Pragmatism ( A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking)

William James

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Title: Pragmatism

A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Author: William James

Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5116]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on May 1, 2002]

Edition: 10

A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

To the Memory of John Stuart Mill

from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my

fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.

Preface

combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and

from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted

statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it

presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and

avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been

avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we

got our message fairly out.

If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will

doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few

references.

In America, John Dewey's 'Studies in Logical Theory' are the

foundation. Read also by Dewey the articles in the Philosophical

Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 465, in Mind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in

the Journal of Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.

Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S.

numbered i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in

in his footnotes.

Furthermore, see G. Milhaud: le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine

The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and

still be a pragmatist.

Harvard University, April, 1907.

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

Chesterton quoted. Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a

factor in all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The

tender-minded and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and

religion. Empiricism gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives

The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of the method. Its

character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and

intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of

truth, equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical,

logical, and natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and

Dewey's 'instrumental' view. The formation of new beliefs. Older

truth always has to be kept account of. Older truth arose similarly.

The 'humanistic' doctrine. Rationalistic criticisms of it.

Pragmatism as mediator between empiricism and religion. Barrenness

of transcendental idealism. How far the concept of the Absolute must

be called true. The true is the good in the way of belief. The clash

of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens discussion.

Lecture III

Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered

treatment of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The

treatment. 'God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless

problem of design. 'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT

Total reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality.

world is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of

discourse. Its parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-

ordinate. Question of one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One

story. One knower. Value of pragmatic method. Absolute monism.

Vivekananda. Various types of union discussed. Conclusion: We must

Lecture V

Pragmatism and Common Sense

Noetic pluralism. How our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking

remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts.

List of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time.

'Things.' Kinds. 'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental

means verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us

prosperously through experience. Completed verifications seldom

needful. 'Eternal' truths. Consistency, with language, with previous

truths. Rationalist objections. Truth is a good, like health,

wealth, etc. It is expedient thinking. The past. Truth grows.

Rationalist objections. Reply to them.

Lecture VII

Pragmatism and Humanism

The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of

reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account'

is ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The

human contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence

of pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a

transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects

them. A genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates.

Lecture VIII

Pragmatism and Religion

Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

'Heretics,' Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some

people--and I am one of them--who think that the most practical and

important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We

think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to

know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We

think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to

know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the

enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory

of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run,

more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It

is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just

seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have

no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in

the class-room sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you

in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically

treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous

tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like

a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a

professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends

itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences

is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No

faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and

colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they

soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only

partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder

of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the

Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes of

fancy, understood ALL that he said--yet here I stand, making a very

good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a

per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the

situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human

pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the

inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its

doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to

common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing

beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These

illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and

mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that

is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain

for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe,

just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his

temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any

representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of

opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in

his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the

philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical

ability.

Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his

temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus

a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest

of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would

contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this

rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.

Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of

radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on

are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very

ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our

out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the

Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in

making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art,

formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians

and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists.

In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as

familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast

expressed in the pair of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,'

'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal

principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and

principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds

antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the

emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily

convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking

their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the

'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast simple and

massive.

for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of

characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms

'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of

'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most

frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic

tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly

materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional

and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes

and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism

starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection-is not

averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually

considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much

to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim

when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling,

and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-

headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor

of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist--

I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will

be more sceptical and open to discussion.

I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will

I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded'

Religious,

Free-willist,

Dogmatical.

THE TOUGH-MINDED

Sensationalistic,

Materialistic,

Pessimistic,

Irreligious,

Fatalistic,

Pluralistic,

Sceptical.

Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted

atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic

atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists

and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous,

or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes

place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of

Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to

itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in

the other it has a dash of fear.

Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot

Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain

toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good

things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course--give us

lots of facts. Principles are good--give us plenty of principles.

The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as

indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one

and many--let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of

course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are

evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so

so forth--your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical,

plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish

to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity

facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape?

And, if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else

than a place of escape from the crassness of reality's surface? What

better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and

show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that great

intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be

anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne cathedral built without

an architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an

abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?

Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I

have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like

all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can

treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of

individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man,

when a friend or enemy of ours is dead.

Not only Walt Whitman could write "who touches this book touches a

man." The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men.

Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them,

typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own

accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be

is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is--and oh so

flagrantly!--is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal

flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and

all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by

learning) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to

the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow

as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a person

presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are

couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure

the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the

hinein"--that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced

that sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all of them!

to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of

their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a

to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They don't just

cover HIS world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a

third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a

fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know

offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and

name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel--I prudently avoid

names nearer home!--I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these

names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal

ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways

of taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to

reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I

repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall

ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at

things will be the most completely IMPRESSIVE way to the normal run

meagre thing. It is the essential meagreness of WHAT IS SUGGESTED by

the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their

gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much

to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of

insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy

monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument,

his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general

the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden,

as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards--and yet the

half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey.

Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his

weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who

feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey

notwithstanding?

Simply because we feel his heart to be IN THE RIGHT PLACE

philosophically. His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any

this, particular world's carcase. The noise of facts resounds

emphasizes facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is

Lecture II

What Pragmatism Means

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I

ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a

squirrel--a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a

tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human

being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight

of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how

fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction,

and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never

a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now

is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round

passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then

to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man

does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But

if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the

right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in

front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round

him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps

his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned

away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther

dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive

the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a

shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic

hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the

majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the

dispute.

example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The

disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or

either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes

right.

pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pi

rho alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning action, from which our words

'practice' and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into

philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled

'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for

Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. vii).] Mr. Peirce, after

pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that

to develope a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct

it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole

significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-

distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so

fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of

practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object,

then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical

university of California, brought it forward again and made a

special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times

seemed ripe for its reception. The word 'pragmatism' spread, and at

present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic journals. On

all hands we find the 'pragmatic movement' spoken of, sometimes with

respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding.

It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number

of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name, and that

it has 'come to stay.'

To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get

accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago

that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making

perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his

lectures on the philosophy of science, tho he had not called it by

that name.

"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that

to my classes in this way: In what respects would the world be

nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no

"if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental

fact could have been made different by one or the other view being

could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if,

theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast,

one party should have invoked a 'brownie,' while another insisted on

an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon." [Footnote: 'Theorie

und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u.

pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin:

"I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student

gets it, is that it is 'the science of masses, molecules and the

ether.' And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student

does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways

of taking hold of bodies and pushing them!" (Science, January 2,

1903.)]

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates

was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley

and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.

Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they

are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in

fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it

generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission,

pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I

hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy,

the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me,

both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has

ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once

for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional

philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from

verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles,

towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action,

rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and

pretence of finality in truth.

together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.

know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know

what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have

his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can

control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be.

Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names,

appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key

must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing

word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to

possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself.

'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many

solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end

of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such

all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being

nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic

tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always

appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing

practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal

solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against

rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed

and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no

particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its

method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it

lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.

Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man

writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees

praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a

body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is

being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is

through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of

orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF

in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I

mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after

hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter

of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in

the later lectures.

One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in

conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this

subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws

of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by

mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first

mathematical, logical and natural uniformities, the first LAWS, were

discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and

simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have

deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His

mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought

But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained

ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.

The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is

no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all

the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to

the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but

that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their

great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They

are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone

calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages,

as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many

dialects.

Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific

logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson,

Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students

will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of

Schiller and Dewey appear with their pragmatistic account of what

in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in

satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true

for just so much, true in so far forth, true INSTRUMENTALLY. This is

the view that truth in our ideas means their power to 'work,'

promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.

Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general

conception of all truth, have only followed the example of

these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some

simple process actually observable in operation--as denudation by

weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect

by incorporation of new words and pronunciations--and then to

generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great

results by summating its effects through the ages.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled

out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual

are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this

opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously),

until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the

ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea

that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them

into one another most felicitously and expediently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the

older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching

them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that

in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree

explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for

a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously

till we found something less excentric. The most violent revolutions

in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.

Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own

biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a

smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so

a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this

is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it

more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize

most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make

for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them

You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth, and

the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new

truth is of course the mere numerical addition of new kinds of

facts, or of new single facts of old kinds, to our experience--an

day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents themselves

are not true, they simply COME and ARE. Truth is what we say about

them, and when we say that they have come, truth is satisfied by the

plain additive formula.

But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now

utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it

would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of

my philosophy. 'Radium' came the other day as part of the day's

because, altho it extends our old ideas of energy, it causes a

minimum of alteration in their nature.

I need not multiply instances. A new opinion counts as 'true' just

in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate

the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both

lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success (as I said a

moment ago) in doing this, is a matter for the individual's

appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth's addition,

it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the

reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously

its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true,

gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself

then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree

grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.

Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to

apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were

mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were

establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying

whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things

and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology

and its 'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran

plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been

vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and

mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading

physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special

expressions of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors

Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of

'Humanism,' but, for this doctrine too, the name of pragmatism seems

fairly to be in the ascendant, so I will treat it under the name of

pragmatism in these lectures.

Such then would be the scope of pragmatism--first, a method; and

second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth. And these two

things must be our future topics.

factors in Truth's development. You may not follow me wholly in

these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me. But

you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort

with respectful consideration.

You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs.

Schiller's and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of

contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen against them. In

influential quarters Mr. Schiller, in particular, has been treated

like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking. I should not

mention this, but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon

that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of

pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism

is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist

talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and

satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc.,

suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame

second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real

truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote,

thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT

are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with

WHY we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the

concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of

was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more

than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him

once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then

finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal

identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and

answer for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his

consciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing a man punished now for

what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have

no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that

punishment and being created miserable?

Our personal identity, then, consists, for Locke, solely in

pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these

for just SO MUCH, but no more.

The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of

'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit

up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may

deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a

phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in

the wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and

leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts

and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism

is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature

are what run things, materialism says. The highest productions of

human genius might be ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance

with the facts, out of their physiological conditions, regardless

whether nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or

not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature

it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics.

This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better

wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind

them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its

often held, may be simply a state of admiration for one kind, and of

dislike for another kind, of abstraction. I remember a worthy

'mud-philosophy,' and deemed it thereby refuted.

To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr.

Spencer makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end

of the first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a 'matter' so

and fine as those which modern science postulates in her

explanations, has no trace of grossness left. He shows that the

conception of spirit, as we mortals hitherto have framed it, is

itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of nature's facts.

Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing to that one

unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.

To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far

as one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of

But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant

intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the

question. What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can

it make NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I

think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different

character.

And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes

not a single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes,

whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we

think a divine spirit was its author.

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

all irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to

have no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their

rival explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made

it; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success,

how it resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist

if the world is already completed? Concepts for him are things to

differences. But by hypothesis there is to be no more experience and

shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting,

world run down. He would be worth no more than just that world was

worth. To that amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects,

is to be no future; since the whole value and meaning of the world

has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went

with it in the passing, and now go with it in the ending; since it

draws no supplemental significance (such as our real world draws)

from its function of preparing something yet to come; why then, by

for all do THAT; and for that much we are thankful to him, but for

nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that the

bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no

less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we

suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the

matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness, or

crassness, come in? And how, experience being what is once for all,

would God's presence in it make it any more living or richer?

and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no more. If his

presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it

surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come

to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on

the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you

really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its

author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.

Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced

from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism

becomes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event

mean exactly the same thing--the power, namely, neither more nor

less, that could make just this completed world--and the wise man is

he who in such a case would turn his back on such a supererogatory

discussion. Accordingly, most men instinctively, and positivists and

scientists deliberately, do turn their backs on philosophical

disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future

consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character

familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach

practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The

if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly

uncompleted whilst we speak. In this unfinished world the

alternative of 'materialism or theism?' is intensely practical; and

that it is so.

How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we

consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless

configurations of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or

as the past facts go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are

in, are bagged, are captured; and the good that's in them is gained,

be the atoms or be the God their cause. There are accordingly many

materialists about us to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and

practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the odium

attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word

itself, by showing that, if matter could give birth to all these

gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine

an entity as God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean by

But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the

world has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question

'what does the world PROMISE?' Give us a matter that promises

SUCCESS, that is bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to

perfection, and any rational man will worship that matter as readily

as Mr. Spencer worships his own so-called unknowable power. It not

only has made for righteousness up to date, but it will make for

righteousness forever; and that is all we need. Doing practically

all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, its function is a

God's function, and is exerted in a world in which a God would now

be superfluous; from such a world a God could never lawfully be

missed. 'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right name for religion.

But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution

is carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this?

Indeed it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved

thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death and

tragedy; and Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and

contributed nothing serious to its relief. But apply now our

the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires.

Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively,

I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words: "The energies

of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and

which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into

the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy, consciousness

which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the

contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know

itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,'

had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for

all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have

striven through countless generations to effect." [Footnote: The

Foundations of Belief, p. 30.]

That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic

weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted

cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as

our world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products

see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone; so why should he

argue with us as if we were making silly aesthetic objections to the

'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the principles of his

philosophy, when what really dismays us is the disconsolateness of

its ulterior practical results?

No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative.

It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it

IS for 'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES--we now know

THAT. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT--

not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a

fulfiller of our remotest hopes.

The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in

clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical

philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that

it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A

world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or

and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is,

dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal

poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such

and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the

affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.

and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious

philosophic debate.

But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even

whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different

difference as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for

a sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take

shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimaeras as the

latter end of the world. Well, I can only say that if you say this,

you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not

disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The absolute

things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly

philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them,

and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more

paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough, to be sure. The

exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God

insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of

science: we can STUDY our God only by studying his Creation. But we

can ENJOY our God, if we have one, in advance of all that labor. I

myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner

personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, his

name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I

said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to 'down'

each other. The truth of 'God' has to run the gauntlet of all our

other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our

FINAL opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths

have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they

shall find a modus vivendi!

Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the QUESTION of

DESIGN IN NATURE. God's existence has from time immemorial been held

expressly designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's

trees with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our

picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of things diverse in

is the end designed, light and eyes the separate means devised for

its attainment.

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the

force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the

triumph of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the

power of chance-happenings to bring forth 'fit' results if only they

have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste

unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if

designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here all

depends upon the point of view. To the grub under the bark the

exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organism to extract him would

certainly argue a diabolical designer.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace

the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing

divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST

so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save

them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of

nature's vast machinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and

counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose,

would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.

This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old

easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like

deity. His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to

us humans. The WHAT of them so overwhelms us that to establish the

mere THAT of a designer for them becomes of very little consequence

in comparison. We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a

cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture

of goods and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars.

Or rather we cannot by any possibility comprehend it. The mere word

'design' by itself has, we see, no consequences and explains

nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of

WHETHER there is design is idle. The real question is WHAT is the

only by the study of all nature's particulars.

Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be

been FITTED TO THAT PRODUCTION. The argument from fitness to design

exquisite intelligence. And so of any state of things whatever,

either in nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For

chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the

conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We

can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any

conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery MAY have been

designed to produce it.

Pragmatically, then, the abstract word 'design' is a blank

cartridge. It carries no consequences, it does no execution. What

sort of design? and what sort of a designer? are the only serious

questions, and the study of facts is the only way of getting even

approximate answers. Meanwhile, pending the slow answer from facts,

anyone who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a

divine one, gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term--the

same, in fact which we saw that the terms God, Spirit, or the

Absolute, yield us 'Design,' worthless tho it be as a mere

terms will then have in them.

Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM.

Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so

after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive

faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is

enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason.

Determinists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate

nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the

past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, diminish man.

He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I imagine

that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free-

will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much

to do with your fidelity.

But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely

enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by

both disputants. You know how large a part questions of

persons, one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of

the interest in crime and sin and punishment abide with us. 'Who's

preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's religious history.

anything? We should be 'agents' only, not 'principals,' and where

then would be our precious imputability and responsibility?

But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists.

If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the

previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how

can _I_, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any

permanent CHARACTER that will stand still long enough for praise or

disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn

out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine. Messrs. Fullerton

and McTaggart have recently laid about them doughtily with this

argument.

It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask

you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or

child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead

such principles as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and

such a noise in past discussions of the subject.

Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to

expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface

phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the

past. That imitation en masse is there, who can deny? The general

'uniformity of nature' is presupposed by every lesser law. But

nature may be only approximately uniform; and persons in whom

knowledge of the world's past has bred pessimism (or doubts as to

the world's good character, which become certainties if that

character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally welcome free-

will as a MELIORISTIC doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least

possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of

possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and

impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.

Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just

like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design. Taken abstractly, no one

picture, and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value

Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would,

world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness already. Our

what it is, to be impossibly aught else, would put the last touch of

perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely the only POSSIBILITY

BETTER. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the

actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.

Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of RELIEF. As

such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between

desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense-

experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower:

'Watchman, tell us of the night, if it aught of promise bear,' and

the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.

Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will,

design, etc., have none. Yet dark tho they be in themselves, or

intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket

with us the darkness THERE grows light about us. If you stop, in

all's right with the world!'--THAT'S the heart of your theology, and

for that you need no rationalist definitions.

Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists,

confess this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the

immediate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells

just as much upon the world's remotest perspectives.

See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their

hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an

erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design,

a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted

above facts,--see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and

looks forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for

us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually

to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must

therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into

shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To

fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than

yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of

And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess

Lecture IV

may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them

all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he

does know at one single stroke:--he may be liable to forget.

Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe

noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the

would be strung along and overlapped.

The notion of one instantaneous or eternal Knower--either adjective

here means the same thing--is, as I said, the great intellectualist

achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that

conception of 'Substance' which earlier philosophers set such store

by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done--universal

substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all

the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives

that may mean--in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes.

'The world is one,' therefore, just so far as we experience it to be

concatenated, one by as many definite conjunctions as appear. But

then also NOT one by just as many definite DISjunctions as we find.

The oneness and the manyness of it thus obtain in respects which can

be separately named. It is neither a universe pure and