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Title: Pragmatism
       A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Author: William James

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PRAGMATISM



A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

By William James (1907)

To the Memory of John Stuart Mill

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--I
do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it--
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 Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the
foundation. 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.
Schiller's in his 'Studies in Humanism,' especially the essays
numbered i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in
general the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to
in his footnotes.

Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine
articles by Le Roy in the Revue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9.
Also articles by Blondel and de Sailly in the Annales de Philosophie
Chretienne, 4me Serie, vols. 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on
Pragmatism, in the French language, to be published very soon.

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 'radical empiricism.'
The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and
still be a pragmatist.

Harvard University, April, 1907.




Contents

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

Chesterton quoted. Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a
factor in all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The
tender-minded and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and
religion. Empiricism gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives
religion without facts. The layman's dilemma. The unreality in
rationalistic systems. Leibnitz on the damned, as an example. M. I.
Swift on the optimism of idealists. Pragmatism as a mediating
system. An objection. Reply: philosophies have characters like men,
and are liable to as summary judgments. Spencer as an example.

Lecture II

What Pragmatism Means

The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of the method. Its
character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and
intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of
truth, equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical,
logical, and natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and
Dewey's 'instrumental' view. The formation of new beliefs. Older
truth always has to be kept account of. Older truth arose similarly.
The 'humanistic' doctrine. Rationalistic criticisms of it.
Pragmatism as mediator between empiricism and religion. Barrenness
of transcendental idealism. How far the concept of the Absolute must
be called true. The true is the good in the way of belief. The clash
of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens discussion.

Lecture III

Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered

The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic
treatment of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The
problem of materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic
treatment. 'God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless
he promise more. Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The
problem of design. 'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT
design. The problem of 'free-will.' Its relations to
'accountability.' Free-will a cosmological theory. The pragmatic
issue at stake in all these problems is what do the alternatives
PROMISE.

Lecture IV

The One and the Many

Total reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality.
Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the
world is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of
discourse. Its parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-
ordinate. Question of one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One
story. One knower. Value of pragmatic method. Absolute monism.
Vivekananda. Various types of union discussed. Conclusion: We must
oppose monistic dogmatism and follow empirical findings.

Lecture V

Pragmatism and Common Sense

Noetic pluralism. How our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking
remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts.
List of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time.
'Things.' Kinds. 'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental
evolution, due to geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and
2) philosophic, compared with common sense. Impossible to say which
is the more 'true.'

Lecture VI

Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

The polemic situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It
means verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us
prosperously through experience. Completed verifications seldom
needful. 'Eternal' truths. Consistency, with language, with previous
truths. Rationalist objections. Truth is a good, like health,
wealth, etc. It is expedient thinking. The past. Truth grows.
Rationalist objections. Reply to them.

Lecture VII

Pragmatism and Humanism

The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of
reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account'
is ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The
human contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence
of pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a
transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects
them. A genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates.

Lecture VIII

Pragmatism and Religion

Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking
it. My friend's letter. Necessities versus possibilities.
'Possibility' defined. Three views of the world's salvation.
Pragmatism is melioristic. We may create reality. Why should
anything BE? Supposed choice before creation. The healthy and the
morbid reply. The 'tender' and the 'tough' types of religion.
Pragmatism mediates.




PRAGMATISM

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called
'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some
people--and I am one of them--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 enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the
enemy's 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."

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 class-room 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 pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the
Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes of
brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I
fancy, understood ALL that he said--yet here I stand, making a very
similar venture.

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW--they brought
good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious
fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho 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 God's omniscience, or good
and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears.
Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's
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, 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 'bakes no bread,' 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 world's 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 world's character, and in
his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the
philosophic business, even tho 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, Locke, Hegel, Spencer,
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 man's 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 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,'
'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety,
'rationalist' 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 men's ways of taking
their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the
'rationalist' 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
'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of
'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' 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-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--
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 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded'
respectively.

THE TENDER-MINDED

Rationalistic (going by 'principles'),
Intellectualistic,
Idealistic,
Optimistic,
Religious,
Free-willist,
Monistic,
Dogmatical.

THE TOUGH-MINDED

Empiricist (going by 'facts'),
Sensationalistic,
Materialistic,
Pessimistic,
Irreligious,
Fatalistic,
Pluralistic,
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--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 Creek. 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--give us
lots of facts. Principles are good--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--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 free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The
evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so
practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And
so forth--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 incompatibles
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 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. Either it
is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic
monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a 'gaseous
vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a
redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion
politely out at the front door:--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 man's
importance. The result is what one may call the growth of
naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature,
he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must
accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho 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 'nothing but'--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, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce.
This 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 'Absolute,' 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, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd 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 vivendi 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 absolutistic
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 quaesitum 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 cannot read them to you now. This young
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 class-room 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 'refined' 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 philosophy's 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.
Leibnitz 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 'Theodicee' 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:

"The 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, 'De Amplitudine Regni
Coelestis,' 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. ... 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, ... may be replete with
happiness and glory. ... 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."

Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There 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 Socinians and Hobbes objected to
this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice and
which God has reserved for himself at many junctures. ... 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 anyone 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, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as
I have already said."

Leibnitz's 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 'samples' of
the genus 'lost-soul' 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. Mr. Swift's 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 'Human Submission' with a series
of city reporter's items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from
starvation and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime. For
instance:

"'After 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 hour's
trial with the shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employment
was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his
home late 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.

"The 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. 'We are aware of
the presence of God in His world,' 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).] 'The Absolute is
the richer for every discord, and for all diversity which it
embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 204). 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 most qualified in
all 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 with directly, 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-not yet the mind of
philosophers and of the proprietary class-but of the great mass of
the silently thinking and feeling men, is coming to this view. They
are judging the universe as they have heretofore permitted the
hierophants of religion and learning to judge THEM. ...

"This 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 haughty monumental vacuity. This
is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after
millions of years of divine opportunity and twenty centuries of
Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms 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 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 sons and eternities to spare for trying out
discredited systems...." [Footnote: Morrison I. Swift, Human
Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-
10.]

Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill
of fare. It is an absolute 'No, I thank you.' "Religion," says Mr.
Swift, "is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." 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 nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a
materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that
religion "actual things are blank." 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 reality's 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 architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an
abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's 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 "who touches this book touches a
man." 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--and oh so
flagrantly!--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.

"Statt der lebendigen Natur," we say, "da Gott die Menschen schuf
hinein"--that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced
thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product,
that sick man's 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 everyone 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 don't 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 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's
name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel--I prudently avoid
names nearer home!--I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these
names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal
ways of falling 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--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 Spencer's 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--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 world's 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
Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive
religious constructions out of doors--it treats them cordially as
well.

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



Lecture II

What Pragmatism Means

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I
returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a
ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a
squirrel--a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a
tree-trunk; while over against the tree's 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: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on
what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' 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 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho 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 'round,' 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?--fated or free?--material or spiritual?--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
anyone 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 other's 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 [pi
rho alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words
'practice' and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into
philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled
'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for
January of that year [Footnote: Translated in the Revue
Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr. Peirce, after
pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that
to develope a thought's 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--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 anyone for twenty years, until I, in an
address before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the
university of California, brought it forward again and made a
special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times
seemed ripe for its reception. The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at
present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On
all hands we find the 'pragmatic movement' 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 'come to stay.'

To take in the importance of Peirce's 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, tho he had not called it by
that name.

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

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
'tautomerous.' 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. "It would never have begun," says Ostwald,
"if 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 'brownie,' while another insisted on
an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon." [Footnote: 'Theorie
und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u.
Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical
pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin:
"I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student
gets it, is that it is 'the 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!" (Science, January 2,
1903.)]

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 any-
where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere--no difference in
abstract truth that doesn't 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. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley
and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.
Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they
are 'known-as.' 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
'temperament' 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 universe's PRINCIPLE, and to
possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself.
'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' 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 don't 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 someone on his knees
praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a
body's 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, 'CATEGORIES,' 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. He made Kepler's laws for the planets to follow; 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 someone
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, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,
Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, 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, 'truth'
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 'instrumental' view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago,
the view that truth in our ideas means their power to 'work,'
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--as denudation by
weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect
by incorporation of new words and pronunciations--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 outree
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 excentric. The most violent revolutions
in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.
Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's 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
'problem of maxima and minima.' 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 leveled against pragmatism. Their
influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first
principle--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 preconceptions is to ignore them
altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's 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--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 day's 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. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's
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 'potential' energy, pre-
existent inside of the atoms, the principle of conservation would be
saved. The discovery of 'helium' as the radiation's outcome, opened
a way to this belief. So Ramsay's view is generally held to be true,
because, altho it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a
minimum of alteration in their nature.

I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as 'true' just
in proportion as it gratifies the individual's 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 individual's
appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth's 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 'to be true' 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--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 'prescription,' 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
'Humanism,' 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--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 us
brevity. I shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on
'common sense' 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 Truth's 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.
Schiller's and Dewey's 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 'work,' 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
'correspondence' (what that may mean we must ask later) between our
minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that
anyone 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
'attributes'; 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
'scientific,' 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 Esop's
fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia
retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the
Absolute's 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
doesn't 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 empiricism's needs. It substitutes
a pallid outline for the real world's 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 'noble,' 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 tho 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 'in so far forth,' 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 'overruled' 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 don't-care mood is also
right for men, and moral holidays in order--that, if I mistake not,
is part, at least, of what the Absolute is 'known-as,' that is the
great difference in our particular experiences which his being true
makes for us, that is part of 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 'true' 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 'truth,'
you will say, to call ideas also 'true' 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.
Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot
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 life's 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.

'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a
definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to
believe': 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 world's 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,--and let me speak now
confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person,--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 wouldn't clash with my other truths. But we cannot
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 he
unstiffens 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-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 experience's 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 God's existence? She could see no meaning in treating as 'not
true' 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.



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. Everyone 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,--use which term
you will,--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
'wood,' those of my coat in the substance 'wool,' 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 'spirit.'

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--the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc.--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 'climate.'
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 don't change in the Lord's
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 don't 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 'real
presence' on independent grounds.

MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling
effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent
philosophy. Berkeley's 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. Berkeley's criticism
of 'matter' 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 doesn't 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 Locke's treatment
of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to
its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so
much consciousness,' 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 Locke's 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:

Suppose, he says, one 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. ... 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?

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 'ideas' and their peculiar connexions with each
other. As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is good or 'true'
for just SO MUCH, but no more.

The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of
'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit
up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may
deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a
phenomenalist like Huxley, 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 'theism,' or what in a
wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' 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
'mud-philosophy,' 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 'matter' 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 nature's 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 one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of
matter as something 'crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under
one. Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone
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 co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved
incarnation was among matter's 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
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 the 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
opposing, 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 arid 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 God's 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 God's 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, "the same, for our praise or blame," as
Browning says. It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which can't 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--appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak--
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--the power, namely, neither more nor
less, that could make just this completed world--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 'materialism or theism?' 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 that's 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 gross-ness,
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
'what does the world PROMISE?' 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
God's function, and is exerted in a world in which a God would now
be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be
missed. 'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right name for religion.

But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's 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 and
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, tho 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 cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words: "The 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. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,'
death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they
had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for
all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have
striven through countless generations to effect." [Footnote: The
Foundations of Belief, p. 30.]

That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic
weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted
cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as
our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products
are gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of 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 anyone; so why should he
argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the
'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' 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 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES--we now know
THAT. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT--
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 Dante and Wordsworth, 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--not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's
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 anyone 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 world's 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 chimaeras 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 materialism's 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 'down'
each other. The truth of 'God' 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. God's 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 woodpecker's
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
existed. 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 'fit' 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 woodpecker's 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 "My
shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible
that they should have been produced by machinery." 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--the game's 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
nature's vast machinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and
counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose,
would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed 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 consequence
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 world's particulars.
Or rather we cannot by any possibility comprehend it. The mere word
'design' by itself has, we see, no consequences and explains
nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of
WHETHER there is design is idle. The real question is WHAT is the
world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed
only by the study of all nature's 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 product's
character. The recent Mont-Pelee eruption, 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 'design' is a blank
cartridge. It carries no consequences, it does no execution. What
sort of design? and what sort of a 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,
anyone who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a
divine one, gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term--the
same, in fact which we saw that the terms God, Spirit, or the
Absolute, yield us 'Design,' 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 'truth' 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. 'Who's
to blame? whom can we punish? whom will God punish?'--these
preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's 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 'imputability' 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 'agents' only, not 'principals,' 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 'free' 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. Fullerton
and McTaggart 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--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 'merit' is a piteous
unreality--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 had 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
'uniformity of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law. But
nature may be only approximately uniform; and persons in whom
knowledge of the world's past has bred pessimism (or doubts as to
the world's 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, "let me be wound up every
day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom."
'Freedom' 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 optimism's 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 ot