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. |
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기