Latest / Logic Library / 03 Part 2 - Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered - Pragmatism - William James

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03 Part 2 - Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered - Pragmatism - William James · Logic Library

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Theism and materialism so indifferent when taking retrospectively, point when we take them prospectively,
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to wholly different outlooks of experience. For according to the theory of mechanical
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evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, though they are certainly
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to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us,
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and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain
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to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they have once evolved.
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You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary
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science foresees. I cannot state it better than in mister Belfour's words. The
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energies of our system will decay. The glory of the Sun will be dimmed,
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and the Earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race,
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which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into
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the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which
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in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken, The contented silence of
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the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer imperishable monuments
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and immortal deeds. Death itself and love stronger than death, will be as
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though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be
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worse for all that that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of
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man have striven through countless generations to effect footnote the Foundations of Belief, page
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thirty. That is the sting of it that in the vast driftings of the
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cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud
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bank floats away, long lingering ear it be dissolved, even as our world
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now lingers for our joy. Yet when these transient products are gun, nothing,
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absolutely nothing remains of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which
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they may have enshrined, gun utterly from the very sphere and room of being,
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without an echo, without a memory, without an influence on aught that
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may come after to make it care for similar ideals. This utter, final
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wreck and traggy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood.
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The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last
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surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Missus
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Spencer believes this as much as anyone. So why should he argue with us
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as if we were making sillisthetic objections to the grossness of matter and motion the
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principles of his philosophy, when what really dismisses is the disconsolateness of its ulterior
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practical results. No, the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative.
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It would be forcical at this state to make complaint of it for what
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it is, for grossness. Grossness is what grossness does? We now know
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that we make complaint of it, On the contrary, for what it is
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not, Not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller
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of our remotest hopes. The notion of God, on the other hand,
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however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical
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philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an
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ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a guard in it,
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to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze. But
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we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals, and sure
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to bring them elsewhere to fruition, so that where he is, strategy is
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only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution, not the absolutely final things.
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This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of
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our breast, and those poets like Dante and Wordsworth who lived on the conviction
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of such an order owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of
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their verse. Here, then, in these different emotional and practical appeals,
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in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the
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delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism,
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not in hair splitting abstractions about matters inner essence, or about the metaphysical
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attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal
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and the cutting off of ultimate hopes. Spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal
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moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely, here is an issue
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genuine enough for anyone who feels it, and as long as men are men,
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it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate. But possibly some of
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you may still rally to their defense. Even whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism
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make different prophecies of the world's future. You may yourselves poo poo the difference
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as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The
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essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views
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and to feel no concern about such cameras as the latter end of the world.
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Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do
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injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish
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of the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, that overlapping
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things, are the truly philosophic concerns. All superior minds feel seriously about them,
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and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more
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shallow man. The issues of fact at stake in the debate are, of
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course vaguely enough conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its
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forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism's son sets in a sea
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of disappointment. Remember what I said of the absolute, It grants us more
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holidays any religious view does this it not only incites our more strenuous moments,
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but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies
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them. It paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough to be sure. The
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exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God ensures will have
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to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science. We can study our
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God only by studying his creation, but we can enjoy our God if we
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have one in advance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence
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for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given you
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your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You
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remember what I said yesterday about the way in which which truths clash and try
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to down each other. The truth of God has to run the gauntlet of
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all our other truths. It is on trial by them, and they on
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trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all
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the truths have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall find
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a modus vivendi. Let me pause to a very cognate philosophic problem, the
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question of design in nature. God's existence has from time immorial been held to
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be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in
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view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue, feet, tail,
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et cetera, fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid
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in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws
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of light to perfection, leading its raised to a sharp picture on our retina.
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Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design. It was held,
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and the designer was always treated as a man loving deity. The first
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step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed, Nature was ransacked
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for results obtained through separate things being co adapted. Our eyes, for instance,
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originate in intrajuterine darkness, and the light originates in the sun. Yet
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see how they fit each other. They are evidently made for each other.
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Vision is the end designed light and eyes, the separate means devised for its
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attainment. It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of
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this argument, to see how little it counts for. Since the triumph of
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the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance happening to
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bring forth fit results if only they have time to add themselves together. He
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showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their
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unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would
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argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point
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of view to the grub under the bock. The exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's
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organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer. Theologians have by this
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time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian facts, and yet to
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interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of
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purpose against mechanism of one or the other. It was as if one should
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say, my shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet. Hence it is
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impossible that they should have been produced by machinery. We know that they are
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both. They are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with
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shoes. Theology need only stretch similarly the designs of God. As the aim
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of a football team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal.
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If that were so, they would simply get up on some dark knight
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and place it there. But to get it there by a fixed machinery of
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conditions, the game's rules, and the opposing players. So the aim of
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God is not merely, let us say to make men and to say them,
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but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature's vast machinery.
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Without Nature's stupendous laws and counterforces, Man's creation and perfection, we might
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suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them. This
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saves the form of the design argument at the expense of its old, easy
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human content. The designer is no longer the old man like deity. His
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designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The what
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of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for
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them becomes a very little consequence. In comparison, we can with difficulty comprehend
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the character of a cosmic mind, whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange
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mixture of goods and evils that we find in these actual world's particulars. Or
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rather, we cannot, by any possibility comprehend it. The mere word design
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by itself has we see no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenness
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of principles. The old question of whether there is a design is idle.
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The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a
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designer, and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing,
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the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been fitted to that production.
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The argument from fitness to design would consequently always apply whatever were their product's
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character. The recent Mount Pelie eruption, for example, required all previous history
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to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken
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ships, volcanic ashes, et cetera. In just that one hideous configuration oppositions.
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France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to
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exist and send our ships there. If God aimed at just that result.
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The means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it showed exquisite intelligence,
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and so so at any state of things, whatever either in nature or in
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history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of things must always
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make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious, when we look at
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what has actually come, The conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it.
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We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any
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conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to produce it.
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Pragmatically, then the abstract word design is a blank cartridge. It carries
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no consequences, It does no execution. What sort of design and what sort
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of a designer are the only serious questions, and the study of facts is
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the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile, pending the slow answer
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from facts, anyone who insists that there is designer, and who is sure
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he is a divine one gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term. The
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same in fact which we saw that the terms God, spirit or the absolute
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yieldless design worthless, though it be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or
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behind things for our admiration, becomes if our faith concretes it into something theistic,
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a term of promise, returning with it into experience, we gain a
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more confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force, but a
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seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence
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in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at the present discernible in the terms
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design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right, not wrong, better
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not worse, that is a most important meaning that much at least of possible
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truth the terms will then have in them. Let me take up another well
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worn controversy, the free will problem. Most persons who believe in what is
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called their free will do so after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle,
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a positive faculty or virtue added to man by which his dignity is enigmatically
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augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists who deny it,
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who say that individual men originate nothing but merely transmit to the future the
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whole push of the past cosmos, of which they are so small, an
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expression diminish man. He is less admirable stripped of this creative principle. I
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imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free will,
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and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with
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our fidelity. But free will has also been discussed pragmatically, and strangely enough,
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the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. Do
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you know how large a part questions of accountability have played in ethical controversy?
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To hear some persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is
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a code of merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological leaven
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the interesting crime and sin and punishment abide with us? Who's to blame?
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Whom can we punish? Whom will God punish? These preoccupations hang like a
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bad dream of a man's religious history. So both free will and determinism have
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been invagued against and called absurd, because each, in the eyes of its
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enemies, has seemed to prevent the imputability of good or bad deeds. To
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their authors, queer antinemyitiss free will means novelty, the grafting on to the
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past of something not involved therein if our acts were predetermined, if we merely
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transmitted the push of the whole past, the free willists say, how could
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we be praised or blamed for anything. We should be agents only, not
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principles. And where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility? But where
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would it be if we had free will? Rejoined the determinists. If a
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free act be a sheer novelty that comes not from me, the previous me,
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but ex nihilo, and simply tax itself on to me, how can
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I, the previous eye, be responsible? How can I have any permanent
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character that will stand still enough for praise or blame to be awarded. The
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chaplet of my days tumbles into a cost of disconnected beads as soon as as
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the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine misters Fullerton
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and MacTaggart have recently laid about them. Doubtedly with this argument it may be
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good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you,
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quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child with a
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sense for realities ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity
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or imputability, instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on
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the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts,
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we shall praise him. If he does bad acts, we shall punish him
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anyhow, And quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what
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was previous in him or our novelties in a strict sense, to make our
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human ethics revolve about the question of merit is a pitious unreality. God alone
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can know our merits, if we have any. The real ground for supposing
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free will is indeed pragmatic, for it has nothing to do with this contemptible
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right to punish, which had made such a noise in past discussions of the
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subject. Free will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect
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that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future
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may not identically repeat and imitate the past that imitation and moss is there who
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can deny the general uniformity of nature is presupposed by every lesser law. But
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nature may be only approximately uniform. And persons in whom knowledge of the world's
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post has bred pessimism or doubts as to the world's good character, which becomes
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certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed may naturally welcome free will as a
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melioristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least possible, whereas determinism assures
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us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that
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necessity and impossibility, between them rule the destinies of the world. Free will
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is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the absolute good spirit
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or design. Taking abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content,
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None of them gives us any picture, and no one of them would
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retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the
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start elation at mere existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would it seems
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to me quench all interest in those speculations if the world were nothing but a
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lubberland of happiness already our interest in religious metaphysics arise in the fact that our
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empirical future feels to us unsafe and needs some higher guarantee. If the past
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and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not
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resemble them? Who could desire free will? Who would not say, with
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Huxley, let me be wound? Up every day like a watch to go
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right fatally, and I ask no better freedom. Freedom in a world already
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perfect could only mean freedom to be worse. And who could be so insane
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as to wish that to be necessarily what it is to be impossibly ought elsewhere
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would put the last touch of perfection upon Optimism's universe. Surely, the only
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possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better.
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That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual
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world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating. Free will thus has no
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meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief. As such, it takes its
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place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they build up the old wastes
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and repair the former desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense,
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experience is always saying to the intellect, upon the tower watchmen, tell
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us of the night. If it ought to promise, bear and the intellect
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gives it, then these terms of promise. Other than this practical significance,
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the words God, free will, design, et cetera, have none yet,
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dark though they be in themselves or intellectualistically taken, when we bear them
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into life's thicket with us. The darkness there grows light about us if you
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stop in dealing with such words with their definition, thinking what to be an
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intellectual finality? Where are you stupidly staring at a pretentious sham? Thus ast
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ends assay extra et supra omnegenus necessarium oum, infinity, perfectum, simplex immotabilee,
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immensum a taranum, intelligence, et cetera. Wherein is such a definition
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really instructive? It means less than nothing in its pompous robe of adjectives.
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Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns
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her back upon the intellectualist point of view. Altogether, God's in his heaven,
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all's right the world. That's the heart of your theology, And for
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that you need no rationalist definitions. Why shouldn't we all of us rationalists as
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well as pragmatists, confess this pragmatism so far from keeping her eyes bent on
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the immediate practical foreground as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much
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upon the world's remotest perspectives. See then, how all these ultimate questions turn,
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as it were, up their hinges, and from looking backwards upon principles,
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upon an eerkindnist theo ish a god, a causalitates princip a design a
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free will taken in themselves as something august and exalted about facts. See I
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say how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts themselves. The really
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vital question for us all is what is this world going to be? What
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is life? Eventually? To make of itself? The center of gravity of
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philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into
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shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To
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shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated
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by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic
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in their tone, yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in
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the seat of authority that reminds one almost of the Protestant Reformation, and as
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to papal minds, Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of honarchy and confusion.
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Such no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra rationalist minds in philosophy.
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It will seem so much much sheer trash philosophically. But life wags on
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all the same and composes its ends in Protestant countries. I venture to think
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that philosophic Protestantism will compose a not dissimilar prosperity. End of Lecture three.