; and since most anti-pragmatists have already come round to agreeing that, if the object exists, the idea that it does so is workable; there would seem so little left to fight about that I might well be asked why instead of reprinting my share in so much verbal wrangling, I do not show my sense of âvaluesâ by burning it all up.

I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of radical empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in making radical empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.

The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.]

The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.

The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.

The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In the prevalent idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which ârelatesâ things together by throwing âcategoriesâ over them like a net. The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is supposed to be the truth-relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known, yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable, explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by uttering the name âtruthâ

The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The âworkablenessâ which ideas must have, in order to be true, means particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete experience. Were this pragmatic contention admitted, one great point in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored, for the relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to stand outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation, so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate rally.

Now the anti-pragmatlst contentions which I try to meet in this volume can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of resistance, not only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also (for if the truth-relation were transcendent, others might be so too), that I feel strongly the strategical importance of having them definitely met and got out of the way. What our critics most persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth, yet they do not constitute it. It is numerically additional to them, prior to them, explanatory of them, and in no wise to be explained by them, we are incessantly told. The first point for our enemies to establish, therefore, is that something numerically additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since the object is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists plead it, and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the bystanders the impression â since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the object â that our account of truth breaks down, and that our critics have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it âtruly,â is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully, if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse of language, to say the least, to transfer the word âtruthâ from the idea to the objectâs existence, when the falsehood of ideas that wonât work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of those that will.

I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries. But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word âtruthâ represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens fair and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism on its merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its workings, or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings; it will mean neither the ideaâs object, nor anything âsaltatoryâ inside the idea, that terms drawn from experience cannot describe.

One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes made between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the objectâs existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which they, as more radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself understand these authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in the truth-relation. Dewey in particular has insisted almost ad nauseam that the whole meaning of our cognitive states and processes lies in the way they intervene in the control and revaluation of independent existences or facts. His account of knowledge is not only absurd, but meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But because he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations âtranscendentâ in the sense of being altogether trans-experiential, their critics pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that they deny the existence within the realm of experience of objects external to the ideas that declare their presence there.³ It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should so fail to catch their adversaryâs point of view.

What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas of different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the other provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the reader thereupon considers it to be denied. Schillerâs universe is the smallest, being essentially a psychological one. He starts with but one sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the independent objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most successfully validated of all claims is that such facts are there. My universe is more essentially epistemological. I start with two things, the objective facts and the claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there, will work successfully as the latterâs substitutes and which will not. I call the former claims true. Deweyâs panorama, if I understand this colleague, is the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own account of its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to objects independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this, he must correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at second hand.

I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the critics of my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor⁵ Lovejoy,⁶ Gardiner,⁷Bakewell,⁹ Creighton,⁹ Hibben,¹⁰Parodi,¹¹ Salter,¹² Cams,¹³ Lalande,¹⁴ Mentre,¹⁵ McTaggart,¹⁶G. E. Moore,¹⁷ Ladd¹⁸ and others, especially not Professor Schinz,¹⁹ who has published under the title of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing sociological romance. Some of these critics seem to me to labor under an inability almost pathetic, to understand the thesis which they seek to refute. I imagine that most of their difficulties have been answered by anticipation elsewhere in this volume, and I am sure that my readers will thank me for not adding more repetition to the fearful amount that is already there.

95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE (MASS.),

August, 1909.

¹ But âverifiability.â I add, âis as good as verification. For one truth-process completed, there are a million in our lives that function in [the] state of nascency. They lead us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the object they envisage; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.â

2 Op. cit., p. 36.

³ It gives me pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read¹ into the pragmatistic church, so far as his epistemology goes. See his vigorous book, The Metaphysics of Nature, Id Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work What is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson² (Boston, 1891), of which I make the acquaintance only while correcting these proofs, contains some striking anticipations of the later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking, by Irving E. Miller³ (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist documents yet published, tho it does not use the word âpragmatismâ at all. While I am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox,⁴ in the Quarterly Review for April, 1909.

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The Tigers in India1

THERE ARE TWO WAYS of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is known-as, to use Shadworth Hodgsonâs inelegant but valuable form of words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to them. A great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called intentional inexistence, of the tigers in our mind. At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here.

But now what do we mean by pointing, in such a case as this? What is the pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer â one that traverses the prepossessions not only of common sense and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of propositions which donât contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if yon once grant a connecting world to be there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Humeâs language, as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.²

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies. All this was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller1 at our meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledgment. ³

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes. The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and there is no context of intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought and thing. There is no âpresence in absenceâ here, and no âpointingâ but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when the tigers were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief always does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get better informed, is quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we mean by âknowingâ such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in the fewest words. And let me first say this: So far as the white paper or other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into some one elseâs experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to know it there as well as here; so far, again, as it is considered to be a mere mask for hidden molecules that other now impossible experiences of our own might some day lay bare to view; so far it is a case of tigers in India again â the things known being absent experiences, the knowing can only consist in passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary context that the world supplies. But if our own private vision of the paper be considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it constituted by itself the universe (and it might perfectly well do so, for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.*To know immediately,then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be identical. This is a very different definition from that which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither definition involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of knowledge, both of philosophers and of common men.⁵

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¹ Extracts from a presidential address before the American Psychological Association, published in the Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895).

² A stone in one field may âfit,â we say, a hole in another field. But the relation of âfitting,â so long as no one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such an act may happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory name for a further associative and terminative process that may occur.

³ See Dr. Millerâs articles on Truth and Error, and on Content and Function, in the Philosophical Review, July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.

⁴ What is meant by this is that âthe experienceâ can be referred to either of two great associative systems, that of the experiencerâs mental history, or that of the experienced facts of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part, and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection. One might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the same object, O, appears also in the mental history of different persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases to be the private property of one experience, and becomes, so to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its outer history in this way, and represent it by the horizontal line. [It is also known representatively at other points of the vertical lines, or intuitively there again, so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it straight for simplicityâs sake.] In any case, however, it is the same stuff that figures in all the sets of lines.

⁵ [The reader will observe that the text is written from the point of view of naÃ¯f realism or common sense, and avoids raising the idealistic controversy.]

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Humanism and Truth¹

RECEIVING FROM the Editor of Mind¹ an advance proof of Mr. Bradleyâs article on âTruth and Practice,â I understand this as a hint to me to join in the controversy over âPragmatismâ which seems to have seriously begun. As my name has been coupled with the movement, I deem it wise to take the hint, the more so as in some quarters greater credit has been given me than I deserve, and probably undeserved discredit in other quarters falls also to my lot.

First, as to the word âpragmatism.â I myself have only used the term to indicate a method of carrying on abstract discussion. The serious meaning of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that âpragmaticâ test, and you will escape vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which of two statements be true, then they are really one statement in two verbal forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning. In neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may save our breath, and pass to more important things.

All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should have practical² consequences. In England the word has been used more broadly still, to cover the notion that the truth of any statement consists in the consequences, and particularly in their being good consequences. Here we get beyond affairs of method altogether; and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different, and both are important enough to have different names, I think that Mr. Schillerâs proposal to call the wider pragmatism by the name of âhumanismâ is excellent and ought to be adopted. The narrower pragmatism may still be spoken of as the âpragmatic method.â

I have read in the past six months many hostile reviews of Schillerâs and Deweyâs publications; but with the exception of Mr. Bradleyâs elaborate indictment, they are out of reach where I write, and I have largely forgotten them. I think that a free discussion of the subject on my part would in any case be more useful than a polemic attempt at rebutting these criticisms in detail. Mr. Bradley in particular can be taken care of by Mr. Schiller. He repeatedly confesses himself unable to comprehend Schillerâs views, he evidently has not sought to do so sympathetically, and I deeply regret to say that his laborious article throws, for my mind, absolutely no useful light upon the subject. It seems to me on the whole an igno-ratio elenchi,²and I feel free to disregard it altogether.

The subject is unquestionably difficult. Messrs. Deweyâs and Schillerâs thought is eminently an induction, a generalization working itself free from all sorts of entangling particulars. If true, it involves much restatement of traditional notions. This is a kind of intellectual product that never attains a classic form of expression when first promulgated. The critic ought therefore not to be too sharp and logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but should weight it as a whole, and especially weigh it against its possible alternatives. One should also try to apply it first to one instance, and then to another to see how it will work. It seems to me that it is emphatically not a case for instant execution, by conviction of intrinsic absurdity or of self-contradiction, or by caricature of what it would look like if reduced to skeleton shape. Humanism is in fact much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight, as it were, borne upon tides âtoo deep for sound or foam,â³ that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life â changes of which we all have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle. This is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. Round your obstacle flows the water and âgets there all the same.â In reading some of our opponents, I am not a little reminded of those catholic writers who refute darwinism by telling us that higher species cannot come from lower because minus nequit gignere plus,⁴ or that the notion of transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their own destruction, and that would violate the principle that every reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive argument. Wide generalizations in science always meet with these summary refutations in their early days; but they outlive them, and the refutations then sound oddly antiquated and scholastic. I cannot help suspecting that the humanistic theory is going through this kind of would-be refutation at present.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least resistance âon the whole.â âIn other words,â an opponent might say, âresolve your intellect into a kind of slush.â âEven so,â I make reply, â âif you will consent to use no politer word.â For humanism, conceiving the more âtrueâ as the more âsatisfactoryâ (Deweyâs term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this inductive view of the conditions of belief.

As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its being to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought about in the older notions of scientific truth. âGod geometrizes,â it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclidâs elements literally reproduced his geometrizing. There is an eternal and unchangeable âreasonâ; and its voice was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent.⁵ So also of the âlaws of nature,â physical and chemical, so of natural history classifications â all were supposed to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was thought. Up to about 1850 almost every one believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws now treated as so much âconceptual shorthand,â true so far as they are useful but no farther. Our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead of rigor. âEnergetics,â measuring the bare face of sensible phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all their changes of âlevel,â is the last word of this scientific humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding as to the reason for so curious a congruence between the world and the mind, but which at any rate makes our whole notion of scientific truth more flexible and genial than it used to be.

It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either in mathematics, logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of God. The main forms of our thinking, the separation of subjects from predicates, the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments, are purely human habits. The ether, as Lord Salisbury⁶ said, is only a noun for the verb to undulate; and many of our theological ideas are admitted, even by those who call them âtrue,â to be humanistic in like degree.

I fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what originally gave the impulse to Messrs. Deweyâs and Schillerâs views. The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal âobjectivity,â as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its âeleganceâ or its congruity with our residual beliefs. Yielding to these suspicions, and generalizing, we fall into something like the humanistic state of mind. Truth we conceive to mean everywhere, not duplication, but addition; not the constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a clearer result. Obviously this state of mind is at first full of vagueness and ambiguity. âCollaboratingâ is a vague term; it must at any rate cover conceptions and logical arrangements. âClearerâ is vaguer still. Truth must bring clear thoughts, as well as clear the way to action. âRealityâ is the vaguest term of all. The only way to test such a programme at all is to apply it to the various types of truth, in the hope of reaching an account that shall be more precise. Any hypothesis that forces such a review upon one has one great merit, even if in the end it prove invalid: it gets us better acquainted with the total subject. To give the theory plenty of âropeâ and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset by abstract accusations of self-contradiction. I think therefore that a decided effort at sympathetic mental play with humanism is the provisional attitude to be recommended to the reader.

When I find myself playing sympathetically with humanism, something like what follows is what I end by conceiving it to mean.

Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating, rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own, but most of them are common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive. The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind; between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of classes with sub-classes within them; the separation of fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempts to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable shape. They proved of such sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose with them. No experience can upset them. On the contrary, they apperceive every experience and assign it to its place.

To what effect? That we may the better foresee the course of our experiences, communicate with one another, and steer our lives by rule. Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer, more inclusive mental view.

The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one Time and one Space, is probably the concept of permanently existing things. When a rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby, he does not look to see where it has gone. Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief. That our perceptions mean beings, rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten. It applies with equal felicity to things and persons, to the objective and to the ejective realm.⁷ However a Berkeley, a Mill, or a Cornelius⁹ may criticise it, it works; and in practical life we never think of âgoing backâ upon it, or reading our incoming experiences in any other terms. We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of âpureâ experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed; and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis. But we cannot positively imagine to-day what the different hypothesis could have been, for the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the foundations of our life. Our thoughts must still employ it if they are to possess reasonableness and truth.

This notion of a first in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience which sets us questions, of a second in the way of fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and practically irreversible, which define the general frame within which answers must fall, and of a third which gives the detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our present needs, is, as I take it, the essence of the humanistic conception. It represents experience in its pristine purity to be now so enveloped in predicates historically worked out that we can think of it as little more than an Other, of a That, which the mind, in Mr. Bradleyâs phrase, âencounters,â and to whose stimulating presence we respond by ways of thinking which we call âtrueâ in proportion as they facilitate our mental or physical activities and bring us outer power and inner peace. But whether the Other, the universal That, has itself any definite inner structure, or whether, if it have any, the structure resembles any of our predicated whats, this is a question which humanism leaves untouched. For us, at any rate, it insists, reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for âtruthâ in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old.

It is hard to see why either Mr. Bradleyâs own logic or his metaphysics should oblige him to quarrel with this conception. He might consistently adopt it verbatim et literatim⁹ if he would, and simply throw his peculiar absolute round it, following in this the good example of Professor Royce. Bergson in France, and his disciples, Wilbois¹⁰ the physicist and Leroy,¹¹ are thoroughgoing humanists in the sense defined. Professor Milhaud also appears to be one; and the great Poincare misses it by only the breadth of a hair. In Germany the name of Simmel¹² offers itself as that of a humanist of the most radical sort. Mach and his school, and Hertz¹³ and Ostwald must be classed as humanists. The view is in the atmosphere and must be patiently discussed.

The best way to discuss it would be to see what the alternative might be. What is it indeed? Its critics make no explicit statement, Professor Royce being the only one so far who has formulated anything definite. The first service of humanism to philosophy accordingly seems to be that it will probably oblige those who dislike it to search their own hearts and heads. It will force analysis to the front and make it the order of the day. At present the lazy tradition that truth is adÃ¦quatio intellectÃ»s et rei¹⁴ seems all there is to contradict it with. Mr. Bradleyâs only suggestion is that true thought âmust correspond to a determinate being which it cannot be said to make,â and obviously that sheds no new light. What is the meaning of the word to âcorrespondâ? Where is the âbeingâ? What sort of things are âdeterminations,â and what is meant in this particular case by ânot to makeâ?

Humanism proceeds immediately to refine upon the looseness of these epithets. We correspond in some way with anything with which we enter into any relations at all. If it be a thing, we may produce an exact copy of it, or we may simply feel it as an existent in a certain place. If it be a demand, we may obey it without knowing anything more about it than its push. If it be a proposition, we may agree by not contradicting it, by letting it pass. If it be a relation between things, we may act on the first thing so as to bring ourselves out where the second will be. If it be something inaccessible, we may substitute a hypothetical object for it, which, having the same consequences, will cipher out for us real results. In a general way we may simply add our thought to it; and if it suffers the addition, and the whole situation harmoniously prolongs and enriches itself, the thought will pass for true.

As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to, although they may be outside of the present thought as well as in it, humanism sees no ground for saying they are outside of finite experience itself. Pragmatically, their reality means that we submit to them, take account of them, whether we like to or not, but this we must perpetually do with experiences other than our own. The whole system of what the present experience must correspond to âadequatelyâ may be continuous with the present experience itself. Reality, so taken as experience other than the present, might be either the legacy of past experience or the content of experience to come. Its determinations for us are in any case the adjectives which our acts of judging fit to it, and those are essentially humanistic things.

To say that our thought does not âmakeâ this reality means pragmatically that if our own particular thought were annihilated the reality would still be there in some shape, though possibly it might be a shape that would lack something that our thought supplies. That reality is âindependentâ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief. That this drift of experience itself is in the last resort due to something independent of all possible experience may or may not be true. There may or may not be an extra-experiential âding an sichâ¹⁵ that keeps the ball rolling, or an âabsoluteâ that lies eternally behind all the successive determinations which human thought has made. But within our experience itself, at any rate, humanism says, some determinations show themselves as being independent of others; some questions, if we ever ask them, can only be answered in one way; some beings, if we ever suppose them, must be supposed to have existed previously to the supposing; some relations, if they exist ever, must exist as long as their terms exist.

Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation of less fixed parts of experience (predicates) to other relatively more fixed parts (subjects); and we are not required to seek it in a relation of experience as such to anything beyond itself. We can stay at home, for our behavior as experients is hemmed in on every side. The forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by our own objects, and the notion of truth as something opposed to waywardness or license inevitably grows up solipsistically inside of every human life.

So obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic authors âmakes me tired.â âHow can a deweyite discriminate sincerity from bluff?â was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where I reported on Deweyâs Studies. âHow can the mere³ pragmatist feel any duty to think truly?â is the objection urged by Professor Royce. Mr. Bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his own doctrine, âhe must hold any idea, however mad, to be the truth, if any one will have it so.â And Professor Taylor describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases and calling it truth.

Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which menâs thinking actually goes on seems to me most surprising. These critics appear to suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft of our experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even tho there were compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be no pole for them to point to. There must be absolute sailing-directions, they insist, decreed from outside, and an independent chart of the voyage added to the âmereâ voyage itself, if we are ever to make a port. But is it not obvious that even tho there be such absolute sailing-directions in the shape of pre-human standards of truth that we ought to follow, the only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human equipment. The âoughtâ would be a brutum fulmen¹⁶ unless there were a felt grain inside of our experience that conspired. As a matter of fact the devoutest believers in absolute standards must admit that men fail to obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite of the eternal prohibitions, and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is no warrant against unlimited error in rebus being incurred. The only real guarantee we have against licentious thinking is the circumpressure of experience itself, which gets us sick of concrete errors, whether there be a trans-empirical reality or not. How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to think? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no means of guessing what it wants of him except by following the humanistic clues. The only truth that he himself will ever practically accept will be that to which his finite experiences lead him of themselves. The state of mind which shudders at the idea of a lot of experiences left to themselves, and that augurs protection from the sheer name of an absolute, as if, however inoperative, that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is like the mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a social tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to puff, and say âParliament or Congress ought to make a law against it,â as if an impotent decree would give relief.

All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine.

And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist will always have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than will your believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the standard rigid. If by this latter believer he means a man who pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist will doubtless prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the absolutist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately our present-day absolutists do follow) empirical methods of inquiry in concrete affairs. To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein.¹⁷

Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been used to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as he does, that truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most propitious reaction, he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a learned colleague say, from trying to convert opponents, for does not their view, being their most propitious momentary reaction, already fill the bill? Only the believer in the ante-rem brand of truth can on this theory seek to make converts without self-stultification. But can there be self-stultification in urging any account whatever of truth? Can the definition ever contradict the deed? âTruth is what I feel like sayingâ â suppose that to be the definition. âWell, I feel like saying that, and I want you to feel like saying it, and shall continue to say it until I get you to agree,â Where is there any contradiction? Whatever truth may be said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held to carry. The temper which a saying may comport is an extra-logical matter. It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the humanist, for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to make one proselyte, if his nature be enthusiastic enough.

âBut how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to alter during the next minute? How is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions?â

This is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of the situation. If they would only follow the pragmatic method and ask: âWhat is truth known-as? What does its existence stand for in the way of concrete goods?â â they would see that the name of it is the inbegriff¹⁹ of almost everything that is valuable in our lives. The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth â truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional foolâs paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit! When absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism â as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. These contradict the dramatic temperament of nature, as our dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive it. They seem oddly personal and artificial, even when not bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree. We turn from them to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes.⁴

This is surely enough to show that the humanist does not ignore the character of objectivity and independence in truth. Let me turn next to what his opponents mean when they say that to be true, our thoughts must âcorrespond.â

The vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the thoughts must copy the reality â cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cognoscentis²¹ and philosophy, without having ever fairly sat down to the question, seems to have instinctively accepted this idea: propositions are held true if they copy the eternal thought; terms are held true if they copy extra-mental realities. Implicitly, I think that the copy-theory has animated most of the criticisms that have been made on humanism.

A priori, however, it is not self-evident that the sole business of our mind with realities should be to copy them. Let my reader suppose himself to constitute for a time all the reality there is in the universe, and then to receive the announcement that another being is to be created who shall know him truly. How will he represent the knowing in advance? What will he hope it to be? I doubt extremely whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as a mere copying. Of what use to him would an imperfect second edition of himself in the new cornerâs interior be? It would seem pure waste of a propitious opportunity. The demand would more probably be for something absolutely new. The reader would conceive the knowing humanistically, âthe new comer,â he would say, âmust take account of my presence by reacting on it in such a way that good would accrue to us both. If copying be requisite to that end, let there be copying; otherwise not.â The essence in any case would not be the copying, but the enrichment of the previous world.

I read the other day, in a book of Professor Euckenâs, a phrase, âdie erhÃ¶hung des vorgefundenen daseins,â²² which seems to be pertinent here. Why may not thoughtâs mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as âillusoryâ because they copy nothing in the thing. The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement.

âKnowing,â in short, may, for aught we can see beforehand to the contrary, be only one way of getting into fruitful relations with reality, whether copying be one of the relations or not.

It is easy to see from what special type of knowing the copy-theory arose. In our dealings with natural phenomena the great point is to be able to foretell. Foretelling, according to such a writer as Spencer, is the whole meaning of intelligence. When Spencerâs âlaw of intelligenceâ says that inner and outer relations must âcorrespond,â it means that the distribution of terms in our inner time-scheme and space-scheme must be an exact copy of the distribution in real time and space of the real terms. In strict theory the mental terms themselves need not answer to the real terms in the sense of severally copying them, symbolic mental terms being enough, if only the real dates and places be copied. But in our ordinary life the mental terms are images and the real ones are sensations, and the images so often copy the sensations, that we easily take copying of terms as well as of relations to be the natural significance of knowing. Meanwhile much, even of this common descriptive truth, is couched in verbal symbols. If our symbols fit the world, in the sense of determining our expectations rightly, they may even be the better for not copying its terms.

It seems obvious that the pragmatic account of all this routine of phenomenal knowledge is accurate. Truth here is a relation, not of our ideas to non-human realities, but of conceptual parts of our experience to sensational parts. Those thoughts are true which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

From the frequency of copying in the knowledge of phenomenal fact, copying has been supposed to be the essence of truth in matters rational also. Geometry and logic, it has been supposed, must copy archetypal thoughts in the Creator. But in these abstract spheres there is no need of assuming archetypes. The mind is free to carve so many figures out of space, to make so many numerical collections, to frame so many classes and series, and it can analyze and compare so endlessly, that the very superabundance of the resulting ideas makes us doubt the âobjectiveâ pre-existence of their models. It would be plainly wrong to suppose a God whose thought consecrated rectangular but not polar co-ordinates, or Jevonsâs²³ notation but not Booleâs.²⁴ Yet if, on the other hand, we assume God to have thought in advance of every possible flight of human fancy in these directions, his mind becomes too much like a Hindoo idol with three heads, eight arms and six breasts, too much made up of super-fÅtation and redundancy for us to wish to copy it, and the whole notion of copying tends to evaporate from these sciences. Their objects can be better interpreted as being created step by step by men, as fast as they successively conceive them.

If now it be asked how, if triangles, squares, square roots, genera, and the like, are but improvised human âartefacts,â their properties and relations can be so promptly known to be âeternalâ the humanistic answer is easy. If triangles and genera are of our own production we can keep them invariant. We can make them âtimelessâ by expressly decreeing that on the things we mean time shall exert no altering effect, that they are intentionally and it may be fictitiously abstracted from every corrupting real associate and condition. But relations between invariant objects will themselves be invariant. Such relations cannot be happenings, for by hypothesis nothing shall happen to the objects. I have tried to show in the last chapter of my Principles of Psychology⁵ that they can only be relations of comparison. No one so far seems to have noticed my suggestion, and I am too ignorant of the development of mathematics to feel very confident of my own view. But if it were correct it would solve the difficulty perfectly. Relations of comparison are matters of direct inspection. As soon as mental objects are mentally compared, they are perceived to be either like or unlike. But once the same, always the same, once different, always different, under these timeless conditions. Which is as much as to say that truths concerning these man-made objects are necessary and eternal. We can change our conclusions only by changing our data first.

The whole fabric of the a priori sciences can thus be treated as a man-made product. As Locke long ago pointed out, these sciences have no immediate connection with fact. Only if a fact can be humanized by being identified with any of these ideal objects, is what was true of the objects now true also of the facts. The truth itself meanwhile was originally a copy of nothing; it was only a relation directly perceived to obtain between two artificial mental things.⁶

We may now glance at some special types of knowing, so as to see better whether the humanistic account fits. On the mathematical and logical types we need not enlarge further, nor need we return at much length to the case of our descriptive knowledge of the course of nature. So far as this involves anticipation, tho that may mean copying, it need, as we saw, mean little more than âgetting readyâ in advance. But with many distant and future objects, our practical relationsare to the last degree potential and remote. In no sense can we now get ready for the arrest of the earthâs revolution by the tidal brake, for instance; and with the past, tho we suppose ourselves to know it truly, we have no practical relations at all. It is obvious that, altho interests strictly practical have been the original starting-point of our search for true phenomenal descriptions, yet an intrinsic interest in the bare describing function has grown up. We wish accounts that shall be true, whether they bring collateral profit or not. The primitive function has developed its demand for mere exercise. This theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human differentia, and humanism recognizes its enormous scope. A true idea now means not only one that prepares us for an actual perception. It means also one that might prepare us for a merely possible perception, or one that, if spoken, would suggest possible perceptions to others, or suggest actual perceptions which the speaker cannot share. The ensemble of perceptions thus thought of as either actual or possible form a system which it is obviously advantageous to us to get into a stable and consistent shape; and here it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings finds triumphant use. Beings acting outside of the thinker explain, not only his actual perceptions, past and future, but his possible perceptions and those of every one else. Accordingly they gratify our theoretic need in a supremely beautiful way. We pass from our immediate actual through them into the foreign and the potential, and back again into the future actual, accounting for innumerable particulars by a single cause. As in those circular panoramas, where a real foreground of dirt, grass, bushes, rocks and a broken-down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture of sky and earth and of a raging battle, continuing the foreground so cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint; so these conceptual objects, added to our present perceptual reality, fuse with it into the whole universe of our belief. In spite of all berkeleyan criticism, we do not doubt that they are really there. Tho our discovery of any one of them may only date from now, we unhesitatingly say that it not only is, but was there, if, by so saying, the past appears connected more consistently with what we feel the present to be. This is historic truth. Moses²⁵ wrote the Pentateuch, we think, because if he didnât, all our religious habits will have to be undone. Julius Caesar was real, or we can never listen to history again. Trilobites were once alive, or all our thought about the strata is at sea. Radium, discovered only yesterday, must always have existed, or its analogy with other natural elements, which are permanent, fails. In all this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory total state of mind. That state of mind, we say, sees truth, and the content of its deliverances we believe.

Of course, if you take the satisfactoriness concretely, as something felt by you now, and if, by truth, you mean truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run, you cannot make them equate, for it is notorious that the temporarily satisfactory is often false. Yet at each and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man âtrowethâ²⁶ at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself; and similarly, abstract truth, truth verified by the long run, and abstract satisfactoriness, long-run satisfactoriness, coincide. If, in short, we compare concrete with concrete and abstract with abstract, the true and the satisfactory do mean the same thing. I suspect that a certain muddling of matters hereabouts is what makes the general philosophic public so impervious to humanismâs claims.

The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change. For the âtrowerâ at any moment, truth, like the visible area round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot²⁷calls âthe wall of dark seen by small fishesâ eyes that pierce a span in the wide Ocean,â is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of which it is the critic, and which then either suffers alteration or is continued unchanged. The critic sees both the first trowerâs truth and his own truth, compares them with each other, and verifies or confutes. His field of view is the reality independent of that earlier trowerâs thinking with which that thinking ought to correspond. But the critic is himself only a trower; and if the whole process of experience should terminate at that instant, there would be no otherwise known independent reality with which his thought might be compared.

The immediate in experience is always provisionally in this situation. The humanism, for instance, which I see and try so hard to defend, is the completest truth attained from my point of view up to date. But, owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one. Every one is insufficient and off its balance, and responsible to later points of view than itself.

You, occupying some of these later points in your own person, and believing in the reality of others, will not agree that my point of view sees truth positive, truth timeless, truth that counts, unless they verify and confirm what it sees.

You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however satisfactory, can count positively and absolutely as true only so far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself; and if you then forget that this standard perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of the experiences, you may carelessly go on to say that what distributively holds of each experience, holds also collectively of all experience, and that experience as such and in its totality owes whatever truth it may be possessed-of to its correspondence with absolute realities outside of its own being. This evidently is the popular and traditional position. From the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one another, philosophers pass to the notion that experience Ã¼berhaupt²⁹ must need an absolute support. The denial of such a notion by humanism lies probably at the root of most of the dislike which it incurs.

But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again? Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity. Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the casrulean abyss? Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished? And if reality genuinely grows, why may it not grow in these very determinations which here and now are made?

In point of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental determinations, be these never so âtrue.â Take the âgreat bearâ or âdipperâ constellation in the heavens. We call it by that name, we count the stars and call them seven, we say they were seven before they were counted, and we say that whether any one had ever noted the fact or not, the dim resemblance to a long-tailed (or long-necked?) animal was always truly there. But what do we mean by this projection into past eternity of recent human ways of thinking? Did an âabsoluteâ thinker actually do the counting, tell off the stars upon his standing number-tally, and make the bear-comparison, silly as the latter is? Were they explicitly seven, explicitly bear-like, before the human witness came? Surely nothing in the truth of the attributions drives us to think this. They were only implicitly or virtually what we call them, and we human witnesses first explicated them and made them âreal.â A fact virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization save one is already there. In this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and comparing mind. But the stars (once the mind considers them) themselves dictate the result. The counting in no wise modifies their previous nature, and, they being what and where they are, the count cannot fall out differently. It could then always be made. Never could the number seven be questioned, if the question once were raised.

We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before. And yet that something was always true. In one sense you create it, and in another sense you find it. You have to treat your count as being true beforehand, the moment you come to treat the matter at all.

Our stellar attributes must always be called true, then; yet none the less are they genuine additions made by our intellect to the world of fact. Not additions of consciousness only, but additions of âcontent.â They copy nothing that pre-existed, yet they agree with what pre-existed, fit it, amplify it, relate and connect it with a âwain,â²⁹ a number-tally, or what not, and build it out. It seems to me that humanism is the only theory that builds this case out in the good direction, and this case stands for innumerable other kinds of case. In all such cases, odd as it may sound, our judgment may actually be said to retroact and to enrich the past.

Our judgments at any rate change the character of future reality by the acts to which they lead. Where these acts are acts expressive of trust, â trust, e.g., that a man is honest, that our health is good enough, or that we can make a successful effort, â which acts may be a needed antecedent of the trusted things becoming true, Professor Taylor says⁷ that our trust is at any rate untrue when it is made, i. e., before the action; and I seem to remember that he disposes of anything like a faith in the general excellence of the universe (making the faithful personâs part in it at any rate more excellent) as a âlie in the soul.â But the pathos of this expression should not blind us to the complication of the facts. I doubt whether Professor Taylor would himself be in favor of practically handling trusters of these kinds as liars. Future and present really mix in such emergencies, and one can always escape lies in them by using hypothetic forms. But Mr. Taylorâs attitude suggests such absurd possibilities of practice that it seems to me to illustrate beautifully how self-stultifying the conception of a truth that shall merely register a standing fixture may become. Theoretic truth, truth of passive copying, sought in the sole interests of copying as such, not because copying is good for something, but because copying ought schlechthin³⁰to be, seems, if you look at it coldly, to be an almost preposterous ideal. Why should the universe, existing in itself, also exist in copies? How can it be copied in the solidity of its objective fulness? And even if it could, what would the motive be? âEven the hairs of your head are numbered.â Doubtless they are, virtually; but why, as an absolute proposition, ought the number to become copied and known? Surely knowing is only one way of interacting with reality and adding to its effect.

The opponent here will ask: âHas not the knowing of truth any substantive value on its own account, apart from the collateral advantages it may bring? And if you allow theoretic satisfactions to exist at all, do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she admits them at all?â The destructive force of such talk disappears as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist.

Are they not all mere matters of consistency â and emphatically not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mindâs copies of it, but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the mindâs own experienceable world? And are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that do develop mental habits â habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow âlawâ? If this were so, what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit as such, and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point of fact, this seems to have been the probable case. At lifeâs origin, any present perception may have been âtrueâ â if such a word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became âtrueâ whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were âfalseâ or âmistakenâ reactions. But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, and a disappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.

Theoretic truth thus falls within the mind, being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects â âaccordâ consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the balance â provided always that we are highly organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which their lives are cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we âoughtâ to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates that do not explicitly contradict their subjects. We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others. The form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral profits stop. Such men systematize and classify and schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying. Too often the results, glowing with âtruthâ for the inventors, seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders. Which is as much as to say that the purely theoretic criterion of truth can leave us in the lurch as easily as any other criterion, and that the absolutists, for all their pretensions, are âin the same boatâ concretely with those whom they attack.

I am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the extreme. But the whole subject is inductive, and sharp logic is hardly yet in order. My great trammel has been the nonexistence of any definitely stated alternative on my opponentsâ part. It may conduce to clearness if I recapitulate, in closing, what I conceive the main points of humanism to be. They are these: â

1. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true.

2. By ârealityâ humanism means nothing more than the other conceptual or perceptual experiences with which a given present experience may find itself in point of fact mixed up.*

3. By âconforming,â humanism means taking account-of in such a way as to gain any intellectually and practically satisfactory result.

4. To âtake account-ofâ and to be âsatisfactoryâ are terms that admit of no definition, so many are the ways in which these requirements can practically be worked out.

5. Vaguely and in general, we take account of a reality by preserving it in as unmodified a form as possible. But, to be then satisfactory, it must not contradict other realities outside of it which claim also to be preserved. That we must preserve all the experience we can and minimize contradiction in what we preserve, is about all that can be said in advance.

6. The truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a positive addition to the previous reality, and later judgments may have to conform to it. Yet, virtually at least, it may have been true previously. Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing: the possibility of only one answer, when once the question is raised.

¹ Reprinted, with slight verbal revision, from Mind, vol. xiii, N. S., p. 457 (October, 1904). A couple of interpolations from another article in Mind, âHumanism and truth once more,â in vol. xiv, have been made.

2 [âPracticalâ in the sense of particular, of course, not in the sense that the consequences may not be mental as well as physical.]

³ I know of no âmereâ pragmatist, if mereness here means, as it seems to, the denial of all concreteness to the pragmatistâs thought.

4 [I cannot forbear quoting as an illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist tempers of mind, in a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks on the Dreyfus âaffaire,â¹⁹ written by one who assuredly had never heard of humanism or pragmatism. âAutant que la RÃ©volution, âlâAffaireâ est dÃ©sormais une de nos âorigines.â Si elle nâa pas fait ouvrir le gouffre, câest elle du moins qui a rendu patent et visible le long travail souterrain.qui, silencieusement, avait preparÃ© la sÃ©paration entre nos deux camps dâaujourdâhui, pour Ã©carter enfin, dâun coup soudain, la France des traditionalistes (poseurs de principes, chercheurs dâunitÃ©, constructeurs de systÃ©mes Ã  priori) et la France Ã©prise du fait positif et de libre examen; â la France rÃ©volutionnaire et romantique si lâon veut, celle qui met trÃ¨s haul lâindividu, qui ne veut pas quâun juste pÃ©risse, futce pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la vÃ©ritÃ© dans toutes ses parties aussi bien que dans une vue dâensemble.â¦Â Duclaux ne pouvait pas concevoir quâon prÃ©ferÃ¢t quelque chose Ã  la vÃ©ritÃ©. Mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honnÃªtes gens qui, mettant en balance la vie dâun homme et la raison dâÃtat, lui avouaient de quel poids lÃ©ger ils jugeaient une simple existence individuelle, pour innocente quâelle fÃ»t. Câetaient des classiques, des gens Ã  qui lâensemble seul importe.â La Vie de Ãmile Duclaux, par Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247â248.]²⁰

⁵ Vol. ii, pp. 641 ff.

⁶ [Mental things which are realities of course within the mental world.]

⁷ In an article criticising Pragmatism (as he conceives it) in the McGill University Quarterly published at Montreal, for May, 1904.

⁸ This is meant merely to exclude reality of an âunknowableâ sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given. It includes of course any amount of empirical reality independent of the knower. Pragmatism is thus âepiste-mologicallyâ realistic in its account.

From PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE

The Stream of Consciousness

The order of our study must be analytic. We are now prepared to begin the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself. Most books adopt the so-called synthetic method. Starting with âsimple ideas of sensation,â and regarding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build up the higher states of mind out of their âassociation,â âintegration,â or âfusion,â as houses are built by the agglutination of bricks. This has the didactic advantages which the synthetic method usually has. But it commits one beforehand to the very questionable theory that our higher states of consciousness are compounds of units; and instead of starting with what the reader directly knows, namely his total concrete states of mind, it starts with a set of supposed âsimple ideasâ with which he has no immediate acquaintance at all, and concerning whose alleged interactions he is much at the mercy of any plausible phrase. On every ground, then, the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer to follow the âanalyticâ method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life. The analytic method will discover in due time the elementary parts, if such exist, without danger of precipitate assumption. The reader will bear in mind that our own chapters on sensation have dealt mainly with the physiological conditions thereof. They were put first as a mere matter of convenience, because incoming currents come first. Psychologically they might better have come last. Pure sensations were described [earlier] as processes which in adult life are well-nigh unknown, and nothing was said which could for a moment lead the reader to suppose that they were the elements of composition of the higher states of mind.

The Fundamental Fact. â The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. âStates of mindâ succeedeach other in him. If we could say in English âit thinks,â as we say âit rainsâ or âit blows,â we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on.

Four Characters in Consciousness. â How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:

1) Every âstateâ tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing.

3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.

4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects â chooses from among them, in a word â all the while.

In considering these four points successively, we shall have to plunge in medias res as regards our nomenclature and use psychological terms which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book. But every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in a rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a painterâs first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear.

When I say every âstateâ or âthoughtâ is part of a personal consciousness, âpersonal consciousnessâ is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the next chapter; here a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room â this lecture-room, say â there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobodyâs thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular Iâs and youâs.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither 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 personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Every one will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of something corresponding to the term âpersonal mindâ is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not âfeelings and thoughts exist,â but âI thinkâ and âI feel.â No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to be connected are what we mean by personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth.

Consciousness is in constant change. I do not mean by this to say that no one state of mind has any duration â even if true, that would be hard to establish. What I wish to lay stress on is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states, it may be said, produced by combination of simpler ones; â do not the simpler ones follow a different law? Are not the sensations which we get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the same piano-key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is noproof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice.

What is got twice is the sameOBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our âideasâ of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect. We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances. The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably be considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The entire history of what is called Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensible qualities received apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our attention far more than the absolute quality of an impression is its ratio to whatever other impressions we may have at the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an object white. Helmholtz¹ calculates that the white marble painted in a picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly learned; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations. These make us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. And yet we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The birdâs song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, we suppose that there must correspond a change of equal amount in the consciousness which the brain subserves.

But if the assumption of âsimple sensationsâ recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common! â the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of common goods.

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mindâs changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two âideasâ are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it already impossible for us to follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the Herbartian² school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Germany among ourselves. No doubt it is often convenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas which âpass and turn again.â³ It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanently existing âIdeaâ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous. I can only define âcontinuousâ as that which is without breach, crack, or division. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out; or they would be breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what followed had no connection whatever with what went before. The proposition that consciousness feels continuous, means two things:

a. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

b. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first.

a. When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peterâs present instantly finds out Peterâs past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paulâs thought in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paulâs last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last states. He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paulâs. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peterâs present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past states appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as âchainâ or âtrainâ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A âriverâ or a âstreamâ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

b. But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive segments of the stream of thought. If the words âchainâ and âtrainâ had no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness or man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before.

âSubstantiveâ and âTransitiveâ States of Mind. â When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts. Like a birdâs life, it seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the âsubstantive parts,â and the places of flight the âtransitive parts,â of the stream of thought. It then appears that our thinking tends at all times towards some other substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can rest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to produce these transitive states of consciousness, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zenoâs⁴ treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thoughtâs stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream. Now the blunder has historically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any substantive feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection between the sensible things of the world, finding no named mental states mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that any such states exist; and many of them, like Hume, have gone on to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as well as in it. Simple substantive âideas,â sensations and their copies, juxtaposed like dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illusion, â such is the upshot of this view. The Intellectnalists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations extra mentem,⁵ but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have made the same admission that such feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The relations must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling, no mental âstate,â continuous and consubstantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations and other substantive conditions of consciousness are made. They must be known by something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an actus purus⁶ of Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something unutterably superior to any passing perishing fact of sensibility whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum naturÃ¢,⁷so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. Consider once again the analogy of the brain. We believe the brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change â the change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, although the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are instants during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen again; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long, whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself?

The object before the mind always has a âFringe.â There are other unnamed modifications of consciousness just as important as the transitive states, and just as cognitive as they. Examples will show what I mean.

Suppose three successive persons say to us: âWait!â âHark!â âLook!â Our consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the three cases. Probably no one will deny here the existence of a real conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. There are innumerable consciousness of want, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. Such feeling of want is tota cÅlo⁹ other than a want of feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in oneâs mind, striving to be filled out with words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some oneâs meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we âtwigâ it? Surely an altogether specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he utters it? Emphasis of this kind almost altogether depends on grammatical construction. If we read âno more,â we expect presently a âthanâ; if we read âhowever,â it is a âyet,â a âstill,â or a ânevertheless,â that we expect. And this foreboding of the coming verbal and grammatical scheme is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Gallon⁹ and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in the chapter on Imagination, made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow the equally ridiculous notion that whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in âstates of consciousness,â relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, â or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image by the name of âpsychic overtoneâ or âfringe.â

Cerebral Conditions of the âFringe.â â Nothing is easier than to symbolize these facts in terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the whence, the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment since vividly aroused: so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus, must be due to the waxing excitement of tracts or processes whose psychical correlative will a moment hence be the vividly present feature of our thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis underlying consciousness must at any moment be like this:

FIG. 52

Let the horizontal in Fig. 52 be the line of time, and let the three curves beginning at a, b, and c respectively stand for the neural processes correlated with the thoughts of those three letters. Each process occupies a certain time during which its intensity waxes, culminates, and wanes. The process for a has not yet died out, the process for c has already begun, when that for b is culminating. At the time-instant represented by the vertical line all three processes are present, in the intensities shown by the curve. Those before câs apex were more intense a moment ago; those after it will be more intense a moment hence. If I recite a, b, c, then, at the moment of uttering b, neither a nor c is out of my consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, âmix their dim lightsâ¹⁰ with the stronger b, because their processes are both awake in some degree.

It is just like âovertonesâ in music: they are not separately heard by the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment blend with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes which are at their culminating point.

The âTopicâ of the Thought. â If we then consider the cognitive function of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference between those that are mere âacquaintanceâ and those that are âknowledges-aboutâ is reducible almost entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a âfringeâ of unarticulated affinities about it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I must say a little of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the most interesting features of the subjective stream.

Thought may be equally rational in any sort of terms.In all our voluntary thinking there is someTOPIC or SUBJECT about which all the members of the thought revolve. Relation to this topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves âall right,â may be considered a thought that furthers the topic. Provided we only feel its object to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the topic also lies, that is sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.

Now we may think about our topic mainly in words, or we may think about it mainly in visual or other images, but this need make no difference as regards the furtherance of our knowledge of the topic. If we only feel in the terms, whatever they be, a fringe of affinity with each other and with the topic, and if we are conscious of approaching a conclusion, we feel that our thought is rational and right. The words in every language have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile, and other ideas. The most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought.

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the later words that come are French; we hardly ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely operating mechanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically belong together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe that can accompany them, if âthoughtâ at all. Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as ârat-trapâ or âplumberâs bill,â in a philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates as it were, we receive a shock from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the terms of thought.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporterâs flourishes give illustrations of this. âThe birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant,â is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers.

We see, then, that it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in what quality of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of relation are everything, and the terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram 186-01may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid; others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighborâs mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

The last peculiarity to which attention in to be drawn in this first rough description of thoughtâs stream is that â

Consciousness is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of course patent examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not ordinarily called by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the different accent which we place on different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tÃ³ck, tick-tÃ³ck, tick-tÃ³ck. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, now and then, in our minds is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the things before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on.

To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselves, as we saw on pp. 10â12, but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade.

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of the organâs termination, Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of notice and suppresses all the rest. We notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things which happen practically or Ã¦sthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual name, as my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each separate thing, what happens? The mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modified by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top is named square, after but one of an infinite number of retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles; but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness into the tableâs essence, for Ã¦sthetic reasons of my own. In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular to its centre â all its other sensations are signs of this sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by. The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom; under other circumstances it gives us other color-sensations which are but signs of this â we then see it looks pinker or bluer than it really is. The reader knows no object which he does not represent to himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size, at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But all these essential characteristics, which together form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest.

Next, in a world of objects thus individualized by our mindâs selective industry, what is called our âexperienceâ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention. A thing may be present to a man a hundred times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions â costumes and colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will be non-existent; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door- and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public halls, and naught besides; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to be able to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby.

If now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in the given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element â âreasonâ if the emergency be theoretical, âmeansâ if it be practical â transfixed upon it.

If now we pass to the Ã¦sthetic department, our law is still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, âconvergence of characters,â as M. Taine¹¹ calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a manâs entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? â his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become.

Taking human experience in a general way, the choosings of different men are to a great extent the same. The race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name; and among the noticed parts we select in much the same way for accentuation and preference, or subordination and dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are âmeâ and ânot-meâ respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighborâs me as in his own. The neighborâs me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass against which his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led.

From THE WILL TO BELIEVE
AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY

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Preface

AT MOST OF OUR AMERICAN COLLEGES there are Clubs formed by the students devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar to address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I have from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to me that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.

Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say âempiricism,â because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say âradical,â because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. PrimÃ¢ facie the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unity than the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absolute unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff.¹ âEver not quiteâ must be the rationalistic philosopherâs last confession concerning it. After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various âpoints of viewâ which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to the other. The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something â âcall it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you willâ â is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. Something is always mere fact and givenness; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case. âReason,â as a gifted writer says, âis but one item in the mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild, â game-flavored as a hawkâs wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraverâs lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true, â ever not quite.â¹

This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed. He who takes for his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is what I call a radical empiricist. For him the crudity of experience remains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt either to âovercomeâ or to reinterpret in monistic form.

Many of my professionally trained confrÃ¨res will smile at the irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in point of technical form. But they should be taken as illustrations of the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its validity. That admits meanwhile of being argued in as technical a shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a share of that work. Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.

The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the legitimacy of religious faith. To some rationalizing readers such advocacy will seem a sad misuse of oneâs professional position. Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that direction. I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is criticism and caution, not faith. Its cardinal weakness is to let belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the conception has instinctive liking at its back. I admit, then, that were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessness may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to them. What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility, â such courage as the Nelsons³ and Washingtons⁴ never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize disaster in case they met defeat. I do not think that any one can accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.

After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all practically agree? In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in the market-place. But it is just on this matter of the market-place that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn. If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out. The truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, âworksâ best; and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses. Religious history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has lapsed from the minds of men. Some articles of faith, however, have maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more vitality to-day than ever before; it is for the âscience of religionsâ to tell us just which hypotheses these are. Meanwhile the freest competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed. They ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in quietly with friends. They ought to live in publicity, vying with each other; and it seems to me that (the regime of tolerance once granted, and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the religious world of his time. Those faiths will best stand the test which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of their own. He should welcome therefore every species of religious agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some religious hypothesis may be true. Of course there are plenty of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of court. Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a nuisance in their eyes. With all such scientists, as well as with their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope that my book may do something to persuade the readerof their crudity, and range him on my side. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm. The most interesting and valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs. The same is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.Â â¦

¹ B. P. Blood² : The Flaw in Supremacy, Published by the Author, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.

The Will to Believe¹

IN THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED Life by Leslie Stephen¹ of his brother, Fitz-James,² there is an account of a school to which the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this wise: âGurney, what is the difference between justification and sanctification? â Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!â etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you, â I mean an essay in justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. âThe Will to Believe,â accordingly, is the title of my paper.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some technical distinctions that will help us in the end.

I

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, â it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdiâs followers), the hypothesis is among the mindâs possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be â 1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: âBe a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,â it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: âBe an agnostic or be a Christian,â it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

2. Next, if I say to you: âChoose between going out with your umbrella or without it,â I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, âEither love me or hate me,â âEither call my theory true or call it false,â your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, âEither accept this truth or go without it,â I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen³ and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well in mind.

II.

The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincolnâs⁴ existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClureâs Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up, â matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.

In Pascalâs⁵ Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature as Pascalâs wager. In it he tries to force us into Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the stakes in a game of chance. Translated freely his words are these: You must either believe or not believe that God is â which will you do? Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either heads or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you should stake all you have on heads, or Godâs existence: if you win in such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at all. If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples, â Cela vous fera croire et vous abÃªtira.⁶ Why should you not? At bottom, what have you to lose?

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps. Surely Pascalâs own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others, a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy water adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faithâs reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward. It is evident that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascalâs logic, invoked for them specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us, saying, âI am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence. You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be cut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!â His logic would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in us to any degree.

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness, â then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their mouths? The whole system of loyalties which grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.

Â 

It fortifies my soul to know

That, though I perish. Truth is so â

sings Clough,⁷ while Huxley exclaims: âMy only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word âpretendâ is surely here redundant], they will not have reached the lowest depth of immorality.â And that delicious enfant terrible Clifford⁹ writes: âBelief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer.â¦Â Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.â¦Â If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure is a stolen one.â¦Â It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town.â¦Â It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.â

III.

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice. Freewill and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth of the facts.

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is unable to bring to life again. But what has made them dead for us is for the most part a previous action of our willing nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say âwilling nature,â I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from, â I mean all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives the name of âauthorityâ to all those influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for âthe doctrine of the immortal Monroe,⁹ all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one elseâs faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another, â we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.²

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Cliffordâs cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman¹⁰ on the contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few âscientistsâ even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. But if this very man had been shown something which as a scientist he might do with telepathy, he might not only have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This very law which the logicians would impose upon us â if I may give the name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature here â is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use.

Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction. Pascalâs argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and holy water complete. The state of things is evidently far from simple; and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the only things that really do produce our creeds.

IV.

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, âDo not decide, but leave the question open,â is itself a passional decision, â just like deciding yes or no, â and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.

V.

It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on âdogmaticâ ground, â ground, I mean, which leaves systematic philosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate that there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point. But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees of dogmatism in their lives.

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. âOther philosophies are collections of opinions, mostly false; my philosophy gives standing-ground forever,â â who does not recognize in this the key-note of every system worthy of the name? A system, to be a system at all, must come as a closed system, reversible in this or that detail, perchance, but in its essential features never.

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of âobjective evidence.â If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect irresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by certain propositions is the ad Ã¦quatio intellectÃ»s nostri cum rÃª. ¹¹ The certitude it brings involves an aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum assensum ¹² on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the subject a quietem in cognitione,¹³ when once the object is mentally received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole transaction nothing operates but the entitas ipsa ¹⁴ of the object and the entitas ipsa of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to talk in Latin, â indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such âinsufficient evidence,â insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start.

VI.

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall we espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them â I absolutely do not care which â as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, â the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophics are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to our libraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as ZÃ¶llner¹⁵ and Charles II. Hinton,¹⁶ and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium,¹⁷ the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test, â Descartes, for instance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid¹⁹ with his âcommon-sense;â and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other, â are standards which, in turn, have been used. The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grensbegriff, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life. To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say that when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically oneâs conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been claimed! The world is rational through and through, â its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God, â a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known, â the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists, â obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one, â there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes, â there is an absolute first cause; an eternal necessity, â a freedom; a purpose, â no purpose; a primal One, â a primal Many; a universal continuity, â an essential discontinuity in things; an infinity, â no infinity. There is this, â there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.

VII.

One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done. There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion, â ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error, â these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood 5, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.

Believe truth! Shun error! â these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end, coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, âBetter go without belief forever than believe a lie!â merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Cliffordâs exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

VIII.

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice.

I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and lend an inhospitable car. Two first steps of passion you have indeed had to admit as necessary, â we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take no further passional step.

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a judgeâs duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over; the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the RÃ¶ntgen¹⁹ says, whether we believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand.

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and Weismann 20 now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results; he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.³ Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than technical rules. âLe cÅur a ses raisons,â as Pascal says, âque la raison ne connait pas;â²² and however indifferent to all but the bare rules of the game the empire, the abstract intellect, may be, the concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually, each one of them, in love with some pet âlive hypothesisâ of his own. Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific suspicion if they did.

IX.

Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction bring man all sorts of other goods which manâs heart in turn declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the headâs play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naÃ¯vetÃ© and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which (as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one man and another. Do you like me or not? â for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your likingâs existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum,²³ ten to one your liking never comes. How many womenâs hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! he will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truthâs existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the âlowest kind of immoralityâ into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

X.

In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.

But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religions differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. âPerfection is eternal,â â this phrase of Charles SecrÃ©tan²⁴ seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religions hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the âsaving remnantâ alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical 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 positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, 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, â that is your faith-vetoerâs exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach scepticism to us as a duty until âsufficient evidenceâ for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, 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. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? 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 scientistâs 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 forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side, â that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is no longer a more It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no oneâs word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn, â so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the godsâ acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be.

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to âbelieve what we willâ you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, âFaith is when you believe something that you know ainât true.â I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concrete, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait â acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true⁴ â till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough, â this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will, â I hope you do not think that I am denying that, â but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one anotherâs mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricismâs glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.

I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation from him. âWhat do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? â¦ These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them.â¦Â In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark.â¦Â If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? âBe strong and of a good courage.â Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.â¦Â If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.â⁵

¹ An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896.

² Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgsonâs Time and Space, London, 1865.

³ Compare Wilfrid Wardâs²¹ Essay, âThe Wish to Believe,â in his Witnesses to the Unseen, Macmillan & Co., 1893.

⁴ Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.

⁵ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; p. 353, 2d edition. London, 1874.

Is Life Worth Living?¹

WHEN MR. MALLOCKâS 1 book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that âit depends on the liverâ had great currency In the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give tonight cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeareâs prologues, â

I come no more to make you laugh; things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, â²

must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find.

I.

With many men the question of lifeâs worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitmanâs works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitmanâs veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling: â

To breathe the air, how delicious!

To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! â¦

To be this incredible God I am! â¦

O amazement of things, even the least particle!

O spirituality of things!

I too carol the Sun, usherâd or at noon, or as now, setting;

I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth.â¦Â 

I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,

I sing the endless finales of things,

I say Nature continues â glory continues.

I praise with electric voice,

For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,

And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.³

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell: â

How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw âMaman,â and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.⁴

If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. In what is called âcircular insanity,â phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call âthe concoction of the humors.â In the words of the newspaper joke, âit depends on the liver.â Rousseauâs ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitmanâs was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his, â the exquisite Leopardi,⁵ for example; or our own contemporary, James Thomson,⁶ in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to quote its words, â they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends thus: â

âO Brothers of sad lives/ they are so brief;

A few short years must bring us all relief:

Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?

But if you would not this poor life fulfil,

Lo, you are free to end it when you will,

Without the fear of waking after death.â â

The organ-like vibrations of his voice

Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;

The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice

Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:

Our shadowy congregation rested still,

As brooding on that âEnd it when you will.â

Our shadowy congregation rested still,

As musing on that message we had heard,

And brooding on that âEnd it when you will,â

Perchance awaiting yet some other word;

When keen as lightning through a muffled sky

Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry: â

âThe man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth;

We have no personal life beyond the grave;

There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:

Can I find here the comfort which I crave?

âIn all eternity I had one chance,

One few yearsâ term of gracious human life, â

The splendors of the Intellectâs advance,

The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;

âThe social pleasures with their genial wit;

The fascination of the worlds of art;

The glories of the worlds of Nature lit

By large imaginationâs glowing heart;

âThe rapture of mere being, full of health;

The careless childhood and the ardent youth;

The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,

The reverend age serene with lifeâs long truth:

âAll the sublime prerogatives of Man;

The storied memories of the times of old,

The patient tracking of the worldâs great plan

Through sequences and changes myriadfold.

âThis chance was never offered me before;

For me the infinite past is blank and dumb;

This chance recurreth never, nevermore;

Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.

âAnd this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,

A mockery, a delusion; and my breath

Of noble human life upon this earth

So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

âMy wine of life is poison mixed with gall,

My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,

I worse than lose the years which are my all:

What can console me for the loss supreme?

âSpeak not of comfort where no comfort is,

Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?

Our lifeâs a cheat, our death a black abyss:

Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair.â

This vehement voice came from the northern aisle,

Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;

And none gave answer for a certain while,

For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;

At last the pulpit speaker simply said,

With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head, â

âMy Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:

This life holds nothing good for us,

But it ends soon and nevermore can be;

And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,

And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:

I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.â

âIt ends soon, and never more can be,â âLo, you are free to end it when you will,â â these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomsonâs pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare, â an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates. We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must âponder these thingsâ also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity, â nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.

âIf suddenly,â says Mr. Ruskin, âin the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest, â would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sickbed, â by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery.â⁷

II.

To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the assurance, âYou may end it when you will.â What reasons can we plead that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides, have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, âThou shalt not.â God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can we find nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth living? There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal. Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse, reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitÃ¦ ⁹ which is peculiar to reflecting men. Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy and Weltschmerz ⁹ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.

Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith. So far as my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.

Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise of religious trust and fancy. There are, as is well known, persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to their heartâs content in prospects of immortality; and there are others who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem real to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them, moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call âhard facts,â which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total soul of things. But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and a better world.

That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. What philosophers call ânatural theologyâ has been one way of appeasing this craving; that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its facts âhardâ; suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically, â and what result can there be but inner discord and contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or, supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make more clear.

III.

Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius,¹⁰ âO Universe! what thou wishest I wish.â Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar nnheimlichkeit, or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree, â in our clinging, on the one hand, to the demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spiritâs adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us, and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as revealed by the visible worldâs course, that this particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle¹¹ expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal âSartor Resartusâ entitled âThe Everlasting No.â âI lived,â writes poor TeufelsdrÃ¶ckh, âin a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.â

This is the first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey. It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the mere necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufels-drÃ¶ckh himself could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this worldâs experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them piecemeal, with no suspicion of any whole expressing itself in them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of âI donât care,â is for this worldâs ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no! something deep down in TeufelsdrÃ¶ckh and in the rest of us tells us that there is a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to, carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a âMoral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.â But those times are past; and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, â a moral multi-verse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.

I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain cars) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists. Such rebellion essentially is that which in the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe: â

ââWherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! â¦ Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!â And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever.â¦

Â 

âThus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said: âBehold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;â to which my whole Me now made answer: âI am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!â From that hour,â Teufelsdrockh-Carlyle adds, âI began to be a man.â

And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes: â

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?

I think myself; yet I would rather be

My miserable self than He, than He

Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou

From whom it had its being, God and Lord!

Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,

Malignant and implacable! I vow

That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

For all the temples to Thy glory built,

Would I assume the ignominious guilt

Of having made such men in such a world.

We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism, â him who made the garden and the serpent, and pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology; but, both alike, they assure us that to have got rid of the sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to worry about their derivation from the âone and only Power.â

Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers to his question about the worth of life. There are in most men instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The certainty that you now may step out of life whenever you please, and that to do so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.

This little life is all we must endure;

The graveâs most holy peace is ever sure, â

says Thomson; adding, âI ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me,â Meanwhile we can always stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if only to see what to-morrowâs newspaper will contain, or what the next postman will bring.

But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable, even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no âSubstanceâ or âSpiritâ is behind them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomonâs¹² glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparteâs¹³ troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French âmilliardsâ were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in the shape in which we see it there to-day. The history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses,¹⁴ of whom I lately have been reading, as examples of what strong men will endure. In 1485 a papal bull of Innocent VIII¹⁵ enjoined their extermination. It absolved those who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, released them from any oath, legitimized their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.

âThere is no town in Piedmont,â says a Vaudois writer,¹⁶ âwhere some of our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Memo; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena: Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at Fenile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces; â¦ Sara Rostignol was slit open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from San Giovanni to LaTorre.â²

Und dergleichen mehr! ¹⁷ In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and the whole Vandois people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy²⁰ ordered the three thousand that remained to give up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange²¹ and led by one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of them returned to conquer their old homes again. They fought their way to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met every force sent against them; until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV,²² Restored them to comparative freedom, â since which time they have increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.

What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us with resolution against our petty powers of darkness, â machine politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and oneâs heel set on the tyrantâs throat. To the suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral nature, you can appeal â and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there â to wait and see his part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these circumstances, is not the sophistical âresignationâ which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deityâs hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with evil in the abstract and at large. The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your reflective, would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the universe in a more solemn light. âDoes not,â as a young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, âthe acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?â²³ Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to religion and its more positive gifts. A poor halfway stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts which are our natureâs best equipment, and to which religion herself must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.

IV.

And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this worldâs experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A manâs religious faith (whatever more special items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. In the more developed religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary cars) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without end.

Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science opposes to our act.

There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called âscienceâ is the idol. Fondness for the word âscientistâ is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it âunscientific.â It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues, â that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of scienceâs career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human nospecies, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, â that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no need. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing.

And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know: we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwinâs âaccidental variations.â But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The boil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic âthou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidenceâ is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.

Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by âtrustingâ? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal, â this bare assurance is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life â the suicidal mood â will then set in.

And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a foolâs paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, â events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dogâs life. Or take another case which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on his back on the board there he may be performing a function incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken.

Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dogâs life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But âmay be! may be!â one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; âwhat use can a scientific life have for maybes?â Well, I reply, the âscientificâ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, â both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act.

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have in-deed made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of â

Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith

As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength

Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas. ²⁴

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a featherâs weight; a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n-o-t. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.

Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen worldâs goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?

Once more it is a case of maybe; and once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight, â as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben 25 (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earthâs bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments â the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith â sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, âas the essence of courage is to stake oneâs life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists.â²⁶

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The âscientific proof â that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV²⁷ greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained; âHang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.â

¹ An Address to the Harvard Young Menâs Christian Association. Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.

2 Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol.¹⁸ Compare A. Berard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.¹⁹

The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life¹

THE MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the raceâs moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that âsayâ shall be.

First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the world resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. The subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of getting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor in ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked; it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily makes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. At the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were he interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would pro tanto ¹ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate for some limited element of the case.

There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let them be called respectively the psychological question, the metaphysical question, and the casuistic question. The psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words âgood,â âill,â and âobligationâ are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.

I.

The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to his own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called âconscienceâ must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that âapriotismâ is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Instuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it all within the limits of this paper. I will therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this, â that the Benthams,² the Mills, and the Bains³ have done a lasting service in taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror of high places, the tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics, â no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose original features arose with no reference to the perception of such discords and harmonies as these.

Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor Richardâs Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common-sense are fantastic and over-strained. The sense for abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as queru-lousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc., â are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and that is all that we can say. âExperienceâ of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar? If a man has shot his wifeâs paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourierâs⁴ and Bellamyâs⁵ and Morrisâs⁶ Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice? â I refer to TolstoÃ¯⁷ with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr. Heidenhainâs Process),⁹ to M. Guyau⁹ with his radical condemnation of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the âlaws of associationâ as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the âetiquette to be observed during engagementâ as are printed in manuals of social form.

No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last chapter of a recent work² I have sought to prove in a general way the existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that schoolâs other characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.

The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by the words âobligation,â âgood,â and âill.â

II.

First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad, â good or bad positively, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopherâs private interests? But we must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient world. How can one physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be âbetterâ than another? Betterness is not a physical relation. In its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simply are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic ânature of thingsâ can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that beingâs consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things have no moral character at all.

In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinkerâs judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium be may settle, though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world.

If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.

One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each otherâs attitude about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinkerâs opinion is more correct than the otherâs, or that either has the trurer moral sense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are supposed to be indifferent to each otherâs thoughts and acts. Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics conceived of, â in which individual minds are the measures of all things, and in which no one âobjectiveâ truth, but only a multitude of âsubjectiveâ opinions, can be found.

But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up. Among the various ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more truth or authority; and to these the others ought to yield, so that system and subordination may reign. Here in the word âoughtâ the notion of obligation comes emphatically into view, and the next thing in order must be to make its meaning clear.

Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that nothing can be good or right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be explained by any abstract moral ânature of thingsâ existing antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals. Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better and worse must be realized in order to be real. If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in some oneâs actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal light. Its esse is percipit, ¹⁰ like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it obtains. The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated, must trace the ought itself to the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. But now what particular consciousness in the universe can enjoy this prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?

If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter. The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should conform. But still the theoretic question would remain, What is the ground of the obligation, even here?

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves, â we follow our usual habit, and imagine a sort of de jure relation, which antedates and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should conform our thoughts to Godâs thoughts, even though he made no claim to that effect, and though we preferred de facto to go on thinking for ourselves.

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true âin themselves,â is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic-ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due.

I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have called the superstitious view, to realize that every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think that something which we call the âvalidityâ of the claim is what gives to it its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claimâs mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness, additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself, exist? Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands.

If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say that âthe universeâ requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action, whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness, then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are the greatest in amount. But it is even then not abstractly right that we should respect them. It is only concretely right, â or right after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made. Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this queer world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an Ã  priori ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this Ã  priori blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal? But the only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the âeverlasting ruby vaultsâ of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which no thought of an âidealâ backing can render more complete; while if, on the other hand the heartâs response is withheld, the stubborn phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims which the universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can gloze over or dispel. An ineffective a priori order is as impotent a thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as hard a thing to explain.

We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we have learned what the words âgood,â âbad,â and âobligationâ severally mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.

Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features. Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rockâs inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations, claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments; compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.

We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in you blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. âThe religion of humanityâ affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can gratify the philosopherâs demand as well as the other is a different question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.

III.

The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the casuistic question. Here we are, in a world where the existence of a divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about which no general consensus obtains. It is hardly necessary to present a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known. The wars of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of different individuals pursuing the same un-shareable material or social prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances, temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc., â all form a maze of apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadneâs thread to lead one out. Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher, adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion (with which if he were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists that over all these individual opinions there is a system of truth which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.

We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports. In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is a truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gained the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws, or an abstract âmoral reason,â but can only exist in act, or in the shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. There is, however, no visible thinker invested with authority. Shall we then simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones? No; for if we are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are fairly to be judged. But how then can we as philosophers ever find a test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with us, on which we simply pin our faith?

The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we revolve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopher obliges him to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must be incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and prepossessions are implied?

One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been taken by the more serious ethical schools. If the heap of things demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed, if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the casuistic problem would be solved. If it were found that all goods quÃ  goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness, and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be the good upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and universal good that the philosopher seeks. Even his own private ideals would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place among the rest.

Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of the ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to promote the survival of the human species on this planet, â are so many tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.

No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however, given general satisfaction. Some are obviously not universally present in all cases, â e. g., the character of harming no one, or that of following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions, and serve not as examples of a universal law. Other characters, such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague. Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help: a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves. The best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be the capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses that never aim at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most universal principle, â that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There is really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single law. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart from the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be so used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.

A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it, will still further show us the philosopherâs perplexities. As a purely theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as such are primÃ  facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, âof n-dimensions,â to include all the acts and experiences incompatible with one another here below, which would then go on in conjunction, â such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create universes Ã  priori, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? â he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? â both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? â he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopherâs demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal.

Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopherâs task by the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, and rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of the truth. The poet Heine¹¹ is said to have written âBunsenâ¹² in the place of âGottâ in his copy of that authorâs work entitled âGod in History,â so as to make it read âBunsen in der Geschichte.â Now, with no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such a Bunsen in der Geschlchte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings? The very best of men must not only be insensible, but be ludicrously and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fighting free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human being, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus¹³ think of Calvin¹⁴ and of Paley¹⁵ think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must think, â and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on which to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom¹⁶ was a reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the light of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to survive, â and the notion really turns one pale. All oneâs slumbering revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist wielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than an order based on any closet-philosopherâs rule, even though he were the most enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopher is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the parties to the fray.

What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?

But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of one particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy (since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole, in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat there must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the more inclusive side, â of the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished partyâs interests lay. The course of history is nothing but the story of menâs struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands, â that and that only is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints; and though some oneâs ideals are unquestionably the worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for himself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction to the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases of conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs of the community on top.

And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without producing others louder still. âRules are made for man, not man for rules,â â that one sentence is enough to immortalize Greenâs Prolegomena to Ethics. And although a man always risks much when he breaks away from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pent in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by which they may get free. See the abuses which the institution of private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed and unnamable sorrows which the tyranny on the whole so beneficent, of the marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the unwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our rÃ©gime of so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which could flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humble and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and everlastingly the problem how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, â these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world. These experiments are to be judged, not Ã  priori, but by actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry or how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions can possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or what can any superficial theoristâs judgment be worth, in a world where every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already provided in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can only follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.

IV.

All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes, ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day. The presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at originality in ethics as in physics. Every now and then, however, some one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old âlaws of natureâ by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept.

On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywhere the ethical philosopher must wait on facts. The thinkers who create the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he knows not how; and the question as to which of two conflicting ideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered by him only through the aid of the experience of other men. I said some time ago, in treating of the âfirstâ question, that the intuitional moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological facts. They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, by mixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions and unconditional âthou shalt nots,â changes a growing, elastic, and continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones. In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no non-moral goods; and the highest ethical life â however few may be called to bear its burdens â consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men what the question always is, â not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but of the two total universes with which these goods respectively belong. He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. But which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the wounded will soon inform him of the fact. In all this the philosopher is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voiceof complaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic, â I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they never can be final, except in their abstractest and vaguest features; and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and would-be âscientificâ form.

V.

The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs. I said some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human world. They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the thinker had various ideals which took hold of him in turn. His self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle and easily put aside. We call the tyrannical demands imperatives. If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it. The good which we have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets. Obligation can thus exist inside a single thinkerâs consciousness; and perfect peace can abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top. It is the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals. Nothing shall avail when weighed in the balance against them. They call out all the mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.

The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. The capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man, but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up. It needs the wilder passions in arouse it, the big fears, loves, and indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom. Strong relief is a necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are brought down and all the valleys are exalted is no congenial place for its habitation. This is why in a solitary thinker this mood might slumber on forever without waking. His various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will. This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up. Many of us, indeed, â like Sir James Stephen in those eloquent âEssays by a Barrister,â â would openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal of the religion of humanity. We do not love these men of the future keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the donât-care mood. No need of agonizing ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at present.

When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shattering, tragically challenging note of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugoâs alpine eagle âqui parle au prÃ©cipice et que le gouffre entend,â¹⁷ and the strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with which it leaps to answer to the greater. All through history, in the periodical conflicts of puritanism with the donât-care temper, we see the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high, and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towards concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously face tragedy for an infinite demanderâs sake. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling lifeâs evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battle-field of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall.

It would seem, too, â and this is my final conclusion, â that the stable and systematic moral universe for which the ethical philosopher asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he now exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach.³ In the interests of our own ideal of systematically unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious cause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the strenuous mood. But this is what it does in all men, even those who have no interest in philosophy. The ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on no essentially different level from the common man. âSee, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore, choose life that thou and thy seed may live,â¹⁹ â when this challenge comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no professorâs lectures and no array of books can save us. The solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their interior characters, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea; but the word is very high unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

¹ An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.

² The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co., 1890.

³ All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of my colleague. Professor Josiah Royce: The Religions Aspect of Philosophy. Boston, 1885.

From TALKS TO TEACHERS ON
PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS ON
SOME OF LIFEâ€™S IDEALS

II

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

OUR JUDGMENTS concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on thefeelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other personsâ conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other! â we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said; âFor an eye medicine,â â that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.

The spectatorâs judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, where-ever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily: â

Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of âcoves,â as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes â an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.

The forest had been destroyed; and what had âimprovedâ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Natureâs beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.

Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for oneâs old age and for oneâs children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and oneâs bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, âWhat sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?â âAll of us,â he replied. âWhy, we ainât happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.â I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pÃ¦an of duty, struggle, and success.

I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is âimportanceâ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson¹ has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.

âToward the end of September,â Stevenson writes, âwhen school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bullâs-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bulls-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bulls-eyes, nor did we over play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain storybooks in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bullâs-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

âWhen two of these asses met, there would be an anxious âHave you got your lantern?â and a gratified âYes!â That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them, â for the cabin was usually locked, â or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bulls-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some specimens! â¦ But the talk was but a condiment, and those gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public, â a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your foolâs heart, to know you had a bullâs-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

âIt is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of manâs imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bullâs-eye at his belt.

â¦ âThere is one fable that touches very near the quick of life, â the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, â seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

â¦ âSay that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

âFor, to repeat, the ground of a manâs joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.â¦Â It has so little bond with externals â¦ that it may even touch them not, and the manâs true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.â¦ In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

âFor to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.â¦Â In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.â¹

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. âTo miss the joy is to miss all.â Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interest fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce: â

âWhat, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, âA pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.â He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.â¦Â So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captorâs power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if though hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.â²

This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.² The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all oneâs later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. I take this passage from âObermann,â a French novel that had some vogue in its day: âParis, March 7. â It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.â¦Â I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made.â³

Wordsworth and Shelley⁴ are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance, â a âlonely cheer.â

To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel

Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.⁴

âAuthentic tidings of invisible things!â⁵ Just what this hidden presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart satisfying authority: â

Magnificent

The morning rose, in memorable pomp,

Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front

The sea lay laughing at a distance; near

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,

Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;

And in the meadows and the lower grounds

Was all the sweetness of a common dawn, â

Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,

And laborers going forth to till the fields.

Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,

A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,

In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.⁵

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.

Richard Jefferies⁶ has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a certain hill-top he says: â

âI was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight.â¦Â With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean, â in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, â with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.â¦Â The great sun, burning with light, the strong earth, â dear earth, â the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed.â¦Â The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away.â¦Â Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I reclined there!â⁶

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of lifeâs meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hardworking conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a wordly success.

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being.

His verses are but ejaculations â things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb oneâs mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels: â

Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high.

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, neither time or place â distance avails not.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refreshâd;

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.

I too many and many a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high;

I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls â I saw them high in the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,

I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

Saw the white seals of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening;

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;

On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high â¦ into the night,

Casting their flicker of black â¦ into the clefts of streets.

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.⁷

And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by lifeâs heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend: â

âNEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868.

âDear Pete, â It is splendid here this forenoon â bright and cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two squares from where I live.â¦Â Shall I tell you about [my life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama â shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else â in fact a perfect stream of people â men too dressed in high style, and plenty of foreigners â and then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes.â⁸

Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less, â Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does not thus âsoar away into the colors of the sunsetâ as did Whitmanâs, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. âHech! it is a sad sight!â says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splender of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum,⁷ that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anÃ¦sthesia, the feeling of âawful inner emptinessâ⁹ from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the worldâs presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing oneâs sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cellini,⁹ after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: âAll these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of God. And then I said to myself, âOh, how much more happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!ââ⁹

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is TolstoÃ¯. They throb all through his novels. In his âWar and Peace,â the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of lifeâs values. âHere only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.â¦Â Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. When at day-break, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here TolstoÃ¯âs description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays, â his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver.â¦Â He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance.â¦Â When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. âAll that is mine,â he thought. âAll that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!â So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades.â¹⁰

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. âCrossing a bare common,â says Emerson, âin snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.â¹⁰

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to lifeâs more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with oneâs body, grows and grows. The savages and, children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. âAh! my brother,â said a chieftain to his white guest, âthou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. They people, â¦ when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours, â the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.â¹¹

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who can write, â Mr. W. H. Hudson,11 in his volume, âIdle Days in Patagonin.â

âI spent the greater part of one winter,â says this admirable author, âat a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea.

â¦ âIt was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns.â¦Â Not ones nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in going, â no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, â the shooting was all left behind in the valley.â¦Â Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.â¦Â At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these rainbles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.

âIt was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of suspense and watch fulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self, â to thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].

âI had undoubtedly gone back; and that state of intense watch-fullness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him.â¹²

For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.

And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off; neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.

¹ âThe Lantern-bearers,â in the volume entitled Across the Plains, Abridged in the quotation.

²The Religions Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157â162 (abridged).

³De SÃ©nancour:³ Obermann, Lettre XXX.

⁴The Prelude, Book III.

⁵The Prelude, Book IV.

⁶Op. cit., Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.

⁷ âCrossing Brooklyn Ferryâ (abridged).

⁸Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.

⁹Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.

¹⁰La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. III, pp. 268, 278, 316.

¹¹ Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. II. p. 240.

¹²Op. cit., pp. 210â222 (abridged).

III

What Makes a Life Significant

IN MY PREVIOUS TALK, âOn a Certain Blindness,â I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and mean ings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most tremendous prac tical importance. I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and san guinary mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jillâs existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in de fect, being victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jillâs mag ical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jillâs palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic in terest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jackâs way of taking it â so importantly â is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.

If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with all enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other peopleâs lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently driven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the truth?

For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.

A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assem bly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels oneâs self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderli ness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Hero you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music â a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium af fords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the sev eral sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spellbound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear,

And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: âOut! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre¹ to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, â I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity.â

Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the realization â on a small, sample scale of course â of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I could.

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, â the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle go ing on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things be come ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turn ing its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still â this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the placeâs historical mu seum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.

Such absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauquaâs flatness and lack of zest.

But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teacherâs conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancerâs or the poetâs pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale. Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn.² Even now, in our own country, correct ness, fairness, and compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.¹

With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the la boring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never falls. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain.

As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our life.

Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote; â and yet at bottom, when you came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.

If any of you have been readers of TolstoÃ¯, you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious natural man.

Where now is our TolstoÃ¯, I said, to bring the truth of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched culture â as it calls itself â is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide-bound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells⁴ or a Kipling⁵ be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborerâs existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?

And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious in sight into life. In Godâs eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to pe culiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in particular individuals, they must be long to the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show.

Thus are menâs lives levelled up as well as levelled down, â levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to arise â the Buddha,⁶ the Christ,⁷ or some Saint Francis,⁹ some Rousseau or Tolstoiâ â to redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent in crease.

This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal rem-iniscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and com-pletely, and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal way.

TolstoÃ¯âs levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled âMy Confession,â which led the way to his more specifically religious works. In his masterpiece âWar and Peace,â â assuredly the greatest of human novels, â the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named KarataÃ¯eff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the prin cipal character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by TolstoÃ¯ to let God into the world again for the reader. Poor little KarataÃ¯eff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.

âThe more,â writes TolstoÃ¯ in the work âMy Confession,â âthe more I examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibility of life.â¦Â Contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.â¦Â The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tran quility, and oftener than not with joy.â¦Â There are enormous mul titudes of them happy with the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life. Those who under stand lifeâs meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me â more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a now significance. I understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted it.â²

In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind.

âWhat a wonderful thing.â he writes,³ âis this Man! How surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives, â who should have blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? â¦ [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; â¦ in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, â¦ often repaying the worldâs scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple; â¦ everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the ensign of manâs ineffectual goodness, â ah! if I could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls.â

All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our Tolstoiâs and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you re member the Irishman who, when asked, âIs not one man as good as another?â replied, âYes; and a great deal better, too!â Similarly (it seems to me) does TolstoÃ¯ overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he does. Grant that at Chautanqun there was little moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? Is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing water, just to keep himself alive? TolstoÃ¯âs philosophy, deeply enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to be a cunning fraud.

A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys and virtues are the essential part of lifeâs business, but it is sure that some positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russiaâs court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be calculated) of his inner virtue and his outer place, â neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differ ences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They must be significant elements of the world as well.

Just test TolstoÃ¯âs deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff,⁹ after working as an unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to belong: â

âThe salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell to the highest bidder our more muscular strength for so many hours each day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a âreserve price.â We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our labor.

âOur employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take our places.

âWe are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see, â that we have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our em ployer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong in stinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end.

âAnd being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.

âAll this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren, hopeless lives.â

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures? Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit, â read the records of mission ary devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then, taken by itself, â no, nor all of them together, â that make such a life undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of Godâs creatures. Quite possibly there were some suc h persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.

If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? It can only have been this, â that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some in ner ideal, while their comrades were not actuated by anything wor thy of that name. These ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are there. In Mr. Wyckoffâs own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic in sight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or there might have been an apostle like TolstoÃ¯ himself, or his compatriot Bondareff,¹⁰ in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks¹¹ has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?

âA rugged, barren land,â says Phillips Brooks, âis poverty to live in, â a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral geology of the world. See how the hard ribs â¦ stand out strong and solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.â¦Â Poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize each otherâs human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God.â¦Â I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.â¦Â But I am sure that the poor manâs dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long.â⁴

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborerâs life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured â for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.

You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.

But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite account of such a word?

To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be some thing intellectually conceived, something of which we are not un conscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal, â novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sudden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sudden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men. TolstoÃ¯ would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off the track of truth.

But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous. The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of the laboring manâs virtues are called into action on his part, â no courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the spectatorâs admiration. Inner joy, to be sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is its own private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.

The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest â or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest â significance in life does seem to be its character of progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call intelligence. Not every oneâs intelligence can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the older more familiar good. In this case character, though not significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with TolstoÃ¯, and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any common unintellectual man can show.

But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then TolstoÃ¯ and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer, all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things. Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be able to impart.

To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one brief practical illustration, and then close.

We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable, â and I think it is so only to a limited extent, â the unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they might regard a act of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody elseâs sight.

Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital difference on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, â the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some manâs or womanâs pains. â And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.

Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more eloquent than any I can speak: âThe âGreat Eastern,â or some of her successors,â he said, âwill perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But, it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.â⁵

In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. There are compensations: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of different menâs hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each other in this way, sub specie Ã¦ternatis,¹² how gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live, would come into the world!

¹ This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine wars.³ Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.

²My Confession, X (condensed).

³Across the Plains: âPulvis et Umbraâ (abridged).

⁴Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.

⁵âEssays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, May 25, 1903

THE PATHOS OF DEATH is this, that when the days of oneâs life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a manâs significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his singularity â happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.

An ideal wraith like this, of Emersonâs singularity, hovers over all Concord to-day, taking in the minds of those of you who were his neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the notion of a spirit indescribably precious. The form that so lately moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields and woods the beloved Museâs visits, is now dust; but the soulâs note, the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over future generations.

What gave a flavor so matchless to Emersonâs individuality was, even more than his rich mental gifts, their combination. Rarely has a man so known the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept within them. âStand by your order,â¹ he used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression one gets of his life is of his loyalty to his own type and mission. The type was that of what he liked to call the scholar, the perceiver of pure truth, and the mission was that of the reporter in worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we have the most perceptions.² There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field, become symbols to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic phenomena can open.³ Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good Spirit will give me.

This was the first half of Emerson, but only half, for his genius was insatiate for expression,⁴ and his truth had to be clad in the right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They form a chemical combination, â thoughts which would be trivial expressed otherwise are important through the nouns and verbs to which he married them. The style is the man, it has been said: the man Emersonâs mission culminated in his style, and if we must define him in one word, we have to call him Artist. He was an artist whose medium was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material.

This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor of his life. It was to shield it from invasion and distraction that he dwelt in the country, and that he consistently declined to entangle himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which, however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and not for him. Even the care of his garden, âwith its stoopings and fingerings in a few yards of space,â he found ânarrowing and poisoning,â and took to long free walks and saunterings instead, without apology.⁵ âCausesâ innumerable sought to enlist him as their âworkerâ â all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it appealed to him, found him firm:

âGod must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me.â⁶ This in reply to the possible questions of his conscience. To hot-blooded moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such a fidelity to the limits of his genius must often have made him seem provokingly remote and unavailable; but we who can see things in more liberal perspective must unqualifiedly approve the results. The faultless tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly asserted himself self within them is an example fitted to give heart to other theorists and artists the world over.

The insight and creed from which Emersonâs life followed can be best summed up in his own verse: â

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man!⁷

Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. âO rich and various Man!â he cries, âthou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.â⁸

If the individual open thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand.â If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?â writes Emerson. âAs long as any man exists there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.â⁹ This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emersonâs writings. The hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. âEach one of us can bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children of the light.â¹⁰ âTrust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each manâs education when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which it was given him to till.â¹¹

The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation, and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as the soul of his message. The present man is the aboriginal reality, the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues. âIf any one would lay an axe to your tree with a text from I John, v. 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say to him,â Emerson wrote, â âMy tree is Ygdrasil, the tree of life.â Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your Creator.â¹² âCleave ever to God,â he insisted, âagainst the name of God;â¹³ and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an iconoclast and desecrator.

Emersonâs belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners and sustainers of our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small as by being great and spreading when he is great. âI love and honor Epaminondas,â¹⁴ said Emerson, âbut I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, âHe acted and thou sittest still.âI see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.â¹⁵ âThe fact that I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the post?â¹⁶

The vanity of all super-serviceableness and pretense was never more happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infalli bly proclaims itself. âHide your thoughts! â hide the sun and moon. They publish themselves to the universe. They will speak through you though you were dumb. They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your face.¹⁷ â¦ Donât say things: What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot say what you say to the contrary.¹⁹ â¦ What a man is engraves itself upon him in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head, and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king. If you would not be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. â How can a man be concealed? How can he be concealed?â¹⁹

On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought utterly lost. âNever a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly.â¦Â The hero fears not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, â himself, â and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident.â²⁰

The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emersonâs way of thinking, from persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine: â

âIn solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth,²¹ until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that manâs day. What filled it? The crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers â Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet, â in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution: â behold Charles the Fifthâs day; another yet the same; behold Chathamâs,²² Hampdenâs,²³ Bayardâs,²⁴ Alfredâs,²⁵ Scipioâs,²⁶ Periclesâs²⁷ day, â day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, â its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, â which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask the inscrutable, obliterated past what it cannot tell, â the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron²⁸ or Burke,²⁹ â but ask it of the enveloping Now.â¦Â Be lord of a day and you can put up your history books.â³⁰

Thus does âthe deep to-day which all men scornâ³¹ receive from Emerson superb revindication. âOther world! there is no other world.â³² All Godâs life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or nowhere, is reality. âThe present hour is the decisive hour, and every day is doomsdayâ³³

Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emersonâs drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and soon as musty and as dreary. Never was such a fastidious lover of significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their discovery. His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar. For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved the situation â they must be worthy specimens, â sincere, authentic, archetypal; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the Unirverseâs meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full equator of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious bore and canter. But he would infallibly have added what he then added: âIt is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, and the axis round which the Universe revolves passes through his body where he stands.â³⁴

Be it how it may, then, this is Emersonâs revelation: â the point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest personâs act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity. This vision is the head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive tones, that posterity will reckon him a prophet, and, perhaps neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that convey this message. His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine, expressing itself through individuals and particulars: â âSo high is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!â

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after they are departed. Emersonâs wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on, and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity. â âGainst death and all oblivious enmity shall you pace forth,â³⁵ beloved Master. As long as our English language lasts, menâs hearts will be cheered and their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages with which you have enriched it.

A World of Pure Experience

IT IS DIFFICULT not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger genera tion appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical vigor and of formal purity. Transcendental idealism is inclining to let the world wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute Subject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyan idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony and dabbling in panpsychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with teleology; and, strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf, and finds glad hands outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet again. We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am personally discontented with extant solutions, so I seem to read the signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight edged andartificial.

If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable rearrangement, the time should be propitious for any one who has suggestions of his own to bring forward. For many years past my mind has been growing into a certain type of Weltanschanung.¹ Rightly or wrongly, I have got to the point where I can hardly see things in any other pattern. I propose, therefore, to describe the pattern as clearly as I can consistently with great brevity, and to throw my description into the bubbling vat of publicity where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it will eventually either disappear from notice, or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside to the profundities, and serve as a possible ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new crystallization.

I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM

I give the name of âradical empiricismâ to my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order. It is es sentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects. But it differs from the Humian type of empiricism in one particular which makes me add the epithet radical.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ârealâ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting cor rected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement.

Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully coordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions. Berkeleyâs nominalism, Humeâs statement that whatever things we distinguish are as âloose and separateâ as if they had âno manner of connection,â James Millâs² denial that similars have anything âreallyâ in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John Millâs account of both physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory,³ are examples of what I mean.

The natural result of such a world-picture has been the efforts of naturalism to correct its incoherencies by the addition of trans-experiental experiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual categories and powers, or Selves; whereas, if empiricism had only been radical and taken every thing that comes without disfavor, conjunction as well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have called for no such artificial correction. Radical empiricism, as I understand it, does full justice to conjunctive relations, without, however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether.

II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS

Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be âwithâ one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immedi ately conscious of continuing each other. The organization of the Self as a system of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental to this most intimate of all relations, the terms of which seem in many cases actually to compenetrate and suffuse each otherâs being.

Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my â these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness. A priori, we can imagine a universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These would be universes, each with its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear upon the surface.

Taken as it does appear, our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No one single type of connection runs through all the experiences that compose it. If we take space-relations, they fail to connect minds into any regular system. Causes and purposes obtain only among special series of facts. The self relation seems extremely limited and does not link two different selves together. Prima facie, if you should liken the universe of absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming, you would have to compare the empiricist universe to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another. Even so my experiences and yours float and dangle, terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another. This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation of withness between some parts of the sum total of experience and other parts, is the fact that ordinary empiricism overemphasizes against rationalism, the latter always tending to ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, on the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the disconnection. It finds no reason for treating ei ther as illusory. It allots to each its definite sphere of description, and agrees that there appear to be actual forces at work which tend, as time goes on, to make the unity greater.

The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts there is no question. My experiences and your experiences are âithâ each other in various external ways, but mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours in a way in which yours and mine never pass into one another. Within each of our personal histories, subject, object, interest and purpose are continuous or may be continuous.¹ Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. âChangeâ in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to hold fast to this conjunctiveand to be a radical empiricist me relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again seem rationally possible.

What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the one to the other is continuous. Continuity here is a definite sort of experience; just as definite as is the discontinuity-experience which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek to make the transition from an experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case I have to get on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted. Though the functions exerted by my experience and by yours may be the same (e.g., the same objects known and the same purposes followed), yet the sameness has in this case to be ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty and uncertainty) after the break has been felt; whereas in passing from one of my own moments to another the sameness of object and interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and the later experience are of things directly lived.

There is no other nature, no other whatness than this absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self. And this whatness is real empirical âcontentâ just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the contrasted case. Practically to experience oneâs personal continuum in this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all that they can ever mean. But all experiences have their conditions; and over-subtle intellects, thinking about the facts here, and asking how they are possible, have ended by substituting a lot of static objects of conception for the direct perceptual experiences. âSameness,â they have said, âmust be a stark numerical identity; it canât run on from next to next. Continuity canât mean mere absence of gap; for if you say two things are in immediate contact, at the contact how can they be two? If, on the other hand, you put a relation of transition between them, that itself is a third thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its terms. An infinite series is involved,â and so on. The result is that from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive experience has been discredited by both schools, the empiricists leaving things permanently disjoined, and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious agencies of union they may have employed. From all which artificiality we can be saved by a couple of simple reflections: first, that conjunctions and separations are, at all events, coordinate phenomena which, if we take experiences at their face value, must be accounted equally real; and second, that if we insist on treating things as really separate when they are given as continuously joined, invoking, when union is required, transcendental principles to overcome the separateness we have assumed, then we ought to stand ready to perform the converse act. We ought to invoke higher principles of disunion also, to make our merely experienced disjunctions more truly real. Failing thus, we ought to let the originally given continuities stand on their own bottom. We have no right to be lopsided or to blow capriciously hot and cold.

III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the âapprehensionâ by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories simply shoved the subject-object gap a step farther, getting it now between the object and the representation. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impassible in the finite realm, and brought an Absolute in to perform the bridging act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. Either the knower and the known are:

(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are

(2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or

(3) the known is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.

To discuss all the types, the ways in which one experience may function as the knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this essay.² I have just treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception, in an article in this JOURNAL for September 1, 1904. This is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct âacquaintanceâ with a present object. In the other types the mind has âknowledge-aboutâ an object not immediately there. Of type 2, the simplest sort of conceptual knowledge, I have given some account in two articles, published respectively in Mind, Vol. X., p. 27, 1885, and in the Psychological Review, Vol. II., p. 105,1895.³ Type 3 can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so that a brief description of that type will put the present reader sufficiently at my point of view, and make him see what the actual experience-value and meaning of the mysterious cognitive relation may be.

Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten minutesâ walk from âMemorial Hall,â 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 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 experiences of conjunction, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its knowing office.

For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can tell you nothing, or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard Delta,⁴ or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind or not, you would rightly deny that I had âmeantâ that particular hall at all, even though my mental image might to some degree have resembled it. The resemblance would count in that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one another in this world without being held for that reason to take cognizance of one another.

On the other hand, 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, however bad it may have been, 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 others; 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 meant, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness 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 denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all 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. Where they do not, or where even as possibles, they can not intervene, there can be no pretense of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations â bare likeness or succession, or by âwithnessâ alone. Knowledge thus lives inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting point thereby becomes 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. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely say that we had the terminal object âin mindâ from the outset, even 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 into existence and of being followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences between. That is what we mean here by being âin mind.â Of any deeper more real way of being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a thing at all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this. âMere intermediaries,â he will say, âeven though they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment, only separate the knower from the known, whereas what we have in knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other, an âapprehensionâ in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by lightning, an act by which union is smitten into living being, over the head of the distinctness of its terms. All these dead intermediaries of yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still.â

But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real kind of union aliunde,5 we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the only ones we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that terminates in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical predication through the copula âis,â or elsewhere. If anywhere there were more absolute unions realized, they could only reveal themselves to us by just such conjunctive results. These are what the unions are worth, these are all that we can ever practically mean by union, by continuity. Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to be one? Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing? In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship. In a world where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience, the conjunctions which we experience must be at least as real as anything else. They will be âabsolutelyâ real conjunctions, if we have no transphenomenal Absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke. If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute, not one of out opponentsâ theories of knowledge could remain standing any better than ours could; for the distinctions as well as the conjunctions of experience would impartially fall its prey. The whole question of how âoneâ thing can know âanotherâ would cease to be a real one at all in a world where otherness itself was an illusion.⁴

So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation, where the knowledge is conceptual in type, or forms knowledge âaboutâ an object. It consists in intermediary experiences (possible, if not actual) of continuously developing progress, and, finally, of fulfillment, when the sensible percept, which is the object, is reached. The object here not only verifies the idea, proves its function of knowing that object to be true, but the objectâs existence as the terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates the function. Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now is, what the idea âhad in mind.â

The towering importance of this kind of knowing for human life lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous âepistemologicalâ sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations, yet leading to the same result. By experimenting on our conceptual experiences, or ideas of reality, we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experience which they severally mean. The ideas form related systems, corresponding point for point to the systems which the realities form; and by letting an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in case we had operated on the real word. This brings us to the general question of substitution, and some remarks on that subject seem to be the next thing in order.

IV. SUBSTITUTION

In Taineâs brilliant book on âIntelligence,â substitution was for the first time named as a cardinal logical function, though of course the facts had always been familiar enough. What now, exactly, in an absolute system of experiences, does the âsubstitutionâ of one of them for another mean?

According to radical empiricism, experience as a whole wears the form of a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the nature of the event called âsupersedingâ signifies, depends altogether on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others follow them more livingly, are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose, or to bring us nearer to their goal. They ârepresentâ them, and may fulfil their function better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to âfulfil a functionâ in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined in only one possible way. In such a world transitions and arrivals (or terminations) are the only events that happen, though they happen by so many sorts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain kind of end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. But the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many alternative paths.

Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for another, and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way, the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is, through âthoughtsâ or âideasâ that âknowâ the things in which they terminate, are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the âuniversalâ Character⁵ which they frequently possess, and to their capacity for association with one another in great systems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the following of trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are the new cuts and the short-circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end outside of the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, Utopias, fictions or mistakes. But where they do reenter reality and terminate therein, we substitute them always; and with these substitutes we pass the greater number of our hours.

This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasichaos. There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose. The nucleus of every manâs experience, the sense of his own body, is, it is true, an absolutely continuous perception; and equally continuous is his perception (though it may be very inattentive) of a material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves. But the rest of the physical world is at all times absent from each of us, a conceptual object merely, into the perceptual realities of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round the nucleus, partly continuous and partly discrete, of what we call the physical world of actual perception, innumerable hosts of thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and around the whole of the nucleus of relative âreality,â as around the Dyakâs head of my late metaphor, there floats the vast nimbus of experiences that are wholly subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world â the mere day-dreams and joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist with one another, indeed, and with the objective nucleus, but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no inter-related system of any kind will ever be made.

This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self-transcendency in knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure experience and of substitution, and our radically empirical view of conjunctive transitions, are Denkmittel that will carry us safely through the pass.

V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE IS

Whosoever feels his experience as something substitutional, even while he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself. From inside of its own entity it postulates reality existing elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to consist in a salto mortale6 across an âepistemological chasmâ such an idea presents no difficulty, but it seems at first sight as if it might be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained conceptual knowledge to be wholly constituted by things that fall outside of the knowing experience itself â by intermediary experiences and by a terminus that fulfills? Can the knowledge be there before these elements that constitute its being have come? And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective reference occur?

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example of my former article, it is only when our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know âfor certainâ that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of that. Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were virtual knowers of the Hall long before we were nailed down and certified to have been its actual knowers by the perceptâs retroactive validating power.

Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated âions,â or of âejectsâ like the contents of our neighborsâ minds; I speak also of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which we hold for true although unterminated perceptually, because nothing says ânoâ to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate, substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience, inter alia,⁷ is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journeyâs end. The truncated experiences are sufficient to act upon â what more could we have done at those moments even if later verification were complete?

This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. I know full well that such brief words as these will leave the hardened transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive experiences separate their terms, he will still say: they are third things interposed, that have themselves to be conjoined by new links, and to invoke them makes our trouble infinitely worse. To âfeelâ our motion forward is impossible. Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus be felt before we have arrived? The barest start and sally forwards, the barest tendency to leave the instant, involves the chasm and the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the most superficial of appearances, illusions of our sensibility which philosophical reflection pulverizes at a touch. Conception is our only trustworthy instrument, conception and the Absolute working hand in hand. Conception disintegrates experience utterly, but its disjunctions are easily overcome again when the Absolute takes up the task.

Such transcendentalists I must leave, provisionally at least, in full possession of their creed. I have no space for polemics in this article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to work or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is a mere incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient and is of process and transition. Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are, and the only complaint of the transcendentalistâs with which I could at all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually there, so that our knowledge for the most part keeps only virtual, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business, and palmed off a mere substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing. Only the admission, that our ideas are self-transcendent already, such a critic might say, in advance of the experiences that are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception carried out.

This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method. When a dispute arises, that method consists in auguring what practical consequences would be different if one side rather than the other were true. If no difference can be thought of, the dispute is a quarrel over words.

What then would the salto mortale, the immediate selftranscendency affirmed as something existing independently of experiential mediation or termination, be known as, what would it practically result in, were it true?

It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the right path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face (or can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the path that led us into the objectâs nearest neighborhood. Where direct acquaintance is lacking, âknowledge aboutâ is the next best thing, and such knowledge are acquaintance with what actually lies about the object, and is most closely related to it, puts within our grasp. Ether-waves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never perceptually terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their really next effects.

Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the postulated selftranscendency, it would still remain true that their putting us into possession of such really next effects would be the sole cash-value of the self-transcendency for us. And this cash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et literatim what our empiricist account pays in. On pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute over self-transcendency here would be a pure logomachy. Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we donât differ about the nature of that exalted virtueâs fruits.

Fruits for us, humanistic fruits, of course. If an Absolute were proved to exist for other reasons, it might well appear that his knowledge is terminated in innumerable cases where ours is still incomplete. That, however, would be a fact indifferent to our knowledge. The latter would grow neither worse nor better, whether we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him out.

So the notion of a knowledge still in transits and on its way joins hands here with that notion of a âpure experienceâ which I tried to explain in my recent article entitled âdoes Consciousness Exist?â The instant field of the present is always experience in its âpureâ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as some oneâs opinion about fact. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual. âMemorial Hallâ is âthereâ in my idea as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to act on its account in either case. Only in the later experience that supersedes the present one is this naif immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a âconsciousnessâ and its âcontent,â and the content corrected or confirmed. While still pure, or present, any experience â mine, for example, of what I write about in these very lines â passes for âtruth.â The morrow may reduce it to âopinion.â The transcendentalist in all his particular knowledges is as liable to this reduction as I am: his Absolute does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel with an account of knowing that merely leaves it liable to this inevitable condition? Why insist on its being a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life? For a thing to be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself valid. When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all things, should knowing be exempt? Why should it not be making itself valid like everything else? That some parts of it may be already valid or verified beyond dispute, the empirical philosopher, of course, like any one else, may always hope.

VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF
DIFFERENT MINDS

With transition and prospect thus enthroned in pure experience, it is impossible to subscribe to the idealism of the English school. Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinities with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and, this can be easily shown.

For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal equivalent of what I term experiences) are discontinuous. The content of each is wholly immanent, and there are no transitions with which they are consubstantial and through which their beings may unite. Your Memorial Hall and mine, even when both are percepts, are wholly out of connection with each other. Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of which in strict logic only a God could compose a universe even of discourse. No dynamic currents run between my objects and your objects. Never can our minds meet in the same.

The incredibility of such a philosophy is flagrant. It is âcold, strained, and unnaturalâ in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted whether even Berkeley himself, who took it so religiously, really believed, when walking through the streets of London, that his spirit and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had absolutely different towns in view.

To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all. Why do I postulate your mind? Because I see your body acting in a certain way. Its gestures, facial movements, words and conduct generally, are âexpressive,â so I deem it actuated as my own is, by an inner life like mine. This argument from analogy is my reason, whether an instinctive belief runs before it or not. But what is âyour bodyâ here but a percept in my field? It is only as animating that object, my object, that I have any occasion to think of you at all. If the body that you actuate be not the very body that I see there, but some duplicate body of your own with which that has nothing to do, we belong to different universes, you and I, and for me to speak of you is folly. Myriads of such universes even now may coexist, irrelevant to one another; my concern is solely with the universe with which my own life is connected.

In that perceptual part of my universe which I call your body, your mind and my mind meet and may be called conterminous. Your mind actuates that body and mine sees it; my thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious cognitive fulfillment; your emotions and volitions pass into it as causes into their effects.

But that percept hangs together with all our other physical percepts. They are of one stuff with it; and if it be our common possession, they must be so likewise. For instance, your hand lays hold of one end of a rope and my hand lays hold of the other end. We pull against each other. Can our two hands be mutual objects in this experience, and the rope not be mutual also? What is true of the rope is true of any other percept. Your objects are over and over again the same as mine. If I ask you where some object of yours is, our old Memorial Hall, for example, you point to my Memorial Hall with your hand which I see. If you alter an object in your world, put out a candle, for example, when I am present, my candle ipso facto goes out. It is only as altering my objects that I guess you to exist. If your objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they be not identically where mine are, they must be proved to be positively somewhere else. But no other location can be assigned for them, so their place must be what it seems to be, the same.⁶

Practically, then, our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds were destroyed. I can see no formal objection to this suppositionâs being literally true. On the principles which I am defending, a âmindâ or âpersonal consciousnessâ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. If one and the same experience can figure twice, once in a mental and once in a physical context (as I have tried, in my article on âConsciousness,â to show that it can), one does not see why it might not figure thrice, or four times, or any number of times, by running into as many different mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection, can be continued into many different lines. Abolishing any number of contexts would not destroy the experience itself or its other contexts, any more than abolishing some of the pointâs linear continuations would destroy the others, or destroy the point itself.

I well know the subtle dialectic which insists that a term taken in another relation must needs be an intrinsically different term. The crux is always the old Greek one, that the same man canât be tall in relation to one neighbor, and short in relation to another, for that would make him tall and short at once. In this essay I can not stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass on, leaving my flank for the time exposed. But if my reader will only allow that the same ânowâ both ends his past and begins his future; or that, when he buys an acre of land from. his neighbor, it is the same acre that successively figures in the two estates; or that when I pay him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his pocket that came out of mine; he will also in consistency have to allow that the same object may conceivably play a part in, as being related to the rest of, any number of otherwise entirely different minds. This is enough for my present point: the common-sense notion of minds sharing the same object offers no special logical or epistemological difficulties of its own; it stands or falls with the general possibility of things being in conjunctive relation with other things at all.

In principle, then, let natural realism pass for possible. Your mind and mine may terminate in the same percept, not merely against it, as if it were a third external thing, but by inserting themselves into it and coalescing with it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that appears to be experienced when a perceptual terminus âfulfills.â Even so, two hawsers may embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of them touch any other part, except that pile, of what the other hawser is attached to.

It is therefore not a formal question, but a question of empirical fact solely, whether, when you and I are said to know the âsameâ Memorial Hall, our minds do terminate at or in a numerically identical percept. Obviously, as a plain matter of fact, they do not. Apart from color-blindness and such possibilities, we see the Hall in different perspectives. You may be on one side of it and I on another. The percept of each of us, as he sees the surface of the Hall, is moreover only his provisional terminus. The next thing beyond my percept is not your mind, but more percepts of my own into which my first percept develops, the interior of the Hall, for instance, or the inner structure of its bricks and mortar. If our minds were in a literal sense conterminous, neither could get beyond the percept which they had in common, it would be an ultimate barrier between them â unless indeed they became âco-consciousâ over a still larger part of their content, which (thought-transference apart) is not supposed to be the actual case. In point of fact the ultimate common barrier can always be pushed, by both minds, farther than any actual percept, until at last it resolves itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles like molecules or ether, so that, where we do terminate in percepts, our knowledge is only speciously completed, being, in theoretic strictness, only a virtual knowledge of those remoter objects which conception carries out.

Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical fact? Do our minds have no object in common after all?

Yes, they certainly have Space in common. On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predicate sameness wherever we can predicate no assignable point of difference. If two named things have every equality and function indiscernible, and are at the same time in the same place, they must be written down as numerically one thing under two different names. But there is no test discoverable, so far as I know, by which it can be shown that the place occupied by your percept of Memorial Hall differs from the place occupied by mine. The percepts themselves may be shown to differ; but if each of us be asked to point out where his percept is, we point to an identical spot. All the relations, whether geometrical or causal, of the Hall originate or terminate in that spot wherein our hands meet, and where each of us begins to work if he wishes to make the Hall change before the otherâs eyes. Just so it is with our bodies. That body of yours which you actuate and feel from within must be in the same spot as the body of yours which I see or touch from without. âThereâ for me means where I place my finger. If you do not feel my fingerâs contact to be âthereâ in my sense, when I place it on your body, where then do you feel it? Your inner actuations of your body also meet my finger there: it is there that you resist its push, or shrink back, or sweep the finger aside with your hand. Whatever farther knowledge either of us may acquire of the real constitution of the body which we thus feel, you from within and I from without, it is in that same place that the newly conceived or perceived constituents have to be located, and it is through that space that your and my mental intercourse with each other has always to be carried on, by the mediation of impressions which I convey thither, and of the reactions thence which those impressions may provoke from you.

In general terms, then, whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might some day become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical identity, there would be an end, so far as those experiences went, to our discussions about truth. No points of difference appearing, they would have to count as the same.

VII. CONCLUSION

With this we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding the Substances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of other philosophies may be taken to stand. In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement. Of course such a metaphor is misleading, for in actual experience the more substantive and the more transitive parts run into each other continuously, there is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome, it stays and counts as separateness to the end. But the metaphor serves to symbolize the taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is âofâ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the pastâs continuation; it is âofâ the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.

These relations of continuous transition experienced are what make our experiences cognitive. In the simplest and completest cases the experiences are cognitive of one another. When one of them terminates a previous series of them with a sense of fulfillment, it, we say, is what those other experiences âhad in view.â The knowledge, in such a case, is verified, the truth is âsalted downâ Mainly, however, we live on speculative investments, or on our prospects only. But living on things in posse is as good as living in the actual, so long as our credit remains good. It is evident that for the most part it is good, and that the universe seldom protests our drafts.

In this sense we at every moment can continue to believe in an existing beyond. It is only in special cases that our confident rush forward gets rebuked. The beyond must of course always in our philosophy be itself of an experiential nature. If not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it must be a thing in itself in Dr. Princeâs9 and Professor Strongâs sense of the term â that is, it must be an experience for itself whose relation to other things we translate into the action of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the physical symbols may be.⁷ This opens the chapter of the relations of radical empiricism to panpsychism, into which I can not enter now.

The beyond can in any case exist simultaneously â for it can be experienced to have existed simultaneously â with the experience that practically postulates it by looking in its direction, or by turning or changing in the direction of which it is the goal. Pending that actuality of union, in the virtuality of which the âtruth,â even now, of the postulation consists, the beyond and its knower are entities split off from each other. The world is in so far forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet. But, as fast as verification comes, trains of experience, once separate, run into one another; and that is why I said, earlier in my article, that the unity of the world is on the whole undergoing increase. The universe continually grows in quantity by new experiences that graft themselves upon the older mass; but these very new experiences often help the mass to a more consolidated form.

These are the main features of a philosophy of pure experience. It has innumerable other aspects and arouses innumerable questions, but the points I have touched on seem enough to make an entering wedge. In my own mind such a philosophy harmonizes best with a radical pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism, moralism and theism, and with the âhumanismâ lately sprung upon us by the Oxford9 and the Chicago10 schools.⁸ I can not, however, be sure that all these doctrines are its necessary and indispensable allies. It presents so many points of difference, both from the common sense and from the idealism that have made our philosophic language, that it is almost as difficult to state it as it is to think it out clearly, and if it is ever to grow into a respectable system, it will have to be built up by the contributions of many cooperating minds. It seems to me, as I said at the outset of this essay, that many minds are, in point of fact, now turning in a direction that points towards radical empiricism. If they are carried farther by my words, and if then they add their stronger voices to my feebler one, the publication of this essay will have been worth while.

¹ The psychology books have of late described the facts here with approximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on âThe Streams of Thoughtâ and on the Self in my own Principles of Psychology, as well as to S. H. Hodgsonâs Metapbysic of Experience, Vol. 1., Chap. VII and VIII.

² For brevityâs sake I altogether omit mention of the type constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidated in Deweyâs Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1904). Such propositions are reducible to the S-is-P form; and the âterminusâ that verifies and fulfills is the S = P as they feel in combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the mediating experiences, or in the âsatisfactorinessâ of the P in its new position.

³ These articles and their doctrine, unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable comment from Professor Strong in this JOURNAL, for May 12, 1904. Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out the same results, which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.

⁴ Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolute aliunde, nevertheless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely verbal, but this is no place for arguing that point out.

⁵ Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be conceived as functional, and denned in terms of transitions, or of the possibility of such.

⁶ The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.

⁷ Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of interaction between âthings-in-themselvesâ) in common. These would exist where, and begin to act where, we locate the molecules, etc., and where we perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby.

⁸ I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled âHumanism and Truthâ in Mind, October, 1904.

Is Radical Empiricism Solipsisticf

IF ALL THE CRITICISMS which the humanistic Weltanschauung is receiving were as sachgemÃ¤ss1 as Mr. Bodeâs2 in this JOURNAL for March 2, the truth of the matter would more rapidly clear up. Not only is it excellently well written, but it brings its own point of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly straight reply.

The argument (unless I fail to catch it) can be expressed as follows:

If a series of experiences be supposed, no one of which is endowed immediately with the self-transcendent function of reference to a reality beyond itself, no motive will occur within the series for supposing anything beyond it to exist. It will remain subjective, and contentedly subjective, both as a whole and in its several parts.

Radical empiricism, trying, as it does, to account for objective knowledge by means of such a series, egregiously fails. It can not explain how the notion of a physical order, as distinguished from a subjectively biographical order, of experiences, ever arose.

It pretends to explain the notion of a physical order, but does so by playing fast and loose with the concept of objective reference. On the one hand, it denies that such reference implies self-transcendency on the part of any one experience; on the other hand, it claims that experiences point. But, critically considered, there can be no pointing unless self-transcendency be also allowed. The conjunctive function of pointing, as I have assumed it, is, according to my critic, vitiated by the fallacy of attaching a bilateral relation to a term a quo,3 as if it could stick out substantively and maintain itself in existence in advance of the term ad quern4 which is equally required for it to be a concretely experienced fact. If the relation be made concrete, the term ad quern is involved, which would mean (if I succeed in apprehending Mr. Bode rightly) that this latter term, although not empirically there, is yet noctically there, in advance â in other words it would mean that any experience that âpointsâ must already have transcended itself, in the ordinary âepistemologicalâ sense of the word transcend.

Something like this, if I understand Mr. Bodeâs text, is the upshot of his state of mind. It is a reasonable sounding state of mind, but it is exactly the state of mind which radical empiricism, by its doctrine of the reality of conjunctive relations, seeks to dispel. I very much fear â so difficult does mutual understanding seem in these exalted regions â that my able critic has failed to understand that doctrine as it is meant to be understood. I suspect that he performs on all these conjunctive relations (of which the aforesaid âpointingâ is only one) the usual rationalistic act of substitution â he takes them not as they are given in their first intention, as parts constitutive of experienceâs living flow, but only as they appear in retrospect, each fixed as a determinate object of conception, static, therefore, and contained within itself.

Against this rationalistic tendency to treat experience as chopped up into discontinuous static objects, radical empiricism protests. It insists on taking conjunctions at their âface-value,â just as they come. Consider, for example, such conjunctions as âand,â âwith,â ânear,â âplus,â âtowards.â While we live in such conjunctions our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of a âmoreâ to come, and before the more has come, the transition, nevertheless, is directed towards it. I fail otherwise to see how, if one kind of more comes, there should be satisfaction and feeling of fulfillment; but disappointment if the more comes in another shape. One more will continue, another more will arrest or deflect the direction, in which our experience is moving even now. We can not, it is true, name our different living âandsâ or âwithsâ except by naming the different terms towards which they are moving us, but we live their specifications and differences before those terms explicitly arrive. Thus, though the various âandsâ are all bilateral relations, each requiring a term ad quern to define it when viewed in retrospect and articulately conceived, yet in its living moment any one of them may be treated as if it âstuck outâ from its term a quo and pointed in a special direction, much as a compass-needle (to use Mr. Bodeâs excellent simile) points at the pole, even though it stirs not from its box.

In Professor HÃ¶ffdingâs5 massive little article in a recent number of this JOURNAL,¹ he quotes a saying of Kierkegaardâs to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar to that which my critic seems to employ here should, it seems to me, forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed towards our future, or that any physical movement can have direction until its goal is actually reached.

At this point does it not seem as if the quarrel about self-transcendency in knowledge might drop? Is it not a purely verbal dispute? Call it self-transcendency or call it pointing, whichever you like â it makes no difference so long as real transitions towards real goals are admitted as things given in experience, and among experienceâs most indefeasible parts. Radical empiricism, unable to close its eyes to the transitions caught in actu, accounts for the self-transcendency or the pointing (whichever you may call it) as a process that occurs within experience, as an empirically mediated thing of which a perfectly definite description can be given. âEpistemology,â on the other hand, denies this; and pretends that the self-transcendency is unmediated or, if mediated, then mediated in a super-empirical world. To justify this pretension, epistemology has first to transform all our conjunctions into static objects, and this, I submit, is an absolutely arbitrary act. But in spite of Mr. Bodeâs maltreatment of conjunctions, as I understand them â and as I understand him â I believe that at bottom we are fighting for nothing different, but are both defending the same continuities of experience in different forms of words.

There are other criticisms in the article in question, but, as this seems the most vital one, I will for the present, at any rate, leave them untouched.

¹ VoL II., No. 4, pp. 85â92.

NOTES

PRAGMATISM

John Stuart Mill (1806â1873), an English philosopher, economist, and statesman, and author of System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, The Subjection of Women, and the classic On Liberty.

John Dewey (1859â1952) was, along with William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the originators of American pragmatism. A generation younger than James, Dewey ranged even more widely than his older colleague into such fields as logic, ethics, educational theory, metaphysics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Some of his best-known titles are Democracy and Education, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Human Nature and Conduct, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, Art as Experience, and A Common Faith.

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864â1937) was the leading British exponent of pragmatism and, during Jamesâs lifetime and for a period afterward, the most famous pragmatist outside the United States. He was a frequent correspondent of Jamesâs; his works include Studies in Humanism and Humanism: Philosophical Essays.

Gaston Samuel Milhaud (1858â1918), French philosopher who argued for the experiential as well as the empirical component of scientific research.

Ãdouard Le Roy (1870â1954), a member of the liberal Catholic group in France centered around Maurice BlondePs âphilosophy of actionâ school, which played a major role in advancing Catholic modernism.

Maurice Blondel (1861â1949) was the pen name of Bernard de Sailly, a French theologian who developed a school known as the âphilosophy of actionâ that, by challenging the intellectualism and rationalism of the Church and arguing for the primacy of will and action in human life, exerted strong influence on the development of Catholic moderism.

Another of Jamesâs correspondents and friends, Giovanni Papini (1881â1956) was the best-known member of a small circle of Italian pragmatists, including Giovanni Vailati (1863â1909) and Mario Calderoni (1879â1914). Papiniâs Sul Pragmatismo (Saggi e Ricerche), to which James refers, was published in 1913.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874â1936), an English essayist, poet, and fiction writer best known as a critic of late-Victorian manners, morals, and culture.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839â1914), a logician and American philosopher of science, was acknowledged by James as the âfounder of pragma tismâ though Peirce became displeased by the way James turned his own theory of meaning into a full-fledged theory of truth Peirce first developed his ideas about pragmatism, which he was tempted to call âpragmaticism,â in essays such as âThe Fixation of Belief,â âHow to Make Our Ideas Clear,â and âThe Essentials of Pragmatismâ

per fas aut nefas âthrough right or wrongâ

Plato (427?â347? B.C.), the Greek philosopher who was a student and disciple of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle Some of his most famous writings include such dialogues as Symposium, Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and The Republic

John Locke (1632â1704) was the first great English philosopher to deny the existence of innate ideas and propose that all ideas derive from sense experience Though his principal work is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his ideas as a political theorist profoundly influenced the development of English and American liberalism

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770â1831), the greatest of German idealist philosophers, wove his diverse interests in politics, art, history, economics, and religion into one of the most intensely integrated philo sophical systems ever conceived in such texts as Phenomenology of Mind, Science of Logic, and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Herbert Spencer (1820â1903), an English philosopher who applied the doctrine of evolution to an interpretation of all aspects of life in such works as Principles of Biology, Principles of Psychology, Principles of Sociology, and Principles of Ethics

Cripple Creek, a Colorado mining town, was placed under martial law in December 1903 because of labor disputes

Ernst Hemnch Haeckel (1834â1919), the foremost German exponent of Darwinism, whose works include The History of Creation and The Origin of the Human Race

Thomas Hill Green (1836â1882), an English philosopher who champi oned Hegelian idealism

Edward Caird (1835â1908) and John Caird (1820â1898), Scottish philos ophers whose writings were devoted to reconciling the philosophical with the religious and the spiritual

Bernard Bosanquet (1848â1923), like T H Green and F H Bradley, defended idealism against traditional British empirical philosophy

Josiah Royce (1855â1916), Jamesâs colleague in philosophy at Harvard and close personal friend and frequent intellectual sparring partner, was the leading American exponent of absolute idealism Royce recorded his interest in topics as various as mathematics, psychology, social ethics, literature, history, and tehgion in such works as The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, The World and the Individual, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Sources of Religious Insight, and The Problem of Christianity.

James Martmeau (1805â1900), an English Unitanan clergyman whose Study of Religion and Types of Ethical Theory James used as texts in his course on âEnglish Contributions to Theistic Ethics.â

Borden Parker Bowne (1847â1910), an American philosopher and Methodist elder whose short books The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, and The Atonement James found âwonderfully able.â

George Trumbull Ladd (1842â1921), an American philosopher, psychologist, and Congregational minister whose Psychology: Descriptive and Explanatory was unfavorably reviewed by James.

modus vivendi. âpractical compromise.â

quaesitum: âwhat is searched for.â

Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von Leibnitz (1646â1716), German philosopher and mathematician who believed that God in his goodness had created the best of all possible universes. His works include Monadology, Principles of Nature and Grace, and Theodicy.

Socinians, members of an evangelical movement originating in the thought of Laelius Socinus (1525â1562) and his nephew Faustus Socinus (1539â1604), which professed belief in God and a rational interpretation of the Christian Scriptures but denied the divinity of Christ and asserted the necessity of a separation of church and state.

Thomas Hobbes (1588â1679), the English political theorist who in his great work Leviathan defined human life in a state of nature as ânasty, brutish, and short.â

Morrison Isaac Swift (1856â?), an American anarchist writer.

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846â1924), an English idealist philosopher who held out against the rising tide of Darwinian mechanistic thinking.

Walt Whitman (1819â1892), the famous American writer who celebrated democracy, the body, and the self in his ongoing series of poems published under the collective title Leaves of Grass. Jamesâs quote resembles a line from the poem âSo Long!â in Songs of Parting.

James quotes from Faust by the German poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749â1832): âInstead of living nature/in which God placed human beings.â

Benedict Spinoza (1632â1677), the Dutch philosopher who in his major work, Ethics, developed a system of metaphysics, psychology, and ethics known as pantheism, which holds that God and the universe are continuous and one.

George Holmes Howison (1834â1916), an American philosopher who established the Philosophical Union of the University of California at Berkeley.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853â1932), a German chemist who taught one year at Harvard and was a frequent visitor at the James home.

William Suddards Franklin (1863â1930), an American physicist.

Socrates (469â399 B.C.), the Greek philosopher famous for the question-and-answer method he employed in his quest for knowledge and virtue; Platoâs teacher.

Aristotle (384â322 B.C.), Platoâs student who, unlike his teacher, believed that ideas cannot, except for purposes of knowledge, be severed from their material expressions This makes of Aristotle, so James contended, the earliest and greatest of the precursors of the pragmatic method, though Aristotle wrote on a vast vanety of subjects in such works as Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics, and Physics.

George Berkeley (1685â1783), Irish philosopher and bishop of Cloyne who defended the idealist belief that knowledge of reality is more dependent on perception than on existence.

David Hume (1711â1776), Scottish philosopher who, in such works as A Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, developed an experimental science of human nature that relied heavily on the conviction that all our ideas are derived from impressions of sense and inner feeling and that matters of fact cannot be proved a priori but must be inferred from or discovered in experience.

Shadworth Hollway Hodgson (1832â1912), an English philosopher whose Philosophy and Experience may have served as one among many sources of Jamesâs pragmatism

Euclid (fl c 300 B.C.), the Greek mathematician who developed the principles of geometry.

Johannes Kepler (1571â1630), the German astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion.

Christoph Sigwart (1830â1904), German logician.

Ernst Mach (1838â1916), an Austrian physicist and philosopher, and member of the Vienna Circle, whose work bears some relationship to pragmatism.

Karl Pearson (1857â1936), English mathematician and author of The Grammar of Science.

Jules-Henri PomcarÃ© (1854â1912), French mathematician whose views of science, like those of Pierre Duhem, bore some relation to the work of members of the âphilosophy of actionâ school such as Maurice Blondel and Ãdouard Le Roy.

Pierre Duhem (1861â1916), French physicist and historian of science.

Theodore Ruyssen (1868â1967), French philosopher.

Sir William Ramsay (1852â1916), English chemist who discovered helium m manium ore.

nulla vestigia retrorsum âno tracks lead back outâ.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825â1895), English biologist and essayist who was an influential defender of Darwinâs work.

Jamesâs quote, with a minor alteration, is taken from âA Loversâ Quar relâ by Robert Browning (1812â1889).

Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour (1848â1930), English philosopher and statesman who lent his name to the declaration in which the British government expressed its support for a national home for the Jewish people in what is now Israel.

Dante Alighieri (1265 â 1321), Italian poet who wrote The Divine Comedy.

William Wordsworth (1770â1850), English Romantic poet best known for his poems on the divinity inherent in nature and childhood, such as âTintern Abbeyâ and âOde: Intimations of Immortality,â as well as for his spiritual autobiography The Prelude.

Mont-PeleÃ©, a volcano that erupted in Martinique on May 8, 1902, killing more than 30,000 people.

George Stuart Fullerton (1859â1925), an American philosopher whose works include âFreedom and âFree Willââ and â Tree Willâ and the Credit for Good Actions.â

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866â1925), Scottish philosopher and author of Some Dogmas of Religion,

James quotes from the poem âWatchman, Tell Us of the Night,â by Sir John Bowring (1792â1872).

Deus est Ens â¦ intelligens: âGod is being, from itself, above and beyond all kinds, necessary, one, infinitely perfect, simple, unchanging, great, eternal, the principle of thought.â

erkenntnisstheoretische Ich: âepistemological Self.â

KausalitÃ¤tspnnzip: âprinciple of causality.â

pari passu: âequally and simultaneously.â

In this work, the otherwise unknown Bellanger argued against Kant that totality, not unity, is the supreme category of reality.

denkmittel: âconceptual device; frame of thought.â

Swami Vivekananda (1863â1902), an Indian religious leader whose lecture entitled âThe Vedanta Philosophyâ was first delivered before the Harvard Graduate Philosophical Society.

inter se: âbetween themselves.â

audita et visa: âhearings and sights.â

ad libitum. âat your pleasure.â

RenÃ© Descartes (1596â1650), French philosopher and mathematician who, in addition to inventing analytical geometry, also attempted to formulate in his famous Discourse on Method a new basis for philosophical inquiry predicated on the dictum âI think; therefore, I am.â

Immanuel Kant (1724 â 1804), German thinker who revolutionized the practice of philosophy by arguing that the mind is incapable of knowing things in themselves since the elemental terms by which things are known â substance, unity, cause, and effect â are categories of the mind itself and not part of reality. His works include Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment, and Critique of Pure Reason.

gewÃ¼hl der erscheinungen, rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen: âswarm of appearances, rhapsody of perceptions.â

George Santayana (1863â1952), American philosopher and writer born in Spain who taught with James at Harvard and, despite his early materialist resistance to pragmatism, eventually developed closer relations with it in his own writings, which include The Sense of Beauty, The Life of Reason, Skepticism and Animal Faith, and the four-volume Realms of Being.

durcheinander: âin confusion.â

Democritus (c. 460â370 B.C.), Greek philosopher who sought a consistent mechanistic theory to explain natural phenomena and defined the atom as the basic unit of matter.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809â1882), English biologist who, in such works as The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, amassed evidence in support of earlier theories of evolution and developed his own notions of the struggle for existence and the âsurvival of the fittest.â

ens rationis: âproduct of reason.â

sibi permissi: âdevoted to themselves.â

Galileo Galilei (1564â1642), Italian astronomer, physicist, and mathematician who proved, among other discoveries, that objects of different weights fall with the same velocity.

John Dalton (1766â1844), English chemist and physicist who inaugurated modern chemistry with his discovery that gases act independently in a mixture.

Michael Faraday (1791â1867), English physicist and chemist best known for his work with electricity and magnetism.

regel der verbindung: âlaw of association.â

AndrÃ©-Marie AmpÃ¨re (1775â1836), French mathematician and physicist who formulated important principles in electricity and magnetism and gave his name to the unit of the rate of flow of electrical current.

Marchese Guglielmo Marconi (1874â1937), Italian electrical engineer who invented the wireless telegraphy that made the modern radio possible.

Archimedes (c. 287â212 B.C.), Greek physicist, mathematician, and inventor who formulated the principle that for a body partly or wholly submerged in fluid, the upward force on that body is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831â1879), Scottish physicist who established the mathematical foundation of electromagnetic theory and helped prove the electromagnetic nature of light.

Gaius Julius Caesar (c. 102â44 B.C.), the Roman statesman, general, orator, and historian who, after precipitating a civil war, became dictator of Rome and was later assassinated in a conspiracy led by his friend Brutus.

in rebus: âin things.â

ante rem: âbefore the thing.â

This epigram from the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729â1781), quoted in Machâs History and Root of the Principle of the Conversion of Work, reads as follows: âSays clever little Hans to Cousin Fritz, / Why is it, Cousin Fritz, / That the richest people in the world / Possess the most gold?â

John Davison Rockefeller (1839â1937), American financier, industrialist, and philanthiopist, who founded Standard Oil.

Andrew Carnegie (1835â1919), Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist who made his fortune manufacturing steel.

Ptolemy (fl 127â141), the Greco-Egyptian geographer, astronomer, and mathematician, developed a system of astronomy based on the belief, later overturned by Copernicus, that the sun and planets revolve around the earth.

SÃ¸ren Kierkegaard (1813â1855), Danish philosopher and theologian who became an important forerunner of modern existentialism through such works as Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness Unto Death.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642â1727), English physicist and mathematician, and author of Principia Mathematica, who was widely regarded in his time as the foremost scientist in the world.

Alfred Edward Taylor (1869â1945), British philosopher.

Heinrich Rickert (1863â1936), German philosopher.

This quotation is from the essay âSelf -Relianceâ by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Harold Henry Joachim (1868â1938), English philosopher who argued for a coherence theory of truth in his work The Nature of Truth.

347-01âmaterialâ.

Henri Bergson (1859â1941), French philosopher, and author of, among other works, Creative Evolution, who emphasized intuition over reason and believed that a âvital spiritâ (Ã©lan vital) infused and formed matter.

Gerardus Heymans (1857â1930), Dutch philosopher and psychologist.

Charles Augustus Strong (1862â1940), American philosopher who argued in Why the Mind Has a Body that the only reality we can conceive is mental in nature.

Frederic William Henry Myers (1843â1901), English writer and psychical researcher.

Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817â1881), German philosopher who argued in Outlines of Logic and of Encyclopedia of Philosophy that the world of objects, rather than existing entirely complete in itself, is constituted through the process of ideation.

Rudolf Eucken (1846â1926), German philosopher.

Diogenes (c 412â323 B.C.), Greek cynic who taught that the virtuous life is a simple life, took up living in a tub, and is said to have searched in the daylight with a lantern for an honest man.

in posse âpotentiallyâ.

Chauncey Wright (1830â1875), an American mathematician and philosopher, and brilliant conversationalist, who taught at Harvard University for several years before his death.

James Jackson Putnam (1846â1918), a physician from Boston, Massachusetts, and author of a letter James pasted into the Pragmatism manuscript.

terminus ad quern âdestinationâ.

sans Ie savoir âwithout learningâ.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788â1860), German philosopher who argued, in The World As Will and Idea, that it is not the intellect but rather the will that motivates human beings and is the source of knowledge.

Top! und schlag auf schlag!: âOkay âOnward and onwardââ.

Epigram attributed to Theodondes of Syracuse, who wrote toward the end of the third century B C.

primus inter pares: âfirst among equalsâ.

From THE MEANING OF TRUTH

Â 

Preface

Carveth Read (1848â1931), British philosopher.

Francis Howe Johnson (1835â1920), American philosopher.

Irving Elgar Miller (1869â1962), American educator.

Howard VincentÃ© Knox (1868â1960), British military officer and philosopher who wrote The Philosophy of William James.

Taylor attacked pragmatism in several of his essays.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873â1963), American philosopher who wrote, among other texts, the Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays.

Harry Norman Gardiner (1855â1927), Enghsh-born American philosopher.

Charles Montague Bakewell (1867â1957), an American philosopher.

James Edwin Creighton (1861â1924), an American philosopher who wrote several essays on pragmatism for the Philosophical Review.

John Grier Hibben (1861â1933), an American philosopher who wrote âThe Test of Pragmatismâ.

Dominique Parodi (1870â1955), an Itahan-born philosopher who wrote primarily in French on, among other topics, âLe Pragmatisme dâapres Mm W James et Schillerâ and âLa Signification du pragmatismeâ.

William Mackintire Salter (1853â1931), who wrote an essay entitled âPragmatism A New Philosophy,â was the brother-in law of Jamesâs wife, Alice.

Paul Carus (1852â1919), German born American philosopher who contributed three articles on pragmatism to the Monist âPragmatism,â âThe Philosophy of Personal Equation,â and âA Postscript on Pragmatismâ.

AndrÃ© Lalande (1867â1963), French philosopher who wrote âPragma tisme et pragmaticismeâ and âPragmatisme, humanisme, et vÃ©ritÃ©â.

FranÃ§ois MentrÃ© (1877â1950), French philosopher who published two articles on pragmatism in the Revue de Philosophic.

James took MâTaggartâs Chapter II of Some Dogmas of Religion on âThe Inadequacy of Certain Common Grounds of Beliefâ as a critique of his The Will to Believe and Other Essays.

George Edward Moore (1873â1958), British philosopher who wrote âProfessol Jamesâ âPragmatismââ

Ladd wrote âThe Confusion of Pragmatismâ and reviewed Jamesâs The Meaning of Truth in the Philosophical Review.

Albert Schinz (1870â1943), Swiss-born philosopher who taught in the United States and whose book was translated into English as Anti-Pragmatism: An Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy.

Â 

The Tigers in India

Dickinson Sergeant Miller (1868â1963), American philosopher and author of two articles to which James refers: âThe Meaning of Truth and Errorâ and âThe Confusion of Function and Content in Mental Analysis.â

Â 

Humanism and Truth

George Frederick Stout (1860â1944), British philosopher and psychologist.

ignoratio elenchi: âignorance of the point in dispute.â

The reference is to the poem âCrossing the Barâ by the English Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809â1892).

minus nequit gignere plus: âthe lesser cannot produce the greater.â

Barbara and Celarent, mnemonic names of traditional syllogisms in logical reasoning, which may be traced back to the thirteenth-century work of William of Shyreswood.

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquis of Salisbury (1830â1903).

Employed in the writings of English philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845â1879), the ejective realm refers to entities, such as other minds, whose existence can only be inferred.

Hans Cornelius (1863â1947), German philosopher.

verbatim et literatim: âword for word and letter for letter.â

Joseph Wilbois (b. 1874), French physicist and author who wrote âLa MÃ©thode des sciences physiquesâ and âLâEsprit positif.â

James refers to Le Royâs work in the preface to Pragmatism.

Georg Simmel (1858â1918), German philosopher whose writings, which include Sociology and Philosophy of Life, helped establish the science of sociology in Germany.

Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857â1894), German physicist.

adÃ¦quatio intellectÃ»s et rei: âadequate to the intellect and to things.â

âding an sichâ: âthing in itself.â

brutum fulmen: âempty threat.â

ins blaue hinein: âinto the blue.â

inbegriff: âsubstance.â

Alfred Dreyfus (1859â1935), Jewish French army officer who was falsely accused of, and then imprisoned for, selling military secrets to German agents, but who was eventually, with the help of Ãimile Zola and other French intellectuals, exonerated completely.

Madame Ãmile Duclaux (Agnes Mary Frances Robinson) (1857â1944), an English poet and critic married to Pierre-Ãmile Duclaux (1840â1904), a French biochemist who was active in Dreyfusâs defense The quote reads as follows âAs much as the Revolution, âthe Affairâ is from hence forth one of our âorigins â If it has not opened the abyss, it has at least rendered patent and visible the long underground labor that silently pre pared the separation between our two camps today, and which at last, with a sudden blow, split the France of the traditionalists (pnnciple-asserters, unity-seekers, builders of a priori systems) and the France in love with the positive fact and free inquiry, â the revolutionary and romantic France, if you will, which exalts the individual, which would not see one just man perish, even to save the nation, and which seeks truth in each subordinate part as well as in the whole Duclaux could not conceive that anyone would prefer something to the truth But we saw about him profoundly sincere people who, weighing political necessity and the life of a man, acknowledged to him how lightly they evaluated a simple individual existence, innocent as it was These were the classicists, people to whom totality alone matters.â

cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cognoscentis âknowing comes through the assimilation of the known and the knower.â

âDie erhÃ¶hung des vorgefundenen daseinsâ âthe elevation of existence as we know it.â

William Stanley Jevons (1835â1882), English logician and economist.

George Boole (1815â1864), English mathematician who was one of the first to demonstrate the advantage of symbolic logic.

Moses (fl c thirteenth century B C) was the Hebrew leader who helped secure his peopleâs freedom from captivity in Egypt and led them to Mt Sinai where, as the Book of Exodus (one of five books of the Penta teuch) attests, God made a covenant with his people centered around the Ten Commandments supposedly handed down to Moses.

âtrowethâ âbelieves.â

George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819â1880), author of such works as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch.

Ã¼berhaupt âin general.â

âwainâ short for âCharlesâs Wainâ â the Big Dipper constellation.

schlechthin âsimply.â

From PSYCHOLOGY BRIEFER COURSE

Â 

The Stream of Consciousness

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821â1894), German physiologist and physicist who wrote A Treatise on Physiological Optics and On the Sensations of Tone.

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776â1841), German philosopher, educator, and psychologist, and author of The Science of Education and Application of Psychology to the Science of Education.

This quotation is from Ralph Waldo Emersonâs poem âBrahma.â

Zeno of Elea (c 490-c 430 B.C.), Greek philosopher who is regarded as the founder of the dialectical method of disputation.

extra mentem âbeyond the mind or intellect or reasoning.â

actus purus âpure act.â

in rerum naturÃ¢ âin the nature of things.â

tota cÃ¦lo âdiametrically.â

Francis Galton (1822â1911), British scientist.

This quote is from Tennysonâs In Memonium, XCV, 63.

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828â1893), French literary critic and historian who, in History of English Literature, argued that literature is determined by race, milieu, and the historical moment.

From THE WILL TO BELIEVE AND OTHER ESSAYS
IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY

Â 

Preface

Grenzbegriff âlimiting concept, concept at the limit of understanding.â

Benjamin Paul Blood (1832â1919), an American mystic who corre sponded frequently with James.

Horatio Nelson (1758â1805), English naval commander who was killed in action during the battle in which his forces decisively defeated NapolÃ©onâs navy near Cape Trafalgar, Spam, in 1805.

George Washington (1732â1799), first president of the United States.

Â 

The Will to Believe

Leslie Stephen (1832â1904), English philosopher, critic, and biographer.

James FitZjames Stephen (1829â1894), English jurist.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861â1930), Norwegian explorer and statesman who led several arctic expeditions.

Abraham Lincoln (1809â1865), the sixteenth president of the United States.

Blaise Pascal (1623â1662), French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist whose Pensees (Thoughts) proclaimed that âthe heart has its reasons of which reason itself knows nothing.â

Cela vous fera croire et vous abÃªtira âThat will make you believe and will stupefy you.â

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819â1861), English poet.

Clifford expressed views opposed to Jamesâs, stimulating him to write âThe Will to Believe.â

James Monroe (1758â1831), the fifth president of the United States, here referred to as the author of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U S would regaid any colonizing effort by European powers in the Amencas as a hostile act.

John Henry Newman (1801â1890), English theologian and writer who began his career as a high Anglican churchman but was later received into the Catholic Church and made a cardinal.

adÃ¦quatio intellectÃ»s nostn cum rÃª âperfect correspondence of our understanding with the thing.â

aptitudmem ad extorquendum certum assensum âaptitude to force a certain agreement.â

quietem in cognitione ârepose in knowledge.â

entitas ipsa âbeing itself.â

Johann ZÃ¶llner (1834â1882), German astrophysicist who researched psychic phenomena and concluded that there was a âfourth dimension.â

Charles Howard Hinton (1853â1907), English mathematician who also published several works on the âfourth dimension.â

consensus gentium âconsensus of the people.â

Thomas Reid (1710â1796), Scottish philosopher who wrote Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense.

Wilhelm Conrad RÃ¶ntgen (1845â1923), German physicist who discovered X rays.

August Friedrich Leopold Weismann (1834â1914), German biologist who advocated the theory of evolution.

Wilfrid Philip Ward (1856â1916), British biographer and Catholic apologist.

âLe cÅur pasâ âThe heart has its reasons of which reason itself knows nothing.â

ad extorquendum assensum meum âto force my unqualified assent.â

Charles SecrÃ©tan (1815â1895), Swiss philosopher.

Â 

Is Life Worth Living?

William Hurrell Mallock (1849â1923), English author of Is Life Worth Limng? and Reconstruction of Belief.

This quotation is from the prologue to Henry VIII by William Shake speare (1564-1616).

This quotation is from Whitmanâs âSongs at Sunsetâ in Leaves of Grass.

James quotes from the beginning of Book VI of Confessions by the French author and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712â1778).

Giacomo Leopardi (1798â1837), Italian poet noted for the pessimistic mood of his lyrics.

James Thomson (1834â1882), Scottish poet.

James quotes from âThe Opening of the Crystal Palaceâ by the English essayist, art critio, and social reformer John Ruskin (1819â1900).

tedium vitÃ¦ âlife wearinessâ.

Weltschmerz âworld weariness.â

Marcus Aurelius (121â180), Roman emperor who expounded the Stoic philosophy in his Meditations.

Thomas Carlyle (1795â1881), Scottish essayist and historian opposed equally to orthodox creeds and materialistic tendencies Among his works are Sartor Resartus, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, and Past and Present.

Solomon (c 973-c 931 B.C.), the Israelite king, noted for his wisdom, who built the first temple in Jerusalem.

NapolÃ©on Bonaparte (1769â1821) French general who was crowned empeior and made France the dominant power in Europe in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Waldenses (or Vaudois), a Christian sect founded in southern France in the twelfth century by Peter Waldo (d 1217), which emphasized simplicity of faith and advocated the abolition of private ownership of property.

Innocent VIII (originally Giovanni Battista Cibo) (1432â1492), Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1484 to 1492.

Alexis Muton (1810â1888), Vaudois historian who wrote The Israel of the Alps A History of the Persecution of the Waldenses.

Und dergleichen mehr!: âAnd so on and so forthâ.â

George E. Waring (1833â1898), an American engineer who wrote Tyrol and the Skirt of the Alps.

Alexandre Octave BÃ©rard (1859â1923), French statesman and writer.

The Savoy dynasty ruled over the territories of Savoy and Piedmont for nine centuries.

William III (William of Orange) (1650â1702), a Protestant of Dutch background who succeeded the Catholic James II as king of England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Louis XIV (1638â1715), known as the âSun King,â ruled France for seventy-two years, the longest reign in European history.

The quotation is from Xenos Clarkâs âThe Study of Human Suffering.â

The quotation is from Wordsworthâs The Excursion, Book IV â âDe spondency Corrected.â

Binnenleben âinner life.â

The quotation is from Salterâs âCarlyle and the Social Question.â

Henry IV (1553â1610), also known as Henry of Navarre or Henry the Great, was the first of the French Bourbon kings The taunt to which James refers was supposedly written by Henry in a letter to Louis Berton de Crillon after the battle of Arques in 1589.

Â 

The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

pro tanto âas far as that goes.â

Jeremy Bentham (1748â1832), English jurist and philosopher who founded the Westminster Review as well as the philosophy of utilitaranism, which, in addition to holding that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil, seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Alexander Bain (1818â1903), Scottish philosopher who wrote Emotions and the Will.

FranÃ§ois-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772â1837), French reformer and socialist whose principles of a Utopian cooperative society formed the basis of the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts.

Edward Bellamy (1850â1898), American author of the Utopian romance Looking Backward.

William Morris (1834â1896), English socialist writer, artist, and printer who wrote the Utopian romance News from Nowhere.

Leo TolstoÃ¯ (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoi) (1828â1910), the great Russian writer of more than ninety volumes whose novels include War and Peace, Anna Karenma, and Resurrection.

James refers to Bellamyâs novel, whose actual title was Dr. Heidenhoffâs Process.

Marie-Jean Guyau (1854â1888), French poet and philosopher.

esse is percipi: ââto beâ is âto be perceived.ââ

Heinrich Heine (1797â1856), German poet who was forced to leave Germany because of his liberal political convictions and became a follower of the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Christian Karl Josias, Freiherr von Bunsen (1791â1860), German diplomat and historian.

Epicurus (341â270 B.C.), Greek philosopher who argued that the greatest good in life is happiness or pleasure in the sense of equilibrium or âimperturbability.â

John Calvin (1509â1564), the Protestant theologian and religious reformer whose Institutes of the Christian Religion furnished a model not only for the theocratic government he helped establish in Switzerland but also for the theocracy that the Massachusetts Bay colonists attempted to set up in North America.

William Paley (1743â1805), English theologian and philosopher.

This incident reportedly occurred at Sidmouth during a storm in 1824 and was used to ridicule those who try to withstand progress.

James quotes from the French novelist, poet, and dramatist Victor-Marie Hugo (1802â1885); âwho speaks to the precipice, and the abyss apprehends.â

James quotes from Deuteronomy 30:15 and 19.

From TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND
TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFEâS IDEALS

Â 

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850â1894), the Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist best known for his adventure and horror stories, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

James refers to Emersonâs essay âThe Over-Soul.â

Ãtienne Pivert de SÃ©nancour (1770â1846), French ethical writer.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792â1822), English Romantic poet, dramatist, and essayist.

James quotes from Wordsworthâs The Excursion.

Richard Jefferies (1848â1887), English writer.

secula seculorumâ âworld without end.â

Jamesâs translation of âinnere Leerheitâ from Schopenhauerâs essay âVon Dem, was Emerist.â

Benvenuto Cellini (1500â1571), Italian sculptor and goldsmith equally well known and justly admired for his artistic work and for his Autobiography.

James quotes from Emersonâs essay âNature.â

William Henry Hudson (1841â1922), English naturalist and author of Green Mansions, The Purple Land That England Lost, and Far Away and Long Ago.

Â 

What Makes a Life Significant

From 1894 to 1896, thousands of Armenians were killed by Turks in a series of massacres in the eastern Ottoman empire.

James quotes from âThe Gods of Greeceâ by the German poet, dramatist, historian, and philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759â1805). Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn: âWhat lives in song must perish in life.â

The Spanish-American War of 1898 resulted in Cuba becoming an American protectorate and the Philippines being ceded to the United States.

William Dean Howells (1837â1920), American novelist and critic who championed literary realism in such works as The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes.

Rudyard Kipling (1865â1936), English novelist, short-story writer, and poet, born in India, who is best known for the novels Kim and The Light That Failed and the Jungle Book stories for children.

Gautama the Buddha (originally Prince Siddhartha) (563?â483? B.C.), Indian religious leader who left a life of luxury to seek truth and founded ilic Buddhist religion.

Jesus Christ (c. 6 B.C.-C. A.D. 29), the central figure of the Christian religion whom adherents of the faith take to be their savior and the Messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Saint Francis of Assisi, originally Giovanni Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone (1182â1226), Italian monk and founder of the Franciscan order, who accepted a vow of poverty and preached love of all living creatures.

Walter Augustus Wyckoff (1865â1908), American political economist from whose The Workers. An Experiment in Reality James quotes.

Timofei Mikhailovich Bondarev, a Russian peasant whose book Labor The Divine Command was greatly admired by Tolstoi.

Phillips Brooks (1835â1893), an American Episcopal clergyman who championed the cause of the poor and of slaves.

sub specie Ã¦ternatis: âunder the aspect of eternity.â

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

Â 

Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson

James quotes from Emersonâs âThe Man of Letters.â

See Emersonâs âInspiration.â

See Emersonâs âPowers and Laws of Thought.â

See Emersonâs âPowers and Laws of Thoughtâ: âGenius is not a lazy angel contemplating itself and things. It is insatiable for expression.â

See Emersonâs âWealth.â

This passage from Emersonâs journal, August 1852, is quoted by Edward Waldo Emerson in Emerson in Concord.

The quotation is from Emersonâs poem âVoluntaries.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âThe Method of Nature.â

The quotation is from Emersonâs âNominalist and Realist.â

See Emersonâs âThe Method of Nature.â

James rearranges three sentences from Emersonâs âSelf-Reliance.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âThe Sovereignty of Ethics.â

James quotes fiom Emersonâs âPowers and Laws of Thought.â

Epaminondas (c. 410â362 B.C.), the Theban general whose victory over the Spartans temporarily established Thebes as the dominant power in Greece.

James quotes from Emersonâs âSpiritual Laws.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âSpiritual Laws.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âLiterary Ethics.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âSocial Aims.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âSpiritual Laws.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âSpiritual Laws.â

Charles V (1500â1558), king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor who ruled over more territory than any other European monarch and sponsored the New World conquests of CortÃ©s, Pizarro, De Soto, and Coronado.

William Pitt (1st earl of Chatham) (1708â1778), English statesman who served as prime minister during the Seven Yearsâ War (1756â1763) and sought to improve relations with the American colonies.

John Hampden (c. 1594â1643), English patriot whose resistance to taxation and the attempts to arrest him set off the Civil War between the Puritans and the Royalists.

Pierre Terrail Bayard (c. 1473â1524), French military hero.

25. Alfred the Great (849â899), king of Wessex and later of all England.

Scipio Africanus Publms Cornelius (Scipio the Elder) (236â184 B.C.) and Scipio Aemilianus Afncanus Numantinus Publius Cornelius (Scipio the Younger) (185â129 B.C.), both Roman generals.

Pericles (c 499â429 B.C.), Greek statesman who sought to make public affairs more democratic and delivered a famous funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War.

Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron) (1788â1824), English Romantic poet whose works include Childe Haroldâs Pilgrimage and Don Juan.

Edmund Burke (1729â1797), British statesman and Whig who was a conservative in political terms, holding that institutions are necessary for the perpetuation of ideals, but a liberal in humanitarian terms, protesting the harshness of British rule in the American colonies and India and urging an end to slavery.

James quotes from Emersonâs âLiterary Ethics.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âWork and Days.â

James quotes from Emersonâs âSovereignty of Ethics.â

See âWork and Days.â

James has taken and abridged this quote from James Eliot Cabotâs A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

James quotes from Shakespeareâs Sonnet 55.

Â 

A World of Pure Experience

Weltanschauung âworldview.â

James Mill (1773â1836), British philosopher, historian, and economist Father of John Stuart Mill James Mill developed a utilitarian ethics in such works as Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind and Elements of Political Economy.

James refers here to Cliffordâs theory of âmind-stuffâ as developed in his essay âOn the Nature of Thmgs-in-Themselves.â

The Harvard Delta was a delta-shaped plot of land on the Harvard campus that served as the site of Memorial Hall.

aliunde âfrom another source.â

salto mortale âmortal leap.â

inter alia âamong other things.â

Morton Prince (1854â1929), an American physician and psychiatrist who wrote The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism.

James refers to the work of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller and others at the University of Oxford

James refers to the work of John Dewey and others at the University of Chicago.

Â 

Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?

sachgemÃ¤ss âpertinent.â

Boyd Henry Bode (1873â1953), an American philosopher who wrote. ââTure Experienceâ and the External World,â âThe Concept of Pure Experience,â and âCognitive Experience and Its Object.â

a quo: âfrom which.â

ad quem: âto which.â

James refers to Harald HÃ¶ffdingâs âA Philosophic Confession.â

Â 

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