 Preface of Pragmatism. This is a LibriVox recording. Our LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Fredrik Karlsson. Pragmatism by William James. Pragmatism. A new name for some old ways of thinking. To the memory of John Stuart Mill, from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader where he alive today. Preface. The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906 and in January 1907 at Columbia University in New York. They are printed as delivered without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement so called, I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it, seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively and of their combined mission. And this has occurred in so many countries and from so many different points of view that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes dealing in broad strokes and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out. If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references. In America, John Dewey's studies in logical theory are the foundation. Read also by Dewey the articles in the philosophical review, volume 15, page 113 and 465 in mind, volume 15, page 293 and in the journal of philosophy, volume 4, page 197. Probably the best statements to begin with, however, are F. C. S. Schillers in his studies in humanism, especially the essays numbered 1567, 18 and 19. His previous essays, and in general the polemic literature of the subject, are fully referred to in his footnotes. Furthermore, C. G. Milhaud, L'Eretionnelle, 1898, and the fine articles by L'Eroï in the Revue de Metaphysique, volumes 7, 8 and 9. Also, articles by Blondel and Dessali in the anal de philosophie cattienne, fourth series, volumes 2 and 3. Papini announces a book on pragmatism in the French language to be published very soon. To avoid any misunderstandings, at least, let me say that there is no logical connection between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as radical empiricism. The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist. Harvard University, April 1907. End of preface. Lecture 1, Part 1 of Pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Fredrik Carlson. Pragmatism by William James. Lecture 1. The Present Dilemma in Philosophy. In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called Heretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words. There are some people, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that, for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that, for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. I think with, Mr. Chesterton, in this matter, I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter. It is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly gut from books. It is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense. Yet here I stand, desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe. And yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe that professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind. I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry and then technical and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title flashes of brilliant light revealed against Cimmerian darkness. None of us, I fancy, understood all that he said, yet here I stand making a very similar venture. I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew. They brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let our controversy begin in a smoking room anywhere, about free will or God's omniscience or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophists' results concern us all most vitally, and philosophers' coerist arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity. Believing in philosophy myself devoutly and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, perfas et nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation. Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the menitis crannis and it opens up the widest vistas. It bakes no bread as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics often are to common people no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light its sense of the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least and the contrast effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional. The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges in personal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character and in his heart considers them incompetent and not in it in the philosophic business even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability. Yet in the forum he can make no claim on the bare ground of his temperament to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions. The potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I'm sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it and I accordingly feel free to do so. Of course I'm talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical idiosyncrasy who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament. We are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters. Some of us are easily talked out of them and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs. Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free and easy persons, in government, authoritarians and anarchists, in literature, purists or academicals and realists, in art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar? Well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the para terms rationalist and empiricist. Empiricist meaning your lover of facts in all the crude variety rationalist meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles so it is a difference rather of emphasis. Yet it breeds antipathies of the most pugnant character between those who lay the emphasis differently. And we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking the universe by talking of the empiricist and of the rationalist temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive, more simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature. And if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently but by no means uniformly. And I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically, we find the terms intellectualism and sensationalism used as synonyms of rationalism and empiricism. Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism and idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists, on the other hand, are not uncommonly materialistic and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from holds in universals and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts and makes of the whole a collection. It's not averse, therefore, to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism but there is much to say about this claim so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case, the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free will and the empiricist will be a fatalist. I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations while the empiricist may be more skeptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental makeup that I mean if I had the columns by the titles tender-minded and tough-minded respectively. The tender-minded, rationalistic going by principles, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free willist, monistic, dogmatical. The tough-minded, empiricist going by facts, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, skeptical. Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not. I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people characterized as I've written them down do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whatever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere today. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of a crippled creek. Each type leaves the other to be inferior to itself. But disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement. In the other it has a dash of fear. Now as I have already insisted few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple and few are typically rocky mountain tufts in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good of course give us lots of facts. Principles are good give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way but as indubitably is it many if you look at it in another. It is both one and many. Let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined and yet of course our wills are free. A sort of free will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable but the whole can't be evil. So practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical never straightening out his system but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours. But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line. And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us our religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devote. Now take a man of this type and let him be also a philosophic amateur unwilling to mix our hodgepodge system after the fashion of a common layman and what does he find his situation to be in this blessed year of our Lord 1906. He wants facts, he wants science, but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present possibly a majority of you are amateurs of justice sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation and the conflict between science and religion in full blast. Either it is the Rocky Mountain tough of a heckle with his materialistic monism, his aether guard and his jest at our guard as a gaseous vertebrate. Or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely and bowing religion politely out at the front door. She may indeed continue to exist but she must never show her face inside the temple. For 150 years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm, he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth in human though it be and submit to it. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone. The vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert byproducts of physiology. What is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of nothing but. Nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home. If now on the other hand you turn to the religious quarter for consolation and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and the generation is among us English-reading people of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive. The other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Higilian school. The philosophy of such men as Green, the Cares, Bozanke and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the most studious members of our Protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in Protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant through one stage of concession after another of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the Catholic Church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the Hegelians and other philosophers of the absolute, on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics on the other, the man that gives us this kind of philosophy, James Martino, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of Darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with it. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence, whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it. These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts, I have supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism over everything that lies on that side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism, but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it might, for ought they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can't deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things, whatever being true here, below. And the theistic God is almost a sterile principle. You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character. He is the kind of God that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it. While the usual theism is more insipid. But both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connection with this actual world of finite human lives. You want a system that will combine both things. The scientific loyalty to facts and a willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma. You find the two parts of your quesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and a religion, or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows. I'm not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this last reproach. You'll dwell a little longer on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled. I wish that I'd saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a graduate of some western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom, you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of recent trace its outlines. Logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. End of lecture one, part one. Lecture one, part two of pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Fredrik Karlsson, pragmatism by William James. In point of fact, it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe. It is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether refined is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips. Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered in spectral and practical men shaking philosophies dust off their feet and following the call of the wild. Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibniz was a rationalist mind with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate we have only to read that charmingly written theodicy of his in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean. Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy it falls to Leibniz to consider the number of the eternally damned that it is infinitely greater in our human case than that of those saved he assumes as a premise from the theologians and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even then he says, The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good if we once consider the real magnitude of the city of God. Coelius Secundus Corio has written a little book The Amplitudine Regni Coelestis which was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compose the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God. It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants and even the notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But today whatever be the limits that we may grant refuse to the universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes as big as ours or bigger which have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants though it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun as all the fixed stars are suns one sees how small a place among visible things our earth takes up since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns may be inhabited by no one but happy creatures and nothing obliges to believe that the number of damned persons is very great for a very few instances and samples suffice for the utility which good draws from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are stars everywhere may there not be a great space beyond the region of the stars and this immense space surrounding all this region may be replete with happiness and glory. What now becomes of the consideration of our earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point since our earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars? Thus the part of the universe which we know being almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us but which we are yet obliged to admit and all the evils that we know lying in this almost nothing it follows that the evils may be almost nothing in comparison with the goods that the universe contains. Leibniz continues elsewhere There is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal nor at furnishing an example to others nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Sassinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures. It is always founded in the fitness of things and satisfies not only the offended party but all wise lookers on even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the damned continue even though they serve no longer to turn anyone away from sin and that the rewards of the blessed continue even though they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever-new penalties by their continuing sins and the blessed attract ever-fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said. Leibniz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of samples of the genus lost soul whom God throws as a sup to the eternal fitness the more unequivtably grounded is the glory of the blessed. What it gives us is a cold literary exercise whose cheerful substance even hellfire does not warm and do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow, wigpetted age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative. The absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete. I find a fine example of revolt against this airy and shallow optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than mine does but I confess that I sympathize a good deal and some of you I know will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet on human submission with a series of city reporters, items from newspapers, suicides, deaths from starvation and the like as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance, after trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an Upper East Side Tenement House because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, today ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three weeks ago through illness and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow shovelers but he was too weak from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with a shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged Corcoran returned to his home last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door. On the following morning he drank the poison. The records of many more such cases lie before me. Mr. Swift goes on. An encyclopedia might easily be filled with her kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. We are aware of the presence of God in his world, says a writer in a recent English review. The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce. The World and the Individual Part 2, page 385. The Absolute is the richer for every discord and for all diversity which it embraces, says F. H. Bradley, appearance and reality, page 204. He means that these slain men make the universe richer and that is philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience is reality. It gives us an absolute face of the universe. It is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to have the experience, to tell us what is. Now, what does thinking about the experience of these persons come to compared with directly personally feeling it as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades while those who live and feel no truth. And the mind of mankind, not yet the mind of philosophers and of the propriety class, but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling men is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have here too for permitted the hero fans of religion and learning to judge them. This Cleveland working man, killing his children and himself, another of the sighted cases, is one of the elemental stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glossed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God and love and being helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine opportunity and 20 centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazes to man is the imposter of all philosophy which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove religion anality. Man will not give religion 2,000 centuries or 20 centuries more to try itself and waste human time. Its time is up. Its probation is ended. Its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited systems. Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an absolute no, I thank you. Religion, says Mr. Swift, is like a sleepwalker to whom actual things are blank. And such, though possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy today who turns to the philosophy professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fullness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism. Rationalists give him something religious. But to that religion, actual things are blank. He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully. For after all, he is the typically perfect mind. The mind the sum of whose demands is greatest. The mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run. It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious, like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favourable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said. If any of you here are professional philosophers and some of you I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction. And in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of rough and tumble fight between two hostile temperaments. What a childishly external view. And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape rather than as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape? And if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality which the intellect devines? How can principles and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne Cathedral built without an architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's true? Believe me, I feel the full force of the Indictment. The picture I have given is indeed monstrously oversimplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can't treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact, the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments, with their cravings and refusals, do determine men in their philosophies and always will. The details of systems may be recent out to piecemeal and when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the forest for the single tree. But when labour is accomplished, the mind always performs its big summarising act and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing with that strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the wraith of the man when a friend or enemy of ours is dead. Not only Walt Whitman could write, who touches this book, touches a man. The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavour in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is, and also flagrantly, is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavour of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms, and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning, our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favour. Our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it against the flavour of the philosophy prophet us, and one word is enough. Statt der lebedigen Natur, we say, der Gottdimension schurft hinein, that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream, our way with it, our way with all of them, impossible, impossible. Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own, but almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar system that he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial or what not. At any rate, he and we know offhand that such philosophers are out of plumb and out of key and out of whack and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel I prudently avoid names nearer home. I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on our part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds. One word more, namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are fat, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper with a aid of rule and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and mortar, and the outline already suggests that result. An outline in itself is meager, truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meager thing. It is the essential meagerness of what is suggested by the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his presence for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards. And yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey. Why? Why does Spencer call out so much reverence in spite of his weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated men who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the abbey of the standing? Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right place philosophically. His principles may be old skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of this particular world's carcass. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters. The citations of fact never cease. He emphasises facts, turns his face towards their quarter, and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind. The pragmatistic philosophy, of which I hope to begin talking in my next lecture, preserves as cordial a relation with facts and unlike Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends by turning positive religious constructions out of doors. It treats them cordially as well. I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that you require. End of lecture one. Lecture two, part one of pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Fredrik Karlsson. Pragmatism by William James. Lecture two, what pragmatism means. Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel. A live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree trunk while over against the other tree's opposite side, a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly around the tree. But no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction and always keeps the tree between himself and the man so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this. Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree. But does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken science and was obstinate. And the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of this scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction, you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows. Which party is right, I said, depends on what you practically mean by going round the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any further dispute. You are both right and both wrong, according as you conceive the verb to go round in one practical fashion or the other. Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair splitting, but meant just plain honest English round, the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute. I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as the pragmatic method. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical dispute that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many, fated or free, material or spiritual? Here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the others being right. A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word π ρ α γ μ α meaning action from which our words practice and practical come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled How to Make Our Ideas Clear in the Popular Science Monthly for January of that year, footnote translated in the Review Philosophic for January 1879, volume 7. Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that to develop a thought's meaning we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. That conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object then we need only consider what conceivable effects of practical kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years until I, in an address before Professor Howinson's Philosophical Union at the University of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date, 1898, the time seemed ripe for its reception. The word pragmatism spread and at present it fairly spots the pages of philosophic journals. On all hands, we find the pragmatic movement spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with consummally, seldom with clear understanding. It is evident that the term applies itself conveniently to a number of tendencies that hitherto have lacked a collective name and that it has come to stay. To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed to bringing it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science, though he had not called it by that name. All realities influence our practice, he wrote me, and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way. In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense. That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald, in a published lecture, gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called Totomeros. Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged, but never was decided. It would never have begun, says Ostwald, if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue, and the quarrel was as unreal as if theorizing in primitive times about the racing of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a brownie while another insisted an elf as the true cause of the phenomenon. Footnote. Theorie und Praxis. Seitschift des öster Reichischen Ingenieur und Architektenvereines. 1905, Number 4, Volume 6. I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address by Professor W. S. Franklin. I think that the sickest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is the science of masses, molecules, and either. And I think that the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of bodies and pushing them. Science, January 2nd, 1903. It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere. No difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequence upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhere. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me at definite instance of our life if this world formula or that world formula be the true one. There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Youm made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are known as. But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments. They were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself become conscious of a universal mission pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief. Pragmatism represent a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude. But it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of invertebrate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth. At the same time, it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I have called in my last lecture the temperament of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the quartier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultra-mountain type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, aphrite or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits and having their names he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. God, matter, reason, the absolute, energy are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word practical cash value. Set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution then than as a program for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories thus become instruments not answers to enigmas in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them. We move forward and on occasion make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance in always appealing to particulars with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions useless questions and metaphysical abstractions. All these you see are anti-intellectualist tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But at the outset at least it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papina has well said it lies in the midst of our theories like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing on an atheistic volume. In the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength. In a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excurgitated. In a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor and all must pass through it if they want a practical way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. No particular results then so far but only an attitude of orientation is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed necessities and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. So much for the pragmatic method. You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you but I shall presently explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems. Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense as meaning also a certain theory of truth. I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory after first paving the way so I can be very brief now. But brevity is hard to follow so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour. If much remains obscure I hope to make it clear in the later lectures. One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic. The study of the condition under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical and natural uniformities the first laws were discovered men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and raches and geometries like Euclid. He made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies. He made the law of the science for light to obey when refracted. He established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes of all things and devised their variations and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions we seize his mind in its very literal intention. But as the sciences have developed father the notion has gained ground that most perhaps all of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves moreover have grown so numerous that there is no counting them and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language a conceptual shorthand as someone calls them in which we write our reports of nature and languages as is well known tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigurd, Mack, Ostwald, Persson, Milford, Poincaré, Duhem, Reysen those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of and will think of additional names. Writing now on the front of this wave of scientific logic Mr. Schiller and Jui appear with their pragmatistic account of what truth everywhere signifies. Everywhere, these teachers say truth in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but this that ideas which themselves are but parts of our experience become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual shortcuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part linking things satisfactorily working securely simplifying, saving labour is true for just so much true and so far forth true instrumentally. This is the instrumental view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago. The view that truth in our ideas means their power to work promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford. Mr. Jui Schiller and their allies in reaching this general conception of all truth have only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists. In the establishment of these other sciences the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually observable in operation as denudation by weather say or variation from parental type or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations and then to generalize it making it apply to all times and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages. The observable process which Schiller and Jui particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already but it meets a new experience that puts them to strain. Somebody contradicts them or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion and then that for they resist change very variously until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter. Some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience come into one another most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An out-tree explanation violating all our preconceptions calls for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch around industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old-order standing time and space cause and effect nature and history and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between a smoother over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new facts so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold the theory true just in proportion to his success in solving this problem of maxima and minima. But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it whole more satisfactorily than that theory. But that means more satisfactorily to ourselves and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much of the unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism. Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle. In most cases, it is the only principle. For by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether or to abuse those who bear witness for them. You doubtless wish examples of this process of truth's growth and the only trouble is their superabundance. The simplest case of new truth is, of course, the mere numerical addition of new kinds of facts or of new single facts of all kinds to our experience an addition that involves no alteration in the old beliefs. Day follows day and content are simply added. The new contents themselves are not true. They simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them and when we say that they have come truth is satisfied by the plain additive formula. But often the day's contents oblige a rearrangement. If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy. Radium came the other day as part of the day's content and seemed for a moment to contradict our ideas of the whole order of nature. That order having come to be identified with what is called the conservation of energy. The mere sight of radium paying heat away indefinitely out of its own pocket seemed to violate that conservation. What to think? If the radiations from it were nothing but an escape of unsuspected potential energy pre-existent inside of the atoms the principle of conservation would be saved. The discovery of helium as the radiation's outcome opened a way to this belief. So Ramsey's view is generally held to be true because although it extends our old ideas of energy it causes a minimum of alteration in their nature. End of lecture 2 Part 1 Lecture 2 Part 2 of Pragmatism This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Carlson Pragmatism by William James I need not multiply instances a new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact and its success as I said a moment ago in doing this is a matter for the individual's appreciation. When old truth grows then by new truth's addition it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true get itself classed as true by the way it works grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer Now, Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were plastic they also were called truth for human reasons they also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction the previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatever is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true for to be true means only to perform this marriage function. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent truth that we find merely no longer malleable to human need truth incorrigible in a word. Such truth exists indeed super abundantly or it's supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and its prescription and may grow stiff with years of veteran service petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity but how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and mathematical ideas. A transformation which seems even to be invading physics. The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions of much wider principles. Principles that our ancestors never got a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation. Mr. Schiller still gives to all this view of truth the name of humanism but for this doctrine too the name of pragmatism seems fairly to be in the ascendant so I will treat it under the name of pragmatism in these lectures. Such then would be the scope of pragmatism first a method and second a genetic theory of what is meant by truth and these two things must be our future topics. What I've said of the theory of truth will I am sure have appeared obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity. I shall make amends for that hereafter. In a lecture on common sense I shall try to show what I mean by truths growing petrified by antiquity. In another lecture I shall dispatch age on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function. In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in truths development. You may not follow me wholly in these lectures and if you do you may not wholly agree with me but you will I know regard me at least as serious and treat my effort with respectful consideration. You will probably be surprised to learn then that Mr. Schiller's and Jewish theory have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have posed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. These pragmatists talk about truths in the plural about their utility and satisfactoriness about the success with which they work etc. Suggest to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame, second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this objective truth must be something non- utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think unconditionally. The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology down with psychology up with logic in all this question. See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind. The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness observes truth at its work in particular cases and generalizes. Truth for him become a class name for all sorts of definite working values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer the rationalist is unable to recognize the concreets from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness. Other things equal he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered he would always choose the skinny outline than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. I hope that as these lectures go on the concreteness and closeness to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of correspondence. What that may mean we must ask later between our minds and reality into that of a rich and active commerce that anyone may follow in detail and understand. Between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of our experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses. But enough of this at present. The justification of what I say must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human beings. Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament you may remember to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old-fashioned theism was bad enough with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous attributes, but so long as it held strongly by the argument from design it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the scientific theism has lost that foothold, and some kind of an imminent or pantheistic deity working in things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn as a rule more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders. But, as I said in my first lecture the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connection whatever with concreteness affirming the absolute mind which is its substitute for God to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact whatever they may be it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may the absolute will father them like the sick lion and asps fable all footprints lead into his den but you cannot re-descend into the world of particulars by the absolutes aid or deduce any necessary consequences of detail importance for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with him and for his eternal way of thinking but there upon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds but from the human point of view no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness it is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper it disdains empiricism's needs its substitutes are pallid outline for the real world's richness it is dapper it is noble in the bad sense in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service in this real world of sweat and dirt it seems to me that when a view of things is noble that or to count as a presumption against its truth and as a philosophic disqualification the prince of darkness may be a gentleman as we are told is but whatever the god of earth and heaven is he can surely be no gentleman his menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials even more than his dignity is needed in the criterion now pragmatism devoted though should be to facts has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under moreover she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere interested in no conclusions but those your minds and our experiences work out together she has no a priori prejudices against theology if theological ideas prove to have a value for a concrete life they will be true for pragmatism in the sense of being good for so much for how much more they are true will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged what I have said just now about the absolute of transcendental idealism is a case in point first I called it majestic and said it yielded religious comfort to a class of minds and then I accused it of remoteness and sterility but so far as it affords such comfort it surely is not sterile it has that amount of value it performs a concrete function as a good pragmatist I myself ought to call the absolute true in so far forth then and I unhesistatingly now do so but what does true in so far forth mean in this case to answer we need only apply the pragmatic method what do believers in the absolute mean by saying that their belief affords them comfort mean that since in the absolute finite evil is overruled already we may therefore whenever we wish treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal be sure that we can trust its outcome and without sin dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility in short they mean we have a right ever and a none to take a moral holiday to let the world wag in its own way feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business the universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally in which they don't care mood is also right for men and moral holidays in order that if I mistake not is part at least what the absolute is known as that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us that is part of his cash value when he is pragmatically interpreted father than that the ordinary lay reader in philosophy who thinks favorably of absolute idealism does not venture to sharpen his conceptions he can use the absolute for so much and so much is very precious he is pained at hearing you speak incredulously of the absolute therefore and disregards your criticisms because they deal with aspects of the conception that he fails to follow if the absolute means this and means no more than this who can possibly deny the truth of it to deny it would be to insist that men should never relax and that holidays are never in order I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives that it is good for as much as it profits you will gladly admit if what we do by its aid is good you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth for we are the better for possessing it but is it not a strange misuse of the word truth you will say to call ideas also true for this reason to answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage on my account you touch here upon the very central point of Mr. Schiller's and Dewis and my own doctrine of truth which I cannot discuss with detail until my sixth lecture let me now say only this that truth is one species of good and not as is usually supposed a category distinct from good and coordinate with it the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief and good too for definite assignable reasons surely you must admit this that if there were no good for life in true ideas or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantages and false ideas they are only useful ones then the current notion that truth is divine and precious and its pursuit of duty could never have grown up or become a dogma in a world like that our duty would be to shun truth rather but in this world just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste but good for our teeth stomach and our tissues so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of but they are also helpful in lives practical struggles if there be any life that it is really better we should lead and if there be any idea which if I believed in would help us to lead that life really better for us to believe in that idea unless indeed belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits what would be better for us to believe this sounds very like a definition of truth it comes very near to saying what we ought to believe and in that definition none of you would find any oddity ought we ever not to believe what is better for us to believe and can we then keep the notion of what is better for us and what is true for us permanently apart pragmatism says no and I fully agree with her probably you also agree so far as the abstract statement goes but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives we should be found indulging in the differences above this world's affairs and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete that complicates the situation I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with the vital benefit now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with what indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones in other words the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths truths have once for all this concrete instinct of self preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them my belief in the absolute based on the good it does me must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday nevertheless as I conceive it and let me speak now confidentially as it were and merely in my own private person it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account it happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy I find that it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are unacceptable etc etc but as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies I personally just give up the absolute I just take moral holidays or else as a professional philosopher I try to justify them by some other principle if I could restrict my notion of the absolute to its bare holiday giving value it wouldn't clash with my other truths but we cannot easily thus restrict our hypothesis they carry super numerary features and these it is that clash so my disbelief in the absolute means then disbelief in those other super numerary features for I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays you see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said borrowing the word from Papini that he unstiffens our theories she has in fact no prejudices whatever no obstructive dogmas no rigid cannons of what I shall count as proof she is completely genial she will entertain any hypothesis she will consider any evidence it follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both of a positivistic empiricism which is anti theological bias and over religious rationalism with its exclusive interest in the remote the noble the simple and the abstract in the way of conception in short she widens the field of search for God rationalism sticks to logic and the Empyrean empiricism sticks to the external senses pragmatism is willing to take anything to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences she will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences she will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact if that should seem a likely place to find him her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experiences demands nothing being omitted if theological ideas should do this if the notion of God in particular should prove to do it how should pragmatism possibly deny God's existence she should see no meaning in treating as not true a notion that was pragmatically so successful what other kind of truth could there be for her then all this agreement with concrete reality in my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion but you see already how democratic she is her manners are as various and flexible her resources as rich and endless and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature end of lecture 2