FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[116][A communication made (in French) at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, in Rome, April 30, 1905. It is reprinted from theArchives de Psychologie, vol.v, No. 17, June, 1905.] Cette communication est le résumé, forcément très condensé, de vues que l’auteur a exposées, au cours de ces derniers mois, en une série d’articles publiés dans leJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904 et 1905. [The series of articles referred to is reprinted above.Ed.][117]The Sense of Beauty, pp. 44 ff.[118]The Life of Reason[vol.i, “Reason in Common Sense,” p. 142].

[116][A communication made (in French) at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, in Rome, April 30, 1905. It is reprinted from theArchives de Psychologie, vol.v, No. 17, June, 1905.] Cette communication est le résumé, forcément très condensé, de vues que l’auteur a exposées, au cours de ces derniers mois, en une série d’articles publiés dans leJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904 et 1905. [The series of articles referred to is reprinted above.Ed.]

[117]The Sense of Beauty, pp. 44 ff.

[118]The Life of Reason[vol.i, “Reason in Common Sense,” p. 142].

If all the criticisms which the humanisticWeltanschauungis receiving were assachgemässas Mr. Bode’s,[120]the truth of the matter would more rapidly clear up. Not only is it excellently well written, but it brings its own point of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly straight reply.

The argument (unless I fail to catch it) can be expressed as follows:

If a series of experiences be supposed, no one of which is endowed immediately with the self-transcendent function of reference to a reality beyond itself, no motive will occur within the series for supposing anything beyond it to exist. It will remain subjective, and contentedly subjective, both as a whole and in its several parts.

Radical empiricism, trying, as it does, to account for objective knowledge by means of such a series, egregiously fails. It can not explain how the notion of a physical order, as distinguished from a subjectively biographical order, of experiences, ever arose.

It pretends to explain the notion of a physical order, but does so by playing fast and loose with the concept of objective reference. On the one hand, it denies that such reference implies self-transcendency on the part of any one experience; on the other hand, it claims that experiencespoint. But, critically considered, there can be no pointing unless self-transcendency be also allowed. The conjunctive function of pointing, as I have assumed it, is, according to my critic, vitiated by the fallacy of attaching a bilateral relation to a terma quo, as if it could stick out substantively and maintain itself in existence in advance of the termad quemwhich is equally required for it to be a concretely experienced fact. If the relation be made concrete, the termad quemis involved, which would mean (if I succeed inapprehending Mr. Bode rightly) that this latter term, although not empirically there, is yetnoeticallythere, in advance—in other words it would mean that any experience that ‘points’ must already have transcended itself, in the ordinary ‘epistemological’ sense of the word transcend.

Something like this, if I understand Mr. Bode’s text, is the upshot of his state of mind. It is a reasonable sounding state of mind, but it is exactly the state of mind which radical empiricism, by its doctrine of the reality of conjunctive relations, seeks to dispel. I very much fear—so difficult does mutual understanding seem in these exalted regions—that my able critic has failed to understand that doctrine as it is meant to be understood. I suspect that he performs on all these conjunctive relations (of which the aforesaid ‘pointing’ is only one) the usual rationalistic act of substitution—he takes them not as they are given in their first intention, as parts constitutive of experience’s living flow, but only as they appear in retrospect, each fixed as adeterminate object of conception, static, therefore, and contained within itself.

Against this rationalistic tendency to treat experience as chopped up into discontinuous static objects, radical empiricism protests. It insists on taking conjunctions at their ‘face-value,’ just as they come. Consider, for example, such conjunctions as ‘and,’ ‘with,’ ‘near,’ ‘plus,’ ‘towards.’ While we live in such conjunctions our state is one oftransitionin the most literal sense. We are expectant of a ‘more’ to come, and before the morehascome, the transition, nevertheless, is directedtowardsit. I fail otherwise to see how, if one kind of more comes, there should be satisfaction and feeling of fulfilment; but disappointment if the more comes in another shape. One more will continue, another more will arrest or deflect the direction, in which our experience is moving even now. We can not, it is true,nameour different living ‘ands’ or ‘withs’ except by naming the different terms towards which they are moving us, but welivetheir specifications and differences before thoseterms explicitly arrive. Thus, though the various ‘ands’ are all bilateral relations, each requiring a termad quemto define it when viewed in retrospect and articulately conceived, yet in its living moment any one of them may be treated as if it ‘stuck out’ from its terma quoand pointed in a special direction, much as a compass-needle (to use Mr. Bode’s excellent simile) points at the pole, even though it stirs not from its box.

In Professor Höffding’s massive little article inThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,[121]he quotes a saying of Kierkegaard’s to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar to that which my critic seems to employhere should, it seems to me, forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed towards our future, or that any physical movement can have direction until its goal is actually reached.

At this point does it not seem as if the quarrel about self-transcendency in knowledge might drop? Is it not a purely verbal dispute? Call it self-transcendency or call it pointing, whichever you like—it makes no difference so long as real transitions towards real goals are admitted as things giveninexperience, and among experience’s most indefeasible parts. Radical empiricism, unable to close its eyes to the transitions caughtin actu, accounts for the self-transcendency or the pointing (whichever you may call it) as a process that occurs within experience, as an empirically mediated thing of which a perfectly definite description can be given. ‘Epistemology,’ on the other hand, denies this; and pretends that the self-transcendency is unmediated or, if mediated, then mediated in a super-empirical world. To justify this pretension, epistemology has first totransform all our conjunctions into static objects, and this, I submit, is an absolutely arbitrary act. But in spite of Mr. Bode’s mal-treatment of conjunctions, as I understand them—and as I understand him—I believe that at bottom we are fighting for nothing different, but are both defending the same continuities of experience in different forms of words.

There are other criticisms in the article in question, but, as this seems the most vital one, I will for the present, at any rate, leave them untouched.

FOOTNOTES:[119][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 9, April 27, 1905.][120][B. H. Bode: “‘Pure Experience’ and the External World,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, 1905, p. 128.][121]Vol.ii, [1905], pp. 85-92.

[119][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 9, April 27, 1905.]

[120][B. H. Bode: “‘Pure Experience’ and the External World,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, 1905, p. 128.]

[121]Vol.ii, [1905], pp. 85-92.

Although Mr. Pitkin does not name me in his acute article on radical empiricism,[123][...] I fear that some readers, knowing me to have applied that name to my own doctrine, may possibly consider themselves to have been in at my death.

In point of fact my withers are entirely unwrung. I have, indeed, said[124]that ‘to be radical, an empiricism must not admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced.’ But in my own radical empiricism this is only amethodological postulate, not a conclusion supposed to flow from the intrinsic absurdity of transempirical objects. I have never felt the slightest respect for the idealisticarguments which Mr. Pitkin attacks and of which Ferrier made such striking use; and I am perfectly willing to admit any number of noumenal beings or events into philosophy if only their pragmatic value can be shown.

Radical empiricism and pragmatism have so many misunderstandings to suffer from, that it seems my duty not to let this one go any farther, uncorrected.

Mr. Pitkin’s ‘reply’ to me,[125][...] perplexes me by the obscurity of style which I find in almost all our younger philosophers. He asks me, however, two direct questions which I understand, so I take the liberty of answering.

First he asks: Do not experience and science show ‘that countless things are[126]experienced as that which they are not or are only partially?’ I reply: Yes, assuredly, as, for example, ‘things’ distorted by refractive media, ‘molecules,’ or whatever else is taken to be more ultimately real than the immediate content of the perceptive moment.

Secondly: “If experience is self-supporting[127](inanyintelligible sense) does this fact preclude the possibility of (a) something not experienced and (b) action of experience upon a noumenon?”

My reply is: Assuredly not the possibility of either—how could it? Yet in my opinion we should be wise not toconsiderany thing or action of that nature, and to restrict our universe of philosophic discourse to what is experienced or, at least, experienceable.[128]

FOOTNOTES:[122][Reprinted from theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.iii, No. 26, December 20, 1906; andibid., vol.iv, No. 4, February 14, 1907, where the original is entitled “A Reply to Mr. Pitkin.”Ed.][123][W. B. Pitkin: “A Problem of Evidence in Radical Empiricism,”ibid., vol.iii, No. 24, November 22, 1906.Ed.][124][Above, p.42.Ed.][125][“In Reply to Professor James,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.iv, No. 2, January 17, 1907.Ed.][126]Mr. Pitkin inserts the clause: ‘by reason of the very nature of experience itself.’ Not understanding just what reason is meant, I do not include this clause in my answer.[127][See above, p.193.Ed.][128][Elsewhere, in speaking of ‘reality’ as “conceptual or perceptual experiences,” the author says: “This is meant merely to exclude reality of an ‘unknowable’ sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given. It includes, of course, any amount of empirical reality independent of the knower.”Meaning of Truth, p. 100, note.Ed.]

[122][Reprinted from theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.iii, No. 26, December 20, 1906; andibid., vol.iv, No. 4, February 14, 1907, where the original is entitled “A Reply to Mr. Pitkin.”Ed.]

[123][W. B. Pitkin: “A Problem of Evidence in Radical Empiricism,”ibid., vol.iii, No. 24, November 22, 1906.Ed.]

[124][Above, p.42.Ed.]

[125][“In Reply to Professor James,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.iv, No. 2, January 17, 1907.Ed.]

[126]Mr. Pitkin inserts the clause: ‘by reason of the very nature of experience itself.’ Not understanding just what reason is meant, I do not include this clause in my answer.

[127][See above, p.193.Ed.]

[128][Elsewhere, in speaking of ‘reality’ as “conceptual or perceptual experiences,” the author says: “This is meant merely to exclude reality of an ‘unknowable’ sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given. It includes, of course, any amount of empirical reality independent of the knower.”Meaning of Truth, p. 100, note.Ed.]

Mr. Joseph’s criticism of my article ‘Humanism and Truth’[130]is a useful contribution to the general clearing up. He has seriously tried to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean; and if he has failed, it is the fault neither of his patience nor of his sincerity, but rather of stubborn tricks of thought which he could not easily get rid of. Minute polemics, in which the parties try to rebut every detail of each of the other’s charges, are a useful exercise only to the disputants. They can but breed confusion in a reader. I will therefore ignore as much as possible the text of both our articles (mine was inadequate enough) and treat once more the general objective situation.

As I apprehend the movement towards humanism, it is based on no particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer. It is much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion over-night, as it were, borne upon tides ‘too full for sound or foam,’ that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life—changes of which we all have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle. This is like stoppinga river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. Round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there all the same.’ In reading Mr. Joseph, I am not a little reminded of those Catholic writers who refute Darwinism by telling us that higher species can not come from lower becauseminus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their own destruction, and that would violate the principle that every reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive argument. You can not settle questions of fact by formal logic. I feel as if Mr. Joseph almost pounced on my words singly, without giving the sentences time to get out of my mouth.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least resistance ‘on the whole.’ “In other words,” Mr. Joseph may probably say, “resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.” “Even so,” I make reply,—“if you willconsent to use no politer word.” For humanism, conceiving the more ‘true’ as the more ‘satisfactory’ (Dewey’s term) has to renounce sincerely rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case; and what is ‘more’ satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum ofplusesandminuses, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this view of the conditions of belief.

That humanism’s critics have never imagined this attitude inwardly, is shown by their invariable tactics. They do not get into it far enough to see objectively and fromwithout what their own opposite notion of truth is. Mr. Joseph is possessed by some such notion; he thinks his readers to be full of it, he obeys it, works from it, but never even essays to tell us what it is. The nearest he comes to doing so is where[131]he says it is the way “we ought to think,” whether we be psychologically compelled to or not.

Of course humanism agrees to this: it is only a manner of calling truth an ideal. But humanism explicates the summarizing word ‘ought’ into a mass of pragmatic motives from the midst of which our critics think that truth itself takes flight. Truth is a name of double meaning. It stands now for an abstract something defined only as that to which our thought ought to conform; and again it stands for the concrete propositions within which we believe that conformity already reigns—they being so many ‘truths.’ Humanism sees that the only conformity we ever have to deal with concretely is that between our subjects and our predicates, using these words in a verybroad sense. It sees moreover that this conformity is ‘validated’ (to use Mr. Schiller’s term) by an indefinite number of pragmatic tests that vary as the predicates and subjects vary. If an S gets superseded by an SP that gives our mind a completer sum of satisfactions, we always say, humanism points out, that we have advanced to a better position in regard to truth.

Now many of our judgments thus attained are retrospective. The S’es, so the judgment runs, were SP’s already ere the fact was humanly recorded. Common sense, struck by this state of things, now rearranges the whole field; and traditional philosophy follows her example. The general requirement that predicates must conform to their subject, they translate into an ontological theory. A most previous Subject of all is substituted for the lesser subjects and conceived of as an archetypal Reality; and the conformity required of predicates in detail is reinterpreted as a relation which our whole mind, with all its subjects and predicates together, must get intowith respect to this Reality. It, meanwhile, is conceived as eternal, static, and unaffected by our thinking. Conformity to a non-human Archetype like this is probably the notion of truth which my opponent shares with common sense and philosophic rationalism.

When now Humanism, fully admitting both the naturalness and the grandeur of this hypothesis, nevertheless points to its sterility, and declines to chime in with the substitution, keeping to the concrete and still lodging truth between the subjects and the predicates in detail, it provokes the outcry which we hear and which my critic echoes.

One of the commonest parts of the outcry is that humanism is subjectivistic altogether—it is supposed to labor under a necessity of ‘denying trans-perceptual reality.’[132]It is not hard to see how this misconception of humanism may have arisen; and humanistic writers, partly from not having sufficiently guarded their expressions, and partly from not having yet “got round” (in the poverty of theirliterature) to a full discussion of the subject, are doubtless in some degree to blame. But I fail to understand how any one with a working grasp of their principles can charge them wholesale with subjectivism. I myself have never thought of humanism as being subjectivistic farther than to this extent, that, inasmuch as it treats the thinker as being himself one portion of reality, it must also allow thatsomeof the realities that he declares for true are created by his being there. Such realities of course are either acts of his, or relations between other things and him, or relations between things, which, but for him, would never have been traced. Humanists are subjectivistic, also in this, that, unlike rationalists (who think they carry a warrant for the absolute truth of what they now believe in in their present pocket), they hold all present beliefs as subject to revision in the light of future experience. The future experience, however, may be of things outside the thinker; and that this is so the humanist may believe as freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.

The critics of humanism (though here I follow them but darkly) appear to object to any infusion whatever of subjectivism into truth. All must be archetypal; every truth must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism sees that an enormous quantity of truth must be written down as having pre-existed to its perception by us humans. In countless instances we find it most satisfactory to believe that, though we were always ignorant of the fact, it alwayswasa fact that S was SP. But humanism separates this class of cases from those in which it is more satisfactory to believe the opposite, e.g., that S is ephemeral, or P a passing event, or SP created by the perceiving act. Our critics seem on the other hand, to wish to universalize the retrospective type of instance. Reality must pre-exist to every assertion for which truth is claimed. And, not content with this overuse of one particular type of judgment, our critics claim its monopoly. They appear to wish to cut off Humanism from its rights to any retrospection at all.

Humanism says that satisfactoriness is what distinguishes the true from the false. But satisfactoriness is both a subjective quality, and a present one.Ergo(the critics appear to reason) an object,quâtrue, must always for humanism be both present and subjective, and a humanist’s belief can never be in anything that lives outside of the belief itself or ante-dates it. Why so preposterous a charge should be so current, I find it hard to say. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that both the objective and the past existence of the object may be the very things about it that most seem satisfactory, and that most invite us to believe them. The past tense can figure in the humanist’s world, as well of belief as of representation, quite as harmoniously as in the world of any one else.

Mr. Joseph gives a special turn to this accusation. He charges me[133]with being self-contradictory when I say that the main categories of thought were evolved in the course of experience itself. For I use these verycategories to define the course of experience by. Experience, as I talk about it, is a product of their use; and yet I take it as true anteriorly to them. This seems to Mr. Joseph to be an absurdity. I hope it does not seem such to his readers; for if experiences can suggest hypotheses at all (and they notoriously do so) I can see no absurdity whatever in the notion of a retrospective hypothesis having for its object the very train of experiences by which its own being, along with that of other things, has been brought about. If the hypothesis is ‘satisfactory’ we must, of course, believe it to have been true anteriorly to its formulation by ourselves. Every explanation of a present by a past seems to involve this kind of circle, which is not a vicious circle. The past iscausa existendiof the present, which in turn iscausa cognoscendiof the past. If the present were treated ascausa existendiof the past, the circle might indeed be vicious.

Closely connected with this pseudo-difficulty is another one of wider scope and greatercomplication—more excusable therefore.[134]Humanism, namely, asking how truth in point of fact is reached, and seeing that it is by ever substituting more satisfactory for less satisfactory opinions, is thereby led into a vague historic sketch of truth’s development. The earliest ‘opinions,’ it thinks, must have been dim, unconnected ‘feelings,’ and only little by little did more and more orderly views of things replace them. Our own retrospective view of this whole evolution is now, let us say, the latest candidate for ‘truth’ as yet reached in the process. To be a satisfactory candidate, it must give some definite sort of a picture of what forces keep the process going. On the subjective side we have a fairly definite picture—sensation, association, interest, hypothesis, these account in a general way for the growth into a cosmos of the relative chaos with which the mind began.

But on the side of the object, so to call it roughly, our view is much less satisfactory.Of which of our many objects are we to believe that it trulywasthere and at work before the human mind began? Time, space, kind, number, serial order, cause, consciousness, are hard things not to objectify—even transcendental idealism leaves them standing as ‘empirically real.’ Substance, matter, force, fall down more easily before criticism, and secondary qualities make almost no resistance at all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field of speculation, from Scholasticism through Kantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recurring tendency to convert the pre-human into a merely logical object, an unknowableding-an-sich, that but starts the process, or a vaguemateria primathat but receives our forms.[135]

The reasons for this are not so much logical as they are material. We can postulate an extra-mentalthatfreely enough (though some idealists have denied us the privilege), but when we have done so, thewhatof it is hardto determine satisfactorily, because of the oppositions and entanglements of the variously proposedwhatswith one another and with the history of the human mind. The literature of speculative cosmology bears witness to this difficulty. Humanism suffers from it no more than any other philosophy suffers, but it makes all our cosmogonic theories so unsatisfactory that some thinkers seek relief in the denial of any primal dualism. Absolute Thought or ‘pure experience’ is postulated, and endowed with attributes calculated to justify the belief that it may ‘run itself.’ Both these truth-claiming hypotheses are non-dualistic in the old mind-and-matter sense; but the one is monistic and the other pluralistic as to the world process itself. Some humanists are non-dualists of this sort—I myself am oneund zwarof the pluralistic brand. But doubtless dualistic humanists also exist, as well as non-dualistic ones of the monistic wing.

Mr. Joseph pins these general philosophic difficulties on humanism alone, or possibly on me alone. My article spoke vaguely of a‘most chaotic pure experience’ coming first, and building up the mind.[136]But how can two structureless things interact so as to produce a structure? my critic triumphantly asks. Of course they can’t, as purely so-named entities. We must make additional hypotheses. We must beg a minimum of structure for them. Thekindof minimum thatmighthave tended to increase towards what we now find actually developed is the philosophical desideratum here. The question is that of the most materially satisfactory hypothesis. Mr. Joseph handles it by formal logic purely, as if he had no acquaintance with the logic of hypothesis at all.

Mr. Joseph again is much bewildered as to what a humanist can mean when he uses the word knowledge. He tries to convict me[137]of vaguely identifying it with any kind of good. Knowledge is a difficult thing to define briefly, and Mr. Joseph shows his own constructive hand here even less than in the rest of hisarticle. I have myself put forth on several occasions a radically pragmatist account of knowledge,[138]the existence of which account my critic probably does not know of—so perhaps I had better not say anything about knowledge until he reads and attacks that. I will say, however, that whatever the relation called knowing may itself prove to consist in, I can think of no conceivable kind ofobjectwhich may not become an object of knowledge on humanistic principles as well as on the principles of any other philosophy.[139]

I confess that I am pretty steadily hampered by the habit, on the part of humanism’s critics, of assuming that they have truer ideas than mine of truth and knowledge, the nature of which I must know of and can not need to have re-defined. I have consequently to reconstruct these ideas in order to carry on the discussion (I have e.g. had to do so in some partsof this article) and I thereby expose myself to charges of caricature. In one part of Mr. Joseph’s attack, however, I rejoice that we are free from this embarrassment. It is an important point and covers probably a genuine difficulty, so I take it up last.

When, following Schiller and Dewey, I define the true as that which gives the maximal combination of satisfactions, and say that satisfaction is a many-dimensional term that can be realized in various ways, Mr. Joseph replies, rightly enough, that the chief satisfaction of a rational creature must always be his thought that what he believes istrue, whether the truth brings him the satisfaction of collateral profits or not. This would seem, however, to make of truth the prior concept, and to relegate satisfaction to a secondary place.

Again, if to be satisfactory is what is meant by being true,whosesatisfactions, andwhichof his satisfactions, are to count? Discriminations notoriously have to be made; and the upshot is that only rational candidates andintellectual satisfactions stand the test. We are then driven to a purely theoretic notion of truth, and get out of the pragmatic atmosphere altogether. And with this Mr. Joseph leaves us—truth is truth, and there is an end of the matter. But he makes a very pretty show of convicting me of self-stultification in according to our purely theoretic satisfactions any place in the humanistic scheme. They crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, he thinks, and pragmatism has to go into bankruptcy if she recognizes them at all.

There is no room for disagreement about the facts here; but the destructive force of the reasoning disappears as soon as we talk concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist. Mr. Joseph, faithful to the habits of his party, makes no attempt at characterizing them, but assumes that their nature is self-evident to all.

Are they not all mere matters ofconsistency—and emphaticallynotof consistencybetween an Absolute Reality and the mind’s copies of it, but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and manners of reacting, in the mind? And are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that develop mentalhabits—habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow ‘law’? If this were so, what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit, and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point of fact this seems to have been the probable case. At life’s origin, any present perception may have been ‘true’—if such a word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became ‘true’ whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were ‘false’ or ‘mistaken’ reactions. But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, with adisappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory. To gain relief we seek either to preserve the reaction by re-interpreting the object, or, leaving the object as it is, we react in a way contrary to the way claimed of us. Neither solution is easy. Such a situation might be that of Mr. Joseph, with me claiming assent to humanism from him. He can not apperceive it so as to permit him to gratify my claim; but there is enough appeal in the claim to induce him to write a whole article in justification of his refusal. If he should assent to humanism, on the other hand, that would drag after it an unwelcome, yea incredible, alteration of his previous mental beliefs. Whichever alternative he might adopt, however, a new equilibrium of intellectual consistency would in the end be reached. He would feel,whichever way he decided, that he was now thinking truly. But if, with his old habits unaltered, he should simply add to them the new one of advocating humanism quietly or noisily, his mind would be rent into two systems, each of which would accuse the other of falsehood. The resultant situation, being profoundly unsatisfactory, would also be instable.

Theoretic truth is thus no relation between our mind and archetypal reality. It fallswithinthe mind, being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects—‘accord’ consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the balance—provided always that we are highly organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which their livesare cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we ‘ought’ to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates that do not contradict their subjects. We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.

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

I think that if Mr. Joseph will but consider all these things a little more concretely, he may find that the humanistic scheme and the notion of theoretic truth fall into line consistently enough to yield him also intellectual satisfaction.

FOOTNOTES:[129][Reprinted without change fromMind, N. S., vol.xiv, No. 54, April, 1905, pp. 190-198. Pages245-247, and pp.261-265, have also been reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 54-57, and pp. 97-100. The present essay is referred to above, p.203.Ed.][130][‘Humanism and Truth’ first appeared inMind, N. S., vol.xiii, No. 52, October, 1904. It is reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. this articlepassim. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph’s criticism, entitled “Professor James on ‘Humanism and Truth,’” appeared inMind, N. S., vol.xiv, No. 53, January, 1905.Ed.][131]Op. cit., p. 37.[132][Cf. above, pp.241-243.][133]Op. cit., p. 32.[134][This] Mr. Joseph deals with (though in much too pettifogging and logic-chopping a way) on pp. 33-34 of his article.[135]Compare some elaborate articles by M. Le Roy and M. Wilbois in theRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vols.viii,ix, andx, [1900, 1901, and 1902.][136][Cf.The Meaning of Truth, p. 64.][137][Joseph:op. cit., p. 36.][138]Most recently in two articles, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” [See above, pp.1-91.][139]For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring humanism with knowing, I may refer to Prof. Woodbridge’s very able address at the Saint Louis Congress, “The Field of Logic,” printed inScience, N. Y., November 4, 1904.

[129][Reprinted without change fromMind, N. S., vol.xiv, No. 54, April, 1905, pp. 190-198. Pages245-247, and pp.261-265, have also been reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 54-57, and pp. 97-100. The present essay is referred to above, p.203.Ed.]

[130][‘Humanism and Truth’ first appeared inMind, N. S., vol.xiii, No. 52, October, 1904. It is reprinted inThe Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. this articlepassim. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph’s criticism, entitled “Professor James on ‘Humanism and Truth,’” appeared inMind, N. S., vol.xiv, No. 53, January, 1905.Ed.]

[131]Op. cit., p. 37.

[132][Cf. above, pp.241-243.]

[133]Op. cit., p. 32.

[134][This] Mr. Joseph deals with (though in much too pettifogging and logic-chopping a way) on pp. 33-34 of his article.

[135]Compare some elaborate articles by M. Le Roy and M. Wilbois in theRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vols.viii,ix, andx, [1900, 1901, and 1902.]

[136][Cf.The Meaning of Truth, p. 64.]

[137][Joseph:op. cit., p. 36.]

[138]Most recently in two articles, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” [See above, pp.1-91.]

[139]For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring humanism with knowing, I may refer to Prof. Woodbridge’s very able address at the Saint Louis Congress, “The Field of Logic,” printed inScience, N. Y., November 4, 1904.

No seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the terre-à-terre sort of discussion of the issues between Empiricism and Transcendentalism (or, as the champions of the latter would probably prefer to say, between Irrationalism and Rationalism) that seems to have begun inMind.[141]It would seem as if, over concrete examples like Mr. J. S. Haldane’s, both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding. As a reader with a strong bias towards Irrationalism, I have studied his article[142]with the liveliest admiration of its temper and its painstaking effort to be clear. But the cases discussed failed to satisfy me, and I was at first tempted to write a Note animadverting upon them in detail. The growth of the limb, the sea’s contour, the vicarious functioning of the nerve-centre, the digitalis curing the heart, are unfortunatelynotcases where we canseeanythrough-and-throughconditioning of the parts by the whole. They are all cases of reciprocity where subjects, supposed independently to exist, acquire certain attributes through their relations to other subjects. That they alsoexistthrough similar relations is only an ideal supposition, not verified to our understanding in these or any other concrete cases whatsoever.

If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane’s friends could easily reply that he only gave us such examples on account of the hardness of our hearts. He knew full well their imperfection, but he hoped that to those who would not spontaneously ascend to the Notion of the Totality, these cases might prove a spur and suggest and symbolize something better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought forward is a real concrete. They are all abstractions from the Whole, and of course the “through-and-through” character can not be found in them. Each of them still contains among its elements what we callthings, grammatical subjects,forming a sort of residualcaput mortuumof Existence after all the relations that figure in the examples have been told off. On this “existence,” thinks popular philosophy, things may live on, like the winter bears on their own fat, never entering relations at all, or, if entering them, entering an entirely different set of them from those treated of in Mr. Haldane’s examples. Thusifthe digitalis were to weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and to produce death (as sometimes happens), it would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the function of “kill” instead of that of “cure.” The function and relation seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external and, so to speak, accidental to each other. But this popular view, Mr. Haldane’s friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the “existence” of digitalis and heart outside of the relations of killing or curing, is but a function in a wider system of relations, of which,pro hac vice, we take no account. The larger systemdetermines theexistencejust as absolutely as the system “kill,” or the system “cure,” determined thefunctionof the digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of biding with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the law of through-and-throughness must and does obtain.

Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us completely from chopping logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane has chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken to show us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not the sum total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion of through-and-throughness, avowedly takenin abstracto. In abstract systems the “through-and-through” Ideal is realized on every hand. In any system, as such, the members are onlymembersin the system. Abolish the system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived them through noother property than the abstract one of membership. Neither rightness nor leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither mortgager nor mortgagee, except through mortgage. The logic of these cases is this:—IfA, then B; butifB, then A: whereforeifeither, Both; and if not Both, Nothing.

It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute totality of thingsmaybe organized exactly after the pattern of one of these “through-and-through” abstractions. In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of mental movements. Husband makes, and is made by, wife, through marriage; one makes other, by being itself other; everything self-created through its opposite—you go round like a squirrel in a cage. But if you stop and reflect upon what you are about, you lay bare the exact point at issue between common sense and the “through-and-through” school.

What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said above: If any Member, then the Whole System; if not the Whole System, then Nothing. But how can Logicpossibly do anything more with these two hypotheses than combine them into the single disjunctive proposition—“Either this Whole System, just as it stands, or Nothing at all.” Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of Logic in the matter, and can any disjunction, as such, resolveitself? It may be that Mr. Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the Whole System, carries real existence with it. But if he has been as unsuccessful as I in assimilating the Hegelian re-editings of the Anselmian proof,[143]he will have to say that though Logic may determinewhatthe system must be,ifit is, something else than Logic must tell usthatit is. Mr. Haldane in this case would probably consciously, or unconsciously, make an appeal to Fact: the disjunctionisdecided, since nobody can dispute that now, as a matter of fact,something, and not nothing,is. We musttherefore, he would probably say, go on to admit the Whole System in the desiderated sense. Is not then the validity of theAnselmian proof the nucleus of the whole question between Logic and Fact? Ought not the efforts of Mr. Haldane and his friends to be principally devoted to its elucidation? Is it not the real door of separation between Empiricism and Rationalism? And if the Rationalists leave that door for a moment off its hinges, can any power keep that abstract, opaque, unmediated, external, irrational, and irresponsible monster, known to the vulgar as bare Fact, from getting in and contaminating the whole sanctuary with his presence? Can anything prevent Faust from changing “Am Anfang war das Wort” into “Am Anfang war die That?”

Nothing in earth or heaven. Only the Anselmian proof can keep Fact out of philosophy. The question, “Shall Fact be recognized as an ultimate principle?” is the whole issue between the Rationalists and the Empiricism of vulgar thought.

Of course, if so recognized, Fact sets a limit to the “through-and-through” character of the world’s rationality. That rationality mightthen mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but not between the conception itself and reality. Reality would have to be given, not by Reason, but by Fact. Fact holds out blankly, brutally and blindly, against that universal deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the Absolutist Logic demands, and it is the only thing that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Absolutist Logic—hence its non-recognition, its ‘cutting’ of Fact.

The reasons it gives for the ‘cutting’ are that Fact is speechless, a mere word for the negation of thought, a vacuous unknowability, a dog-in-the-manger, in truth, which having no rights of its own, can find nothing else to do than to keep its betters out of theirs.

There are two points involved here: first the claim that certain things have rights that are absolute, ubiquitous and all pervasive, and in regard to which nothing else can possibly exist in itsownright; and second that anything that deniesthisassertion ispurenegativity with no positive context whatsoever.

Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way is thereby convicted of incapacity to be positive in any other way? The word “Fact” is like the word “Accident,” like the word “Absolute” itself. They all have their negative connotation. In truth, their whole connotation is negative and relative. All it says is that, whatever the thing may be that is denoted by the words,otherthings do not control it. Where fact, where accident is, they must be silent, it alone can speak. But that does not prevent its speaking as loudly as you please, in its own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and active in the maximum degree. An indeterminate future volition on my part, for example, would be a strict accident as far as my present self is concerned. But that could not prevent it,in the moment in which it occurred, from being possibly the most intensely living and luminous experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute factab extrasays nothing whatever as to its inwardness. It simply says tooutsiders: ‘Hands off!’

And this brings us back to the first point of the Absolutist indictment of Fact. Is that point really anything more than a fantastic dislike to lettinganythingsay ‘Hands off’? What else explains the contempt the Absolutist authors exhibit for a freedom defined simply on its “negative” side, as freedom “from,” etc.? What else prompts them to deride such freedom? But, dislike for dislike, who shall decide? Why is not their dislike at having me “from” them, entirely on a par with mine at having them “through” me?

I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention them, I am doing a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intellectual Orson of myself. But, for the life of me, I can not help it, because I feel sure that likes and dislikesmustbe among the ultimate factors of their philosophy as well as of mine. Would they but admit it! How sweetly we then could hold converse together! There is something finite about us both, as we now stand. We do not know the Absolute Wholeyet.Partof it is still negative to us. Amongthewhatsof it still stalks a mob of opaquethats, without which we cannot think. But just as I admit that this is all possibly provisional, that even the Anselmian proof may come out all right, and creationmaybe a rational system through-and-through, why might they not also admit that it may all be otherwise, and that the shadow, the opacity, the negativity, the “from”-ness, the plurality that is ultimate,maynever be wholly driven from the scene. We should both then be avowedly making hypotheses, playing with Ideals. Ah! Why is the notion of hypothesis so abhorrent to the Hegelian mind?

And once down on our common level of hypothesis, we might then admit scepticism, since the Whole is not yet revealed, to be the soundestlogicalposition. But since we are in the main not sceptics, we might go on and frankly confess to each other the motives for our several faiths. I frankly confess mine—I can not but think that at bottom they are of an æsthetic and not of a logical sort. The “through-and-through” universe seems tosuffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live in a large seaside boarding-house with no private bed-room in which I might take refuge from the society of the place. I am distinctly aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of sinner and pharisee has something to do with the matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. There is a story of two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same funeral. One came first and had got no farther than “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” when the other entered. “Iam the Resurrection and the Life,” cried the latter. The “through-and-through” philosophy, as it actually exists, reminds many of us of that clergyman. It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconsciousKosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. The “freedom”wewant to see there is not the freedom, with a string tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that philosophy. “Let it fly away,” we say, “fromus! What then?”

Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental grossness. But again,Ich kann nicht anders.I show my feelings; whywillthey not show theirs? I know theyhavea personal feeling about the through-and-through universe, which is entirely different from mine, and which I should very likely be much the better for gaining if they would only show me how. Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing athatin things which Logic does not expel, the most I can do is toaspireto the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelianswillrefuse to set an example, what can they expect the rest ofus to do? To speak more seriously, the onefundamentalquarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and æsthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?

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