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01 Part 2 - The Present Dilemma in Philosophy - Pragmatism - William James · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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In point of fact, it is far less an account of this actual world
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than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist
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fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present.
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It is no explanation of our concrete universe. It is another thing altogether,
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a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. Its
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temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to
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the temperament of existence in the concrete Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies.
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They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation, which is so
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powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you, in all seriousness
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to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments,
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their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then
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to tell me whether refined is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your
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lips. Refinement has its place in things, true enough, But a philosophy
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that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind.
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It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science
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preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral and
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practical, men shaking philosophers dust off their feet and following the call of the
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wild. Truly, there's something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a
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pure but unreal system will fill them rationalist mind. Leibniz was a rationalist mind,
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with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet,
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if you wish for superficiality incarnate, we have only to read that charmingly
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written Theodicy of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God
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to man and to prove that the world we live in is the best of
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possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean. Among other
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obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibniz to consider the number of
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the eternally damned, that it is infinitely greater in our human case than that
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of those saved. He assumes, as a premise from the theologians, and
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then proceeds to argue this way. Even then, he says, the evil
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will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good if we once consider the
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real magnitude of the city of God. Quelius Secundos Courio has written a little
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book De Amplitudine Reigni Celestis, which was reprinted not long ago, but he
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failed to compose the extent of the Kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had
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small ideas of the works of God. It seemed to them that only our
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earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave them pause.
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The rest of the world, for them consisted of some shining globes and a
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few crystalline spheres. But today, whatever be the limits that we may grant
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refuse to the universe, we must recognize in it a countless number of globes
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as big as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it
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has to support rational inhabitants. Though it does not follow that these need all
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be men. Our Earth is only one among the sixes principal satellites of our
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son, as all the fixed stars are suns. One sees how small a
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place among visible things our Earth takes up, since it is only a satellite
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of one among them. Now, all these suns may be inhabited by no
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one but happy creatures, And nothing obliges to believe that the number of damned
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persons is very great, for a very few instances and samples suffice for the
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utility which good draws from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason to
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suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great space beyond
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the region of the stars, And this immense space surrounding all this region may
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be replete with happiness and glory? What now becomes of the consideration of our
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earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than
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a physical point? Since our Earth is but a point compared with the distance
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of the fixed stars. Thus, the part of the universe which we know
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being almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but
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which we are yet obliged to admit, and all the evils that we know
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lying in this almost nothing. It follows that the evils may be almost nothing
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in comparison with the goods that the universe contains. Leibniz continues elsewhere, there
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is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal,
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nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the injury.
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This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in
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the expiation of a wicked deed. The Sucinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive
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justice, which is properly vindictive justice, and which God has reserved for himself
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at many junctures. It is always founded in the fitness of things, and
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satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers on, even as
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beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well constituted mind. It
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is thus that the torments of the damned continue even though they serve no longer
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to turn any one away from sin, and that the rewards of the blessed
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continue even though they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to
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themselves ever new penalties by their continuing sins, and the blessed attract every fresh
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joice by their unceasing progress in good Both facts are founded on the principle of
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fitness, for God has made all things harmonious in perfection, as I have
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already said, and its feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment
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from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a
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damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind, nor had it occurred
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to him that the smaller is the number of samples of the genus lost soul,
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whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably
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grounded is the glory of the blessed. What it gives us is a cold
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literary exercise whose cheerful substance, even health fire, does not warm. And
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do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing, I have
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had to go back to a shallow, wigpited age. The optimism of present
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day irrationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact loving mind. The actual universe
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is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be
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closed for men in practical life. Perfection is something far off and still in
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process of achievement. This, for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite
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and relative the absolute ground of things is a perfection, eternally complete. I
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find a fine example of revolt against this airy and shallow optimism of current religious
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philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer, Morrison I Swift. Mister
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Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than mind us, But I confess that I
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sympathize a good deal, and some of you I know will sympathize heartily.
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With his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue, he begins his pamphlet
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on Human Submission with a series of city reporters items from newspapers, suicides,
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deaths from starvation and the like as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance,
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after trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other
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in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children
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without food, and ordered to leave their home in an upper East side tenement
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house because of non payment of rent, John Krkoran, a clerk to day,
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ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three weeks
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ago through illness, and during the period of idleness, his scanty savings disappeared.
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Yesterday, he obtained work with a gang of city snow shovelers, but
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he was too weak from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial
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with a shovel. Then the weary tas ask of looking for employment was again
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resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home last night to find his
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wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door. On
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the following morning, he drank the poison. The records of many more such
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cases lie before me. Mister Swift goes on. An encyclopedia might easily be
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filled with her kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe.
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We are aware of the presence of God in his world, says a
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writer in a recent English review. The very presence of ill in the temporal
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order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce
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The World and the Individual, Part two, page three hundred and eighty five.
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The absolute is the richer for every discord and for all diversity which it
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embraces, says F. H. Bradley Appearance and Reality, page two hundred
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four. He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that
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is philosophy. But while Professes Royson, Bradley and a whole host of guileless,
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thoroughfed thinkers are unveeling reality and the absolute and explaining away evil and pain.
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This is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the
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universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience
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is reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It is
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the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to have
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experience to tell us what is now? What us thinking about the experience of
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these persons, to compared with directly personally feeling it as they feel it,
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The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel no truth,
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and the mind of mankind, not yet the mind of philosophers and of
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the propriety class, but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling
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men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they
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have heretofore permitted the hero fans of religion and learning to judge them. This
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cleveland working man killing his children and himself another of the cited cases is one
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of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe.
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It cannot be glossed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God and
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love and being helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of
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the simple, irreducible elements of this world's life, after millions of years of
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divine opportunity and twenty centuries of christ. It is in the moral world,
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like atoms or subatoms in the physical, primary, indestructible, and what it
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blazons to man is the imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such
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events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove religion annullity.
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Man will not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself
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and waste human time. Its time is up, its probation is ended,
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its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for
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trying out discredited systems. Footnote Morrison I Swift Human Submission, Part second,
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Philadelphia Liberty Press, nineteen hundred and five, pages four to ten. Such
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is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It
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is an absolute no, I thank you. Religion, says missus Swift,
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is like a sleep walker, to whom actual things are blank. And such,
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though possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously
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inquiring amateur in philosophy to day who turns to the philosophy professors for the wherewithal
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to satisfy the fullness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a met
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materialism. Rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion, actual things
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are blank. He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers, tender or tough
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he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for
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after all, he is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of
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whose demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the
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long run. It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear.
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I offer the oddly named thing pragmatism, as a philosophy that can satisfy
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both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at
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the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with
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facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as
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favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am
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near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily. Now.
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I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time.
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I prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said.
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If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I
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know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to
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have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree,
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tender minded and tough minded. What a barbaric disjunction? And in general,
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when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when
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every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal
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caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent
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and its field of conflict as a sort of rough and tumble fight between two
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hostile temperaments. What a childishly external view. And again, how stupid it
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is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn
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them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape rather than as prolongations
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of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places
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of escape? And if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be
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anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of reality surface? What
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better thing can she do than raises out of our animal senses and show us
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another and a nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles,
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subtending all reality which the intellect divine. How can principles and general views
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ever be anything but abstract outlines? Was Colon Cathedral built without an architect's plan
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on paper? Its refinement in itself an abomination, is concrete rudeness the only
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thing that's true. Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment.
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The picture I have given is indeed monstrously oversimplified and rude, But like
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all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat
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the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment
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of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact, the picture I
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have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments, with
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their cravings and refusals, do determine men in their philosophies, and always will.
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The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student
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is working at a system, he may often forget the forest for the single
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tree. But when labor is accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarizing
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act, and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing,
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with that strange, simple note of individuality which haunts our memory like the wraith
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of the man when a friend or enemy of ours is dead. Not only
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Walt Whitman could write, who touches this book touches a man? The books
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of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an
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essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the
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finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be
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is a picture of the great universe of God what it is, and also
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flagrantly is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature
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is once reduced to these terms, and all our philosophies get reduced to them.
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In minds made critical by learning, our commerce with the systems reverted to
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the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow
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as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as
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a candidate for our favor. Our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of
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praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel
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it against the flavor of the philosophy profit us. And one word is enough
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Stadt der leib digen Natur. We say, da got dimension schuf henain that
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nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight laced thing, that crabbed artificiality,
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that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream, Our way with it,
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our way with all of them impossible impossible. Our work over the details of
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his system is indeed what gives us our resultant impression of the philosopher, but
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it is on the resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is
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measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions by the immediate perceptive epithet with which
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the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for
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the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own,
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but almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the
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union, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar system that
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he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be too dapper,
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another to pedantic, a third too much of a job, lot of
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opinions, a fourth to morbid, and a fifth to artificial or what not.
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At any rate, he and we know offhand that such philosophers are out
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of plumb and out of key and out of whack, and have no business
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speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill cared
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Hegel. I prudently avoid names nearer home. I am sure that to many
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of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as
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many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if
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such ways of taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon
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with such feelings on our part. In the last resort, I repeat,
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it will be by them that all our philosophers shall ultimately be judged. The
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finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to
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the normal run of minds. One word more, namely about philosophers necessarily being
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abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines. Outlines of buildings that are fat
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conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on
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paper with the aid of rule and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even
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when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline already suggests that results.
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An outline in itself is meager, truly, but it does not necessarily
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suggest a meager thing. It is the essential meagerness of what is suggested by
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the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case
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of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here rationalists feel his fearful array
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of insufficiencies, his dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy gurdy monotony of him,
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his presence for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical
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principles, and in general, the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his
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whole system wooden as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards. And yet
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the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey? Why why does
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Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness in rationalistic eyes?
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Why should so many educated men who feel that weakness? You and I perhaps
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wish to see him in the abbey, notwithstanding, simply because we feel his
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heart to be in the right place Philosophically, his principles may be all skin
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and bone, but at any rate, his books try to mold themselves upon
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the particular shape of this particular world's carcass. The noise of facts resounds through
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all his chapters. The citations of fact never sees. He emphasizes facts,
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turns his face towards their quarter, and that is enough. It means the
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right kind of thing for the empiricist mind. The pragmatistic philosophy of which I
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hope to begin talking in my next lecture, preserves as cordial a relation with
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facts, and unlike Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive
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religious constructions out of doors. It treats them cordially as well. I hope
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I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that you
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require. End of Lecture one