It may perhaps be thought that the whole difficulty arises simply
because what we are trying to think consistently about is a reality
that is external to us. Space and time, movement, cause and effect are
ideas that apply to a world outside and independent of the mind that
tries to think it. May not this be the reason of our failure and the
whole explanation of the seeming contradiction? If we turn our
thoughts inward upon our own being and think of the self, the I, the
real subject of experience, then surely where thought is at home and
its object is mental not physical, we shall know reality. It is not
so. The same self-contradiction characterises our ideas when we try to
present the real object of inner perception as when we try to present
the real object of external perception. Not, of course, that it is
possible to doubt the reality of our own existence, but that we fail
altogether to express the meaning of the self we so surely know to
exist in any idea which does not fall into self-contradiction. As in
the case of the thing and its qualities, we think that there is
something distinct from the qualities in which they inhere and yet find
ourselves unable to present to the mind any consistent idea of such
thing, so we think that there must be some substance or basis of
personal identity, some real self which _has_ the successive changing
conscious states, which has the character which distinguishes our
actions as personal but which nevertheless _is_ not itself these
things. The self-contradiction {37} in the idea of self, or I, or
subject, is that it both cannot change and is always changing. As
unchanging, we distinguish it from our body, which is an external
object among other objects and is different from other objects only in
the more direct and intimate relation in which it stands to us. The
body is always changing; never for two successive moments is it exactly
the same combination of chemical elements. We distinguish also ourself
from that consciousness which is memory, the awareness of past
experience, from present feelings, desires, thoughts, and
strivings--these, we say, belong to the self but are not it. The self
must have qualities and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and
controlling it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive
it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is yet
unchangeable.
There is, however, one idea--an idea to which we have already
alluded--that seems to offer us an escape from the whole of this
logical difficulty, the idea that reality is unknowable. May not the
contradictoriness of our ideas be due to this fact, that our knowledge
is entirely of phenomena, of appearances of things, and not of things
as they are in themselves? By a thing-in-itself we do not mean a
reality that dwells apart in a universe of its own, out of any relation
whatever to our universe. There may or may not be such realities, and
whether there are or not is purely irrelevant to any question of the
nature of reality in our universe. The thing-in-itself is the
unknowable reality of the thing we know. We conceive it as existing in
complete abstraction from every aspect or relation of it that
constitutes knowledge of it in another. The self-contradiction of such
an idea is not difficult to show, quite apart from any consideration of
its utter futility as an {38} explanation. The thing-in-itself either
is or else it is not the reality of phenomena. If it is, then,
inasmuch as the phenomena reveal it, it is neither in-itself nor
unknowable. If, on the other hand, it is not, if it is unrelated in
any way to phenomena, then it is not only unknowable--it does not exist
to be known. It is an idea without any content or meaning, and
therefore indistinguishable from nothing. It is simply saying of one
and the same thing that it must be and that there is nothing that it
can be.
While, then, there is no actual thing that we experience, whether it be
an object outside of us or an object within us, of which we can say
this is not a phenomenon or appearance of reality but the actual
reality itself, we cannot also say that we do not know reality, because
if we had no idea, no criterion, of reality we could never know that
anything was only an appearance. It is this fact--the fact that we
undoubtedly possess, in the very process of thinking itself, a
criterion of reality--that the idealist argument lays hold of as the
basis of its doctrine. The mere fact seems, at first sight, barren and
unpromising enough, but the idealist does not find it so. Possessed of
this principle, logic, which has seemed till now purely destructive,
becomes in his hands creative, and gives form and meaning to an object
of pure reason.
The criterion of reality is self-consistency. We cannot think that
anything is ultimately real which has its ground of existence in
something else. A real thing is that which can be explained without
reference to some other thing. Reality, therefore, is completely
self-contained existence, not merely dependent existence.
Contradictions cannot be true. If we have to affirm a contradiction of
anything, it must be due to an {39} appearance, and the reality must
reconcile the contradiction. The idea of reality, therefore, is the
idea of perfect harmony. Knowing, then, what reality is, can we say
that there is any actual object of thought that conforms to it? And
have we in our limited experience anything that will guide us to the
attainment of this object? The idealist is confident that we have.
Some things seem to us to possess a far higher degree of reality than
others, just because they conform in a greater degree to this ideal of
harmonious existence. It is when we compare the reality of physical
things with the reality of mental things that the contrast is most
striking, and in it we have the clue to the nature of the higher
reality. Physical reality may seem, and indeed in a certain sense is,
the basis of existence, but when we try to think out the meaning of
physical reality, it becomes increasingly abstract, and we seem unable
to set any actual limit to prevent it dissipating into nothing. In
physical science we never have before us an actual element, either
matter or energy, in which we can recognise, however far below the
limit of perceivability, the ultimate stuff of which the universe is
composed. Science has simply to arrest the dissipation by boldly
assuming a matter that is the substance and foundation of reality and
an energy that is the ultimate cause of the evolution of the universe.
On the other hand, when we consider mental existence, the pursuit of
reality is in an exactly contrary direction. There, the more concrete,
the more comprehensive, the more individual a thing is, the greater
degree of reality it seems to have. In the spiritual realm, by which
we mean, not some supposed supra-mundane sphere, but the world of
values, the world in which ideas have reality, in which we live our
rational life, reality is always sought in a {40} higher and higher
individuality. The principle of individuality is that the whole is
more real than the parts. An individual human being, for example, is a
whole, an indivisible organic unity, not merely an aggregation of
physiological organs with special functions, nor are these a mere
collection of special cells, nor these a mere concourse of chemical
elements. The State as a community is an individual organic unity with
a reality that is more than the mere total of the reality of individual
citizens who compose it. It is this principle of individuality that is
the true criterion of reality. It is this principle that, while it
leads us to seek the unity in an individuality ever higher and more
complete than we have attained, at the same time explains the
discrepancy of our partial view, explains contradictions as the
necessary result of the effort to understand the parts in independence
of the whole which gives to them their reality. Thus, while on the one
hand the scientific search for reality is ever towards greater
simplicity and abstractness, a simplicity whose ideal limit is zero,
the philosophical search for reality is ever towards greater
concreteness, towards full comprehensiveness, and its ideal limit is
the whole universe as one perfect and completely harmonious individual.
This idea of full reality is the Absolute. There are not two
realities, one material and the other spiritual; the material and the
spiritual are two directions in which we may seek the one reality, but
there is only one pathway by which we shall find it.
The Absolute is the whole universe not in its aspect of an aggregate of
infinitely diverse separate elements, whether these are material or
spiritual, but in its aspect of an individual whole and in its nature
as a whole. This nature of the whole is to be individual--only in {41}
the individual are contradictions reconciled. Is the Absolute more
than an idea? Does it actually exist? Clearly we cannot claim to know
it by direct experience, by acquaintance; it is not a _that_ of which
we can ask _what_? It is the object of reason itself, therefore we
know that it must be. Also we know that it can be; it is a possible
object in the logical meaning that it is not a self-contradictory idea,
like every other idea that we can have. It is not self-contradictory,
for it is itself the idea of that which is consistent. Therefore,
argues the idealist, it is, for that which must be, and can be, surely
exists. The reader will now understand why I introduced this account
of the Absolute with a description for comparison of the St. Anselm
proof of the existence of God.
There is one further question. Whether the Absolute does or does not
exist, is it, either in idea or reality, of any use to us? The reply
is that its value lies in this, that it reveals to us the nature of
reality and the meaning of truth. Logic is the creative power of
thought which leads us to the discovery of higher and higher degrees of
reality. The Satyr, in the fable, drove his guest from his shelter
because the man blew into his hands to warm them, and into his porridge
to cool it. The Satyr could not reconcile the contradiction that one
could with the same breath blow hot and cold. Nor would he reconcile
it ever, so long as he sought truth as correspondence. Truth would
have shown the facts coherent by reconciling the contradiction in a
higher reality.
{42}
CHAPTER V
PRAGMATISM
The theory of the Absolute is only one form of Idealism, but it
illustrates the nature and general direction of the development of
philosophy along the line of speculation that began with Kant. There
have been, of course, other directions. In particular many attempts
have been made to make philosophy an adjunct of physical science, but
the theory I have sketched is characteristic of the prevailing movement
in philosophy during the last period of the Nineteenth Century, and
until the movement known as Pragmatism directed criticism upon it. The
form the pragmatical criticism of the theory of the Absolute took was
to direct attention to the logical or intellectual principle on which
it rests--in fact to raise the problem of the nature of truth.
Pragmatism is a theory of the meaning of truth. It is the denial of a
purely logical criterion of truth, and the insistence that truth is
always dependent on psychological conditions. Pragmatism therefore
rejects both the views that we have examined--the theory that truth is
a correspondence of the idea with its object, and the theory that it is
the logical coherence and consistency of the idea itself. It proposes
instead the theory that truth is always founded on a practical
postulate, and consists in the verification of that postulate; the
verification not being the discovery of something that was waiting to
be discovered, but the discovery that the postulate that claims to be
true is useful, in that it works. Truth is what works.
The Absolute is reality and truth. The idealist argument which we have
followed was an attempt to {43} determine the nature of reality, and
not an attempt to explain what we mean when we say that an idea agrees
with its object. What is true about reality? was the starting point,
and not, What is truth? nor even, What is true about truth? The search
for reality failed to discover any object that agreed with its idea,
but at last there was found an idea that must agree with its object, an
idea whose object cannot not be. This idea, the Absolute, reveals the
nature of reality. The pragmatist when he asks, What is truth? seems
to dig beneath the argument, seems indeed even to reach the bedrock,
but it is only in appearance that this is so. How, indeed, could he
hope to be able to answer the question he has himself asked, if there
is no way of distinguishing the true answer from the false? We must
already know what truth is even to be able to ask what it is--a point
which many pragmatist writers appear to me to have overlooked.
In challenging the idea of truth, the pragmatist raises the no less
important question of the nature of error. A theory of truth must not
only show in what truth consists, but must distinguish false from true
and show the nature of error. The pragmatist claims for his theory
that it alone can give a consistent account of illusion and error.
Now, as we saw in our account of the idealist argument, it is the fact
of illusion and error that compels us to seek reality behind the
appearances that are the sense data of our conscious experience. The
whole force of the pragmatist movement in philosophy is directed to
proving that truth is a prior consideration to reality. If we
understand the nature of truth, we shall see reality in the making.
Reality can in fact be left to look after itself; our business is with
our conceptions alone, which are either true or false. The distinction
of appearance and reality does {44} not explain illusion and error
because it does not distinguish between true and false appearance.
There is no principle in idealism by which the Absolute rejects the
false appearance and reconciles the true.
Before I examine the pragmatist argument, I ought first to explain the
meaning and origin of the word. The term pragmatism, that has in the
last few years entered so widely into all philosophical discussion, was
used first by Mr. C. S. Peirce, an American philosopher, in a magazine
article written as long ago as 1878, but it attracted no attention for
nearly twenty years, when it was recalled by William James in the
criticism of the current philosophy in his _Will to Believe_, a book
which marks the beginning of the new movement. Pragmatism was first
put forward as the principle that the whole meaning of any conception
expresses itself in practical consequences. The conception of the
practical effects of a conception is the whole conception of the
object. The pragmatist maxim is--would you know what any idea or
conception means, then consider what practical consequences are
involved by its acceptance or rejection. Dr. Schiller, the leading
exponent of the principle in England, prefers to call the philosophy
"Humanism" in order still more to emphasize the psychological and
personal character of knowledge. The name is suggested by the maxim of
Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things." The term
Intellectualism is used by pragmatist writers to include all theories
of knowledge that do not agree with their own, very much as the Greeks
called all who were not Greeks, Barbarians. It must not be taken to
mean, as its etymology would imply, a philosophy like that of Plato,
which held that only universals, the ideas, are real, or like that of
Hegel, who said that "the actual is the rational and the rational is
the actual." The {45} pragmatists apply the term intellectualist to
all philosophers who recognise an objective character in the logical
ideal of truth, whether or not they also recognise non-logical elements
in reality, and whether or not these non-logical elements are physical,
such as matter and energy, or purely psychical, such as will, desire,
emotion, pleasure, and pain.
Pragmatism is a criticism and a theory. If reality in its full meaning
is the Absolute, and if all seeming reality is only a degree of or
approximation to this full reality, if the knowledge of this reality
only is truth, must it not seem to us that truth is useless knowledge?
Useless, not in the sense that it is without value to the mind that
cares to contemplate it, but useless in so far as the hard everyday
working world in which we have to spend our lives is concerned. We who
have to win our existence in the struggle of life, need truth. We need
truth in order to act. Truth that transcends our temporal needs, truth
that is eternal, truth that reconciles illusion and error, that accepts
them as a necessary condition of appearance in time, is useless in
practice, however it may inspire the poet and philosopher. Truth to
serve us must reject error and not reconcile it, must be a working
criterion and not only a rational one. Whatever truth is, it is not
useless; it is a necessity of life, not a luxury of speculation.
Pragmatism therefore rejects the logical criterion of truth because it
is purely formal and therefore useless. It demands for us a practical
criterion, one that will serve our continual needs. Whether our
working ideas--cause, time, space, movement, things and their
qualities, terms and their relations, and the like--are consistent or
inconsistent in themselves, they more or less work; and in so far as
they work they are useful and serve us, and because they work, and just
in so far as they work, they are true. {46} The pragmatist therefore
declares that utility, not logical consistency, is the criterion of
truth. Ideas are true in so far as they work. The discovery that they
serve us is their verification. If we discover ideas that will serve
us better, the old ideas that were true become untrue, and the new
ideas that we adopt become true because they are found to work.
This doctrine of the verification or making true of ideas leads to a
theory of the origin of the ideas themselves. Each idea has arisen or
been called forth by a human need. It has been formed by human nature
to meet a need of human nature. It is a practical postulate claiming
truth. Even the axioms that now seem to us self-evident--such, for
example, as the very law of contradiction itself, from which, as we
have seen, the logical criterion of consistency is deduced--were in
their origin practical postulates, called forth by a need, and, because
found to work, true. The inconsistencies and contradictions in our
ideas do not condemn them as appearance, and compel us to construct a
reality in which they disappear or are reconciled, but are evidence of
their origin in practical need and of their provisional character.
Truth is not eternal, it is changing. New conditions are ever calling
forth new ideas, and truths become untrue. Each new idea comes forward
with a claim to truth, and its claim is tested by its practicability.
Truth is not something we discover, and which was there to be
discovered. We verify ideas. To verify is not to find true but to
make true.
The pragmatist theory therefore is that truth is made. In all other
theories truth is found. But if we make truth we must make reality,
for it is clear that if reality is there already, the agreement with it
of man-made truth would be nothing short of a miracle. The pragmatist,
or at all events the pragmatist who is also a {47} humanist, finds no
difficulty in accepting this consequence of the theory, although at the
same time insisting that the whole problem, of being as well as of
knowing is concerned with truth. We shall see, however, that it offers
a serious difficulty to the acceptance of the theory--a theory which in
very many respects agrees with ordinary practice and with scientific
method. Take, for example, scientific method. Is not all progress in
science made by suggesting a hypothesis, and testing it by experiment
to see if it works? Do we not judge its claim to truth by the
practical consequences involved in accepting or rejecting it? Is there
any other verification? This is the simple pragmatist test,--does the
laboratory worker add to it or find it in any respect insufficient? If
truth can be considered alone, then we must admit that it is the
attribute of knowledge which is comprised under the term useful, the
term being used in its most comprehensive meaning to include every kind
of practical consequence. It is the question of reality that raises
the difficulty for the scientific worker. We cannot believe, or
perhaps we should say, the ordinary man and the scientific man would
find it very difficult to believe, that reality changes correspondingly
with our success or failure in the verification of our hypothesis.
When the scientific worker verifies his hypothesis, he feels not that
he has made something true which before was not true, but that he has
discovered what always was true, although until the discovery he did
not know it. To this the pragmatist reply is, that this very belief is
a practical consequence involved in the verification of the hypothesis,
involved in the discovery that it works. What he denies is that truth
reveals, or ever can reveal, a reality entirely irrelevant to any human
purpose. It is also very important to add that in declaring that truth
is verification, the {48} pragmatist does not set up a purely practical
or utilitarian standard. The "working" of truth means theoretical as
well as practical working. Much of the current criticism of pragmatism
has failed to take notice of this intention or meaning of its
principle, and hence the common misapprehension that the maxim "truth
is what works" must mean that whatever a man believes is for him truth.
The pragmatist doctrine and attitude will perhaps be easier to
understand if we take it in regard to a particular instance of truth
and error in regard to fundamental notions. In the last four or five
years a new principle has been formulated in Physics, named the
Principle of Relativity. It revolutionises the current conceptions of
space and time. It is so recent that probably some of my readers now
hear of it for the first time, and therefore before I refer to its
formulation by mathematicians I will give a simple illustration to
explain what it is. Suppose that you are walking up and down the deck
of a steamer, and let us suppose that the steamer is proceeding at the
speed of four miles an hour, the space that you cover and the interval
of time that you occupy are exactly the same for you whether you are
moving up the deck in the direction the steamer is going or down the
deck in the direction which is the reverse of the steamer's movement.
But suppose some one on the shore could observe you moving while the
ship was invisible to him, your movement would appear to him entirely
different to what it is to you. When you were walking up the deck you
would seem to be going at twice the speed you would be going, and when
you were going down the deck you would seem not to be moving at all.
The time measurement would also seem different to the observer on the
shore, for while to you each moment would be measured by an equal {49}
space covered, to him one moment you would be moving rapidly, the next
at rest. This is simple and easy to understand. Now suppose that both
you and the observer were each observing a natural phenomenon, say a
thunder-storm, it would seem that each of you ought to observe it with
a difference--a difference strictly calculable from the system of
movement, the ship, in which you were placed in relation to him. The
propagation of the sound and of the light would have to undergo a
correction if each of you described your experience to the other. If
you were moving in the direction of the light waves they would be
slower for you than for him, and if against their direction they would
be faster for you than for him. Of course the immense velocity of the
light waves, about 200,000 miles a second, would make the difference in
a movement of four miles an hour so infinitesimal as to be altogether
inappreciable, but it would not be nothing, and you would feel quite
confident that if it could be measured the infinitesimal quantity would
appear in the result. Now suppose that we could measure it with
absolute accuracy, and that the result was the discovery that the
supposed difference did not exist at all--and of course, we suppose
that there is no doubt whatever about the measurement--what, then,
should we be obliged to think? We should be forced to believe that as
the velocity of light was the same for the two observers, one moving,
one at rest, therefore the space and the time must be different for
each. Now, however strange it may seem, such a measurement has been
made, and with this surprising result. In consequence there has been
formulated a new principle in Physics named the Principle of
Relativity. I take this Principle of Relativity for my illustration
because it is based on reasoning that practically admits of no doubt,
and because {50} it requires us to form new conceptions of space and
time which seem to alter fundamentally what we have hitherto considered
as the evident and unmistakable nature of those realities. It has
always seemed that the distance separating two points, and the interval
of time separating two events, were each independent of the other and
each absolute. However different the distance and the interval may
appear to observers in movement or to observers in different systems of
movement in relation to ourselves and to one another, in themselves
they are the same distance and the same interval for all. They are the
same for the man in the express train as for the man standing on the
station platform. The Principle of Relativity requires us to think
that this is not so, but that, contrary to all our settled notions, the
actual space and time vary--really undergo an alteration, a contraction
or expansion--with each different system of movement of translation to
which the observer is bound. Events that for an observer belonging to
one system of movement happen in the same place, for another observer
in a different system of movement happen in different places. Events
that for one observer happen simultaneously, for other observers are
separated by a time interval according to the movement of translation
of the system to which they belong. So that space, which Newton
described as rigid, and time which he described as flowing at a
constant rate, and which for him was absolute, are for the new theory
relative, different for an observer in every different system of
movement of translation. Or we may state it in the opposite way, and
say that the Principle of Relativity shows us that the reason why
natural phenomena, such as the rate of propagation of light, undergo no
alteration when we pass from one system of movement of translation to
another, as we {51} are constantly doing in the changing velocity of
the earth's movement round the sun, is that space and time alter with
the velocity. I cannot here give the argument or describe the
experiments which have given this result--I am simply taking it as an
illustration.[1] It seems to me admirably suited to compare the
pragmatist method and the pragmatist attitude with that of scientific
realism and of absolute idealism.
[1] The Principle of Relativity is mainly the result of the recent
mathematical work of H. A. Lorentz, Einstein, and the late Professor
Minkowski. A very interesting and not excessively difficult, account
of it is contained in _Dernieres Pensees_, by the late Henri Poincare;
Paris, Alcan.
Here, then, is a question in which the truth of our accepted notions is
called in question, and new notions claim to be true. The sole
question involved, pragmatism insists, is the truth of conceptions, not
the reality of things, and there is but one way of testing the truth of
conceptions--and that is by comparing the rival conceptions in respect
of the practical consequences that follow from them and adopting those
that will work. If the old conceptions of space and time fail to
conform to a new need, then what was true before the need was revealed
is no longer true, the new conception has become true. By verifying
the new conception, we make it true. But, objects the realist, an idea
cannot become true; what is now true always was true, and what is no
longer true never was true, though we may have worked with the false
notion ignorant that it was false. Behind truth there is reality. The
earth was spherical even when all mankind believed it flat and found
the belief work. To this the pragmatist reply is that reality is only
our objectification of truth; it possesses no meaning divorced from
human purposes. Had anyone announced that the earth was a sphere {52}
when it was generally held to be flat, unless his announcement had some
relevance to a defect in the flat earth notion, or a claim to revise
that notion, his announcement would have been neither a truth nor a
falsehood in any intelligible meaning of the term--he would have been
making an irrelevant remark. The notions of space and time that Newton
held worked, and were therefore true; if a new need requires us to
replace them with other notions, and these other notions will work and
are therefore true, they have become true and Newton's notions have
become false. If it is still objected that the new notions were also
true for Newton, although he was ignorant of them, the need for them
not having arisen, the only reply is that truth, or reality, in
complete detachment from human purposes, cannot be either affirmed or
denied.
With this view the idealist will be in agreement; his objection is of a
different kind. He rejects, as the pragmatist does, the notion of a
reality independent of human nature that forces upon us the changes
that our conceptions undergo. These changes, he holds, are the inner
working of the conceptions themselves, the manifestation of our
intellectual nature, ever striving for an ideal of logical consistency.
Truth is this ideal. We do not make it; we move towards it. If we
compare, then, the idealist and the pragmatist doctrine, it will seem
that, while for the idealist truth is growing with advancing knowledge
into an ever larger because more comprehensive system of reality, for
the pragmatist it is ever narrowing, discarding failures as useless and
irrelevant to present purpose. How indeed, the idealist will ask, if
practical consequences be the meaning of truth, is it possible to
understand that knowledge has advanced or can advance? Does not the
history of science prove a continual expansion, an increasing {53}
comprehension? It is within the conception that the inconsistency is
revealed, not in any mere outward use of the conceptions, and the
intellectual effort is to reconcile the contradiction by relating the
conception to a more comprehensive whole. How, then, does the idealist
meet this case which we have specially instanced, the demand for new
notions of space and time made by the Principle of Relativity? He
denies that the new conceptions are called forth by human needs in the
narrow sense--that is to say, in the sense that working hypotheses or
practical postulates are required. The need is purely logical. The
inconsistency revealed in the notions that have hitherto served us can
only be reconciled by apprehending a higher unity. If the older
notions of space and time are inadequate to the more comprehensive view
of the universe as a co-ordination of systems of movement, then this
very negation of the older notions is the affirmation of the new, and
from the negation by pure logic the content and meaning which are the
truth of the new notions are derived. To this objection the pragmatist
reply is that if this be the meaning of the truth there is no way shown
by which it can be distinguished from error. There is in fact for
idealism no error, no illusion, no falsehood; as real facts, there are
only degrees of truth. But a theory of truth which ignores such
stubborn realities as illusion, falsehood, and error is, from whatever
standpoint we view it, useless. On the other hand, pragmatism offers a
test by which we can discriminate between true and false--namely, the
method of judging conceptions by their practical consequences. Can we
or can we not make our conceptions work? That is the whole meaning of
asking, Are they true or false? And now, lest the reader is alarmed at
the prospect of having to revise his working ideas of space and {54}
time, I will, to reassure him, quote the words with which Henri
Poincare concluded his account of the new conceptions, and which
admirably express and illustrate the pragmatist's attitude: "What is to
be our position in view of these new conceptions? Are we about to be
forced to modify our conclusions? No, indeed: we had adopted a
convention because it seemed to us convenient, and we declared that
nothing could compel us to abandon it. To-day certain physicists wish
to adopt a new convention. It is not because they are compelled to;
they judge this new convention to be more convenient--that is all; and
those who are not of this opinion can legitimately keep the old and so
leave their old habits undisturbed. I think, between ourselves, that
this is what they will do for a long time to come."
I have so far considered pragmatism rather as a criticism than as a
doctrine. I will now try and characterise it on its positive side. It
declares that there is no such thing as pure thought, but that all
thinking is personal and purposive; that all knowing is directed,
controlled, and qualified by psychological conditions such as interest,
attention, desire, emotion, and the like; and that we cannot, as formal
logic does, abstract from any of these, for logic itself is part of a
psychical process. Truth therefore depends upon belief; truths are
matters of belief, and beliefs are rules of action. It is this
doctrine that gives to pragmatism its paradoxical, some have even said
its grotesque, character. It seems to say that the same proposition is
both true and false--true for the man who believes it, false for the
man who cannot. It seems to say that we can make anything true by
believing it, and we can believe anything so long as the consequences
of acting on it are not absolutely disastrous. And the proposition,
All truths work, seems to involve the conclusion that all that works is
true; and the proposition, The true is the useful, seems to imply that
{55} whatever is useful is therefore true. No small part of the
pragmatist controversy has been directed to the attempt to show that
all and each of these corollaries are, or arise from, misconceptions of
the doctrine. I think, and I shall endeavour to show, that there is a
serious defect in the pragmatist statement, and that these
misconceptions are in a great part due to it. Nevertheless, we must
accept the pragmatist disavowal. And there is no difficulty in doing
so, for the meaning of the theory is sufficiently clear. Truth,
according to pragmatism, is a value and not a fact. Truth is thus
connected with the conception of "good." In saying that truth is
useful, we say that it is a means to an end, a good. It is not a moral
end, but a cognitive end, just as "beauty" is an esthetic end. Truth,
beauty, and goodness thus stand together as judgments of value or
worth. It is only by recognising that truth is a value that we can
possess an actual criterion to distinguish it from error, for if truth
is a judgment of fact, if it asserts existence, so also does error.
The pragmatist principle has an important bearing on religion. It
justifies the Faith attitude. It shows that the good aimed at by a
"truth claim" is only attainable by the exercise of the will to
believe. Thus it replaces the intellectual maxim, Believe in nothing
you can possibly doubt, with the practical maxim, Resolve not to quench
any impulse to believe because doubts of the truth are possible.
Belief may even be a condition of the success of the truth claim.
CHAPTER VI
UTILITY
We have seen in the last chapter that pragmatism is both a criticism
and a theory. It shows us that the {56} notion that truth is
correspondence involves the conception of an "impossible" knowledge,
and the notion that truth is coherence or consistency involves the
conception of a "useless" knowledge. The explanation pragmatism itself
offers is of the kind that is called in the technical language of
philosophy teleological. This means that to explain or to give a
meaning to truth all we can do is to point out the purpose on account
of which it exists. This is not scientific explanation. Physical
science explains a fact or an event by showing the conditions which
give rise to it or that determine its character. Pragmatism recognises
no conditions determining truth such as those which science embodies in
the conception of a natural law--that is, the idea of a connection of
natural events with one another which is not dependent on human
thoughts about them nor on human purposes in regard to them. Truth is
in intimate association with human practical activity; its meaning lies
wholly in its utility. We must therefore now examine somewhat closely
this notion of utility.
There appears to me to be a serious defect in the pragmatist conception
and application of the principle of utility; it is based on a
conception altogether too narrow. A theory that condemns any purely
logical process as resulting in "useless" knowledge can only justify
itself by insisting on an application of the principle of utility that
will be found to exclude not merely the Absolute of philosophy but most
if not all of the results of pure mathematics and physics, for these
sciences apply a method of pure logical deduction and induction
indistinguishable from that which pragmatism condemns. The
intellectual nature of man is an endowment which sharply distinguishes
him from other forms of living creatures. So supreme a position does
our intellect assign to us, so wide is the gap that separates {57} us
from other creatures little different from ourselves in respect of
perfection of material organisation and adaptation to environment, that
it seems almost natural to suppose that our intellect is that for which
we exist, and not merely a mode of controlling, directing, and
advancing our life. Now it is possible to hold--and this is the view
that I shall endeavour in what follows to develop--that the intellect
is subservient to life, and that we can show the manner and method of
its working and the purpose it serves. So far we may agree with the
pragmatist, but it is not the same thing to say that the intellect
serves a useful purpose and to say that truth, the ideal of the
intellect, the end which it strives for, is itself only a utility.
Were there no meaning in truth except that it is what works, were there
no meaning independent of and altogether distinct from the practical
consequences of belief, of what value to us would the intellect be? If
the meaning the intellect assigns to truth is itself not true, how can
the intellect serve us? The very essence of its service is reduced to
nought; for what else but the conception of an objective truth, a
logical reality independent of any and every psychological condition,
is the utility that the intellect puts us in possession of? It is this
conception alone that constitutes it an effective mode of activity.
Therefore, if we hold with the pragmatist that the intellect is
subservient to life, truth is indeed a utility, but it is a utility
just because it has a meaning distinct from usefulness. On the other
hand, to condemn any knowledge as "useless" is to deny utility to the
intellect.
Before I try to show that the logical method of the idealist
philosophy, which pragmatism condemns because it leads to "useless"
knowledge, is identical in every respect with the method employed in
pure mathematics and physics, I will give for comparison two
illustrations {58} that seem to me instances of a narrow and of a wide
use of the concept of utility.
A short time ago an orang-utang escaped from its cage in the Zoological
Gardens under somewhat singular and very interesting circumstances.
The cage was secured with meshed wire of great strength, judged
sufficient to resist the direct impact of the most powerful of the
carnivora; but the ape, by attention to the twisting of the plied wire,
had by constant trying succeeded in loosening and finally in unwinding
a large section. It escaped from its enclosure, and after doing
considerable damage in the corridor, including the tearing out of a
window frame, made its way into the grounds and took refuge in a tree,
twisting the branches into a platform said to be similar to the
constructions it makes in its native forests.
In taking this action as an illustration, I am not concerned with the
question of what may be the distinction between action that is
intelligent and action that is instinctive. If we take intelligence in
a wide and general meaning, we may compare the intelligence shown by
this ape with the intelligence shown by man in the highest processes of
the mind. Psychologists would, I think, be unanimous in holding that
in the mind of the ape there was no conception of freedom, no kind of
mental image of unrestricted life and of a distinct means of attaining
it, no clearly purposed end, the means of attaining which was what
prompted the undoing of the wire, such as we should certainly suppose
in the case of a man in a similar situation. It was the kind of
intelligent action that psychologists denote by the description "trial
and error." It seems to me, however, that this exactly fulfils the
conditions that the pragmatist doctrine of the meaning of truth
require. We see the intellect of the ape making true by finding out
what works. {59} We can suppose an entire absence of the idea of
objective truth to which reality must conform, of truth unaffected by
purpose. Here, then, we seem to have the pure type of truth in its
simplest conditions, a practical activity using intelligence to
discover what works. Is the difference between this practical activity
and the higher mental activities as we employ them in the abstract
sciences one of degree of complexity only, or is it different in kind?
Let us consider now, as an illustration of the method of the abstract
sciences, the well-known case of the discovery of the planet Neptune.
This planet was discovered by calculation and deduction, and was only
seen when its position had been so accurately determined that the
astronomers who searched for it knew exactly the point of the heavens
to which to direct their telescopes. The calculation was one of
extraordinary intricacy, and was made independently by two
mathematicians, Adams of Cambridge and Leverrier of Paris, between the
years 1843 and 1846. Each communicated his result independently--Adams
to the astronomer Challis, the Director of the Cambridge Observatory,
and Leverrier to Dr. Galle of the Berlin Observatory. Within six weeks
of one another and entirely unknown to one another, in August and
September 1846, each of these astronomers observed the planet where he
had been told to look for it. This is one of the romances of modern
science. It is not the discovery but the method that led to it which
may throw light on our problem of the nature of truth.
At first sight this seems exactly to accord with and even to illustrate
the pragmatist theory, that truth is what works. The investigation is
prompted by the discrepancies between the actual and the calculated
positions of Uranus, the outermost planet, as it was then supposed, of
the system. This revealed a need, and this {60} need was met by the
practical postulate of the existence of another planet as yet unseen.
The hypothesis was found to work even before the actual observation put
the final seal of actuality on the discovery. What else but the
practical consequences of the truth claim in the form of the hypothesis
of an undiscovered planet were ever in question? Yes, we reply, but
the actual method adopted, and the knowledge sought for by the method,
are precisely of the kind that pragmatism rejects as "useless"
knowledge. Why were not the observed movements of Uranus accepted as
what they were? Why was it felt that they must be other than they were
seen to be unless there was another planet? The need lay in the idea
of system. It was inconsistent with the system then believed complete,
and the need was to find the complete system in which it would
harmonise. The truth that was sought for was a harmonious individual
whole, and the method employed precisely that which the Absolutist
theory of reality employs. There is observed a discrepancy, an
inconsistency, a contradiction within the whole conceived as a system.
This negation is treated as a defect, is calculated and accurately
determined, and is then positively affirmed of the reality. Now, what
is distinctive in this method is that reality is conceived as a
complete system. If the felt defect in this system cannot be made good
by direct discovery, its place is supplied by a fiction, using the term
in its etymological meaning to express something made and not in its
derived meaning to express something found false. This intellectual
process of construction is purely logical; no psychological element in
the sense of the will to believe enters into it or colours it in any
way.
This is not an isolated instance, it illustrates the method of science
in all theorising. An even more {61} striking illustration than that
we have just given is the case of the hypothesis of the luminiferous
æther--a supposed existence, a fiction, that has served a useful, even
an indispensable service in the history of modern physics. To many
physicists, even to Lord Kelvin, the hypothesis seemed so surely
established that its nonexistence hardly seemed thinkable, yet all the
experiments designed to detect its presence have been uniformly
negative in result, and it now seems not even necessary as a
hypothesis, and likely to disappear. The æther was not only not
discovered, it was not even suspected to exist, as in the case of the
unknown planet Neptune--it was logically constructed. It was required
to support the theory of the undulatory nature of light and to fulfil
the possibility of light propagation in space. It was therefore a
postulate, called forth by a need--so far we may adopt the pragmatist
account. But what was the nature of the need, and what was the method
by which the postulate was called forth? It is in answering this
question that the pragmatist criterion fails. The need was
intellectual in the purely logical meaning of the term, and it was met
by a purely logical construction. The need was a practical human need
only in so far as the intellect working by logical process is a human
endowment but not in any personal sense such as is conveyed by the term
psychological. Willingness or unwillingness to believe, desire,
aversion, interest were all irrelevant. Given the intellect, the
logical necessity was the only need that called forth by logical
process the "truth-claiming" hypothesis of the æther. But even so, the
pragmatist will urge, is its truth anything else but its usefulness as
shown in the practical consequences of believing it? Was it not true
while it was useful, and is it not only now false, if it is false, if
it is actually discovered not to be useful? {62} The reply is that no
mathematician or physicist would recognise the possibility of working
with a conception of truth that simply identified truth with utility,
and for this reason that he can only conceive reality as a system whose
truth is symbolised in an equation. It is the system that determines
and characterises the postulate, and not the postulate advanced at a
venture, tried and verified, that constitutes the system. The
mathematician begins by placing symbols to represent the unknown
factors in his equation, and proceeds by means of his known factors to
determine their value. The æther is at first a pure fiction
constructed to supply an unknown existence recognised as a defect. Its
truth cannot mean that it works for it cannot but work, having been
constructed purely for that purpose. Its truth means that it
corresponds to some actual existence at present unknown. To prove its
truth the physicist does not appeal to its value as a hypothesis, but
devises experiments by which, if it does exist, its existence will be
demonstrated. In this actual case the experiments have had a uniformly
negative result, and therefore the truth of the hypothesis is made
doubtful or denied. The hypothesis continues to work as well as it
ever did, and physicists will probably long continue to use it, but it
has failed to establish its truth claim. The result is the modern
Principle of Relativity, which, as we have already said, has produced a
revolution in modern physics. The abolition of the æther would have
been impossible if the physicist had been content with the utility of
his hypothesis and had not experimented to prove its truth. The
relation between truth and utility is thus proved to be that it is
useful to know what is true.
These two illustrations of scientific method--namely, the discovery of
Neptune and the negative discovery {63} that the æther is
non-existent--make it evident that verification is the intellectual
process not of making true, but of finding true. We can, indeed,
distinguish quite clearly the two processes. The first process, that
of making true, is the constructing of the fiction by which we complete
an incomplete system, and the second is the testing of that fiction to
see if it corresponds to anything actually existing. No kind of
intellectual activity will make an idea true, and conversely we may say
that were truth only a utility, then knowledge instead of being
systematic would be chaotic. Existence has its roots in reality, not
in knowledge. Reality does not depend on truth. Truth is the intellectual apprehension of reality. |
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