 Lecture 3 Part 1 of Pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Fredrik Karlsson. Pragmatism by William James. Lecture 3. Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered. I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with what is driest and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure of human language in the difference between grammatical subject and predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents or affections, use which term you will, are whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water, etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk which thereupon is called the substance in which they in here. So the attributes of this desk in here in the substance would, those of my coat in the substance wool, and so forth. Chalk, wood, and wool show again in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly, our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance spirit. Now it is very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc. All we know of the wood is the combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each substance here is known as. They form its sole cash value for our actual experience. The substance is in every case revealed through them. If we were cut off from them, we should never suspect its existence, and if God could keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we never could detect the moment for our experiences themselves would be unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things. Phenomena come in groups. The chalk group, the wood group, etc. And each group gets its name. The name within treat us in a way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer today, for instance, is supposed to come from something called the climate. Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day, and in general we place the name as if it were a being behind the facts it is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not really in here in names, and if not in names, then they do not in here in anything. They adhere, or cohere rather, with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it as cement might support pieces of mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing. Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case, scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer don't change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But though these don't alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance notion breaks into life then with tremendous effect if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the substance idea with which I am acquainted, and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the real presence on independent grounds. Material substance was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance, unapproachable bias behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world. Abollish that substance, he said, believe that God whom you can understand and approach sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the letter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism of matter was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of color, figure, hardness and the like. They are the catch value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations, by not being is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Yume, applied a similarly pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our personal identity. He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness, namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments and feel them all as part of one and the other. And the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul substance. But Locke says, suppose that God should take away the consciousness. Should we be any the better for having still the soul principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls. Should we, as we realize ourselves, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's days the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke discussing it from this point of view keeps the question pragmatic. Suppose, he says, one to think of himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thercites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor. He then finds himself the same person with Nestor. In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing. Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable? Our personal identity then consists for Locke solely in pragmatically definable particulars. Whether apart from these verifiable facts it also inheres in a spiritual principle is a merely curious speculation. Locke compromise that he was passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness. But his successor Yume and most empirically psychologists after him have denied the soul save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of experience with it and cash it into so much small change value in the way of ideas and their peculiar connections with each other. As I said of Berkeley's matter the soul is good or true for just so much but no more. The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of materialism. But philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in matter as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter in that sense as strongly as Berkeley did. One may be a phenomenalist like Huxley and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones and leaving the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinded parts and forces. It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be siphoned by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts out of their physiological conditions regardless whether nature be there only for our minds as idealists contend or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present-day materialism which may better be called naturalism. Over against it stands theism or what in a wide sense may be termed spiritualism. Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things but also runs and operates them, the world being thus guided not by its lower but by its higher element. Treated as it often is, the question becomes little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy. Spirit is pure, elevated, noble. And since it is more consonant with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat abstract principles as finalities before which our intellects may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation is the great rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration for one kind and of dislike for another kind of abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist professor who always referred to materialism as the mud philosophy and deemed it thereby refuted. To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the first volume of his psychology he shows us that matter so infinitely subtle and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those which modern science postulates in her explanations has no trace of grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit as we mortals here to have framed it is itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of nature's facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease. To an abstract objection, an abstract rejoinger suffices. And so far as one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of matter as something crass, Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial. Matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities. But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the question. What do we mean by matter? What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different character. And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author. Imagine in fact the entire contents of the world to be once for all irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment and to have no future. And then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations to its history. The theist shows how a god made it. The materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world is already completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be no more experiences and no possible differences can now be looked for. Both theories have shown all their consequences and by the hypothesis we are adopting these are identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. I am opposing of course that the theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is. For just consider the case sincerely and say what would be the worth of a god if he were there, where this work accomplished a rid his world run down. He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that amount of result with its mixed merits and defects his creative power could attain but go no farther. And since there is to be no future, since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing and now go with it in the ending, since it draws no simple mental significance such as our real world draws from its function of preparing something yet to come, why then, by it we take God's measure as it were? He is the being who could once for all do that, and for that much we are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer loss then if we dropped God as a hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness or crassness come in? And how experienced being what is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living or richer? Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, the same for our praise or blame, as Browning says. It stands there indefeasibly, a gift which can't be taken back. Calling matter, the course of it, retracts no single one of the items that have made it up, nor does calling God the course augment them. They are the God or the items respectively of just that and no other world. The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do, appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak, and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come to it were he absent and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage. When a play is once over and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack. Thus, if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same thing, the power, namely neither more nor less, that could make just this completed world. And the wise man is he who in such a case would turn his back on such a super-irrigatory discussion. Accordingly, most men instinctively and positivists and scientists deliberately do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The common man and the scientists say they discover no such outcomes, and if the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling, and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly. Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question and place ourselves this time in the world we live in, in the world that has a future that is yet uncompleted whilst we speak. In this unfinished world, the alternative of materialism or theism is intensely practical, and it is worthwhile for us to spend some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so. How indeed does the program differ for us according as we consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind atoms moving accordingly to eternal laws, or that on the other hand they are due to the providence of God. As far as the past facts go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in, are backed, are captured, and the good that's in them is gained, be the atoms or be the God their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about us today who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that if matter could give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered, is just as divine an entity as God, in fact, coalesces with God, is what you mean by God. Seize these persons' advices to use either of these terms with their outgrown opposition. Use a term free of the clerical connotations on the one hand of the suggestion of grossness, coarseness, ignobility on the other. Talk of the primal mystery of the unknowable energy of the one and only power instead of saying either God or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us, and if philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist. But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question, what does the world promise? Give us a matter that promises success, that is bound by its laws, to lead our world even nearer to perfection, and any rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer worships his own so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever, as that is all we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God. Its function is a God's function, and is exerted in a world in which a God would now be superfluous. From such a world a God would never lawfully be missed. Cosmic emotion would here be the right name for religion. But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy. And Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the practical side of the controversy, has really contributed nothing serious to its relief. But apply now our principle of practical results and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires. End of Lecture 3, Part 1 Lecture 3, Part 2 of Pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Fredrik Carlson. Pragmatism by William James. Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taking retrospectively, point when we take them prospectively to wholly different outlooks of experience. For according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion, though they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us, and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again, and to re-dissolve everything that they have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Belfour's words. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the rays which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been, nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that that the labour, genius, devotion and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect. Footnote the foundations of belief, page 30. That is the sting of it. That in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled shore appears and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long-lingering air it be dissolved, even as our world now lingers for our joy, yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing, remains of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see. Mr Spencer believes this as much as anyone. So why should he argue with us as if we were making celesthetic objections to the grossness of matter and motion, the principles of his philosophy, when what really dismisses is the disconceletness of its alternative. No, the true objection to materialism is not positive, but negative. It would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it is for grossness. Grossness is what grossness does. We now know that. We now know that. We make complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is not, not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiler of our remotest hopes. The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them. That it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a guard in it to say the last word may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as God. A world with a guard in it to say the last word may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition. So that, where it is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast, and those poets like Dante and Wordsworth, who lived on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism, not in hair-splitting abstractions about matters inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes. Spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough for anyone who feels it, and as long as men are men it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate. But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of the world's future, you may yourselves poo-poo the difference as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimeras as the latter end of the world. Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns. All superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism's son sets in a sea of disappointment. Remember what I said of the absolute. It grants us moral holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough to be sure. The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God ensures will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science. We can study our God only by studying His creation, but we can enjoy our God if we have one in advance of all that labour. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given you your God, His name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to down each other. The truth of God has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them, and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi. Let me pass to a very cognate philosophical problem, the question of design in nature. God's existence has from time immoral been held to be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc. fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its race to a sharp picture on our retina. Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held, and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity. The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed. Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intrauterine darkness and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other. They are evidently made for each other. Vision is the end designed, light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment. It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance happenings to bring forth fit results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point of view. To the grub under the bark, the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer. Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian facts and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism of one or the other. It was as if one should say, my shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery. We know that they are both. They are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need only stretched similarly the designs of God as the aim of a football team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal. If that were so, they would simply get up on some dark night and place it there. Rather to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions, the game's rules and the opposing players, so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature's vast machinery. Without nature's jupendous laws and counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them. This saves the form of the design argument at the expense of its old easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans. The what of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for them becomes a very little consequence in comparison. We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find in these actual worlds particulars. Rather, we cannot by any possibility comprehend it. The mere word design by itself has, we see, no consequences and explains nothing. It is the bareness of principles, the old question of whether there is a design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer, and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars. Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been fitted to that production. The argument from fitness to design would consequently always apply, whatever were the product's character. The recent Mount Peli eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc. In just that one hideous configuration of positions. France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there. If God aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it showed exquisite intelligence. And so at any state of things, whatever, either in nature or in history, which we find actually realized. For the parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world of any conceivable character that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to produce it. Pragmatically then, the abstract word design is a blank cartridge. It carries no consequences. It does no execution. What sort of design and what sort of a designer are the only serious questions and the study of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers. Meanwhile, pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a divine one gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term. The same, in fact, which we saw that the terms God, spirit or the absolute yield as design, worthless though to be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a term of promise. Returning with it into experience, we gain a more confiding outlook on the future. If not a blind force, but a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues. This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at the present discernible in the terms design and designer. But if cosmic confidence is right, not wrong, better, not worse, that is a most important meaning, that much at least of possible truth the terms will then have in them. Let me take up another well-worn controversy, the free will problem. Most persons who believe in what is called their free will do so after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists who deny it, who say that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression diminish man. He is less admirable stripped of this creative principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free will and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with our fidelity. But free will has also been discussed pragmatically and, strangely enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. You know how large apart questions of accountability have played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons one would suppose that all that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological Levin, the interesting crime and sin and punishment, abide with us. Who's to blame? Whom can we punish? Whom will God punish? These preoccupations hang like a bad dream over man's religious history. So both free will and determinism have been invoked against and called absurd because each in the eyes of its enemies has seemed to prevent the imputability of good or bad deeds to their authors. Queer antinomies. Free will means novelty, the grafting on to the past of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the push of the whole past, the free willists say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything? We should be agents only, not principles. And where then would be our precious imputability and responsibility? But where would it be if we had free will rejoin the determinists? If a free act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent character that will stand still enough for praise or blame to be awarded? The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine. Mr. Follerton and MacTaggart have recently laid about them doubly with this argument. It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child with a sense for realities ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts, we shall praise him. If he does bad acts, we shall punish him anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what was previous in him or our novelties in a strict sense. To make our human ethics revolve about the question of merit is a pituous unreality. God alone can know our merits, if we have any. The real ground for supposing free will is indeed pragmatic, for it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which had made such a noise in past discussions of the subject. Free will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. That imitation and mass is there, who can deny? The general uniformity of nature is presupposed by every lesser law, but nature may be only approximately uniform, and persons in whom knowledge of the world's past has bred pessimism or doubts as to the world's good character, which becomes certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed, may naturally welcome free will as a milioristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least possible, whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance and that necessity and impossibility between them brule the destinies of the world. Free will is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the absolute, good, spirit or design. Taking abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those speculations if the world were nothing but a labyrinth of happiness already. Our interest in religious metaphysics arise in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe and needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free will? Who would not say, with Huxley, let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right fatally and I ask no better freedom? Freedom in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse. And who could be so insane as to wish that? To be necessarily what it is, to be impossibly odd elsewhere, would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe. Surely the only possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for deciderating. Free will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief. As such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they build up the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit, shut within this courtyard of sense experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower. Watchmen, tell us of the night if it ought of promise bear. And the intellect gives it then these terms of promise. Other than this practical significance, the words God, free will, design, etc., have none. Yet dark though they be in themselves, or intellectualistically taken, when we bear them into life's thicket with us, the darkness there grows light about us. If you stop dealing with such words with their definition, thinking what to be an intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham. Deus est ens, ase. Extra et sopra omne genus, necessarium unum, infinitiperefectum, simplex, emotabile, imensum, eternum, intelligens, etc. Wherein is such a definition really instructive? It means less than nothing in its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it, and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualist point of view altogether. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. That's the heart of your theology, and for that you need no rationalist definitions. Why shouldn't we, all of us, rationalists, as well as pragmatists, confess this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate practical foreground as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the world's remotest perspectives. See, then, how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their hinges, and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnis teoretische isch, a god, a kausalitätsprinzip, a design, a free will taken in themselves as something august and exalted above facts. See, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, what is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper aether, must resume its rites. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than here too for. Minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone, yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in the seat of authority that reminds one almost of the Protestant Reformation. And as to papal minds, Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of honor key and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer trash philosophically. But life wags on all the same and compasses its ends in Protestant countries. I venture to think that philosophic Protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity. End of Lecture 3 Lecture 4. Part 1 of Pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Fredrik Carlson. Pragmatism by William James. Lecture 4. The One and the Many. We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method in its dealings with certain concepts instead of ending with admiring contemplation plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the perspective by their means. Design, free will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their soul meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome. Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism. I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called total reflection in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities as pragmatism conceives it. Hold a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its surface or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of a candle flame or any other clear object situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No candle ray under these circumstances gets beyond the water's surface. Every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts and let the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real of course and interact but they interact only at their boundary and the locus of everything that lives and happens to us so far as full experience goes is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense bounded above by the superior element but unable to breathe it pure or penetrated. We get our oxygen from it however we touch it insistently now in this part now in that and every time we touch it we are reflected back into the water with our course redetermined and re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists indispensable for life but irrespirable by themselves as it were and only active in their redirecting function. All similes are halting but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows how something not sufficient for life in itself may nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere. In this present hour I wish to illustrate the pragmatic method by one more application. I wish to turn its light upon the ancient problem of the one and the many. I suspect that in but few of you has this problem occasioned sleepless nights and I should not be astonished if some of you told me it had never vexed you. I myself have come by long brooding over it to consider it the most central of all philosophic problems. Central because so pregnant. I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in ist. To believe in the one or in the many that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences. So bear with me for an hour while I try to inspire you with my own interest in the problem. Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of world's unity. We never hear this definition challenged and it is true as far as it goes for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy we talking general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned along with a reduction to system as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. Your scholarly mind of encyclopedic philological type your man essentially of learning has never lacked for praise along with your philosopher. What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taking singly but totality. Footnote compare a bellinger less concepts the cause at l'activité intentionnelle de l'esprit. Paris Alkin 1905 page 79 ff. In this acquaintance with reality's diversities is as important as understanding their connection. The human passion of curiosity runs on all fours with a systematizing passion. In spite of this obvious fact the unity of things has always been considered more illustrious as it were than their variety. When a young man first conceives the notion that the whole world forms one great fact with all its parts moving abreast as it were and interlocked he feels as if he were enjoying a great insight and looks superciliously on all who still fall short of this sublime conception. Taken thus abstractly as it first comes to one the first monistic insight is so vague as hardly to seem worth defending intellectually. Yet probably everyone in this audience in some way cherishes it. A certain abstract monism a certain emotional response to the character of oneness as if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its maniness but vastly more excellent and eminent is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of course the world is one we say. How else could it be a world at all? Empiricists as a rule are as stout monists of this abstract kind as rationalists are. The difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't blind them to everything else doesn't quench their curiosity for special facts whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity mystically and to forget everything else to treat it as a principle to admire and worship it and they are upon to come to a full stop intellectually. The world is one. The formula may become a sort of number worship. Three and seven have it is true been reckoned sacred numbers but abstractly taken why is one more excellent than forty three or than two million and ten? In this first vague conviction of the world's unity there is so little to take hold of that we hardly know what we mean by it. The only way to get forward with our notion is to treat it pragmatically. Granting the oneness to exist what facts will be different in consequence what will the unity be known as? The world is one yes but how one? What is the practical value of the oneness for us? Asking such questions we pause from the vague to the definite from the abstract to the concrete. Many distinct ways in which oneness predicated of the universe might make a difference come to view. I will note successively the more obvious of these ways. One. First the world is at least one subject of discourse. If its maniness was so irremediable as to permit no union whatever of its parts not even our mind could mean the whole of it at once. There would be like eyes trying to look in opposite directions but in point of fact we mean to cover the whole of it by our abstract term world or universe which expressly intends that no part shall be left out. Such unity of discourse carries obviously no farther monistic specifications a chaos once so named has so much unity of discourse as a cosmos. It is an odd fact that many monists consider a great victory scored for their side when pluralists say the universe is many. The universe, the chuckle, his speech bewraith him, his stance confessed of monism out of his own mouth. Well, let things be one in that sense. You can then fling such a word as universe at the whole collection of them but what matters it? It still remains to be a certain whether they are one in any other sense that is more valuable. Two. Are they, for example, continuous? Can you pause from one to another keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In other words, do the parts of our universe hang together instead of being like detached grains of sand? Even grains of sand hang together through the space in which they are embedded and if you can in any way move through such space you can pause continuously from number one of them to number two. Space and time are thus vehicles of continuity by which the world's parts hang together. The practical difference to us resultant from these forms of union is immense. Our whole motor life is based upon them. Three. There are innumerable other paths of practical continuity among things. Lines of influence can be traced by which they together. Following any such line you pause from one thing to another till you may have covered a good part of the universe's extent. Gravity and heat conduction are such all uniting influences so far as the physical world goes. Electric, luminous and chemical influences follow similar lines of influence. But opaque and inert bodies interrupt the continuity here so that you have to step around them or change your mode of progress if you wish to get farther on that day. Practically, you have then lost your universe's unity so far as it was constituted by those first lines of influence. There are innumerable kinds of connection that special things have with other special things and the ensemble of any one of these connections form one sort of system by which things are conjoined. Thus, men are conjoined in a vast network of acquaintanceship. Brown knows Jones, Jones knows Robinson, etc. and by choosing your father intermediaries rightly you may carry a message from Jones to the Empress of China or the Chief of African Pygmies or to anyone else in the inhabited world. But you are stopped short as by a non-conductor when you choose one man wrong in this experiment. What may be called love systems are grafted on the acquaintance system. A loves or hates B, B loves or hates C, etc. But these systems are smaller than the great acquaintance system that they presuppose. Human efforts are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways. We found colonial, postal, consular, commercial systems all the parts of which they obey definite influences that propagate themselves within the system but not to facts outside of it. The result is innumerable little hangings together of the world's parts within the larger hangings together. Little worlds not only of discourse but of operation within the wider universe. Each system exemplifies one type or grade of union its parts being strung on that peculiar kind of relation and the same part may figure in many different systems as a man may hold several offices and belong to various clubs. From this systematic point of view, therefore, the pragmatic value of the world's unity is that all these definite networks actually and practically exist. Some are more enveloping and extensive, some less so. They are superimposed upon each other and between them all they let no individual elementary part of the universe escape. Enormous as is the amount of disconnection among things for these systematic influences and conjunctions follow rigidly exclusive paths. Everything that exists is influenced in some way by something else if you can only pick the way out rightly. Loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other somehow and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or integrated affair. Any kind of influence whatever helps to make the world one so far as you can follow it from next to next. You may then say that the world is one meaning in these respects namely and just so far as they obtain. But just as definitely is it not one so far as they do not obtain and there is no species of connection which will not fail if instead of choosing conductors for it you choose non-conductors. You are then arrested at your very first step and have to write the world down as a pure many from that particular point of view. If our intellect had been as much interested in disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations philosophy would have equally successfully celebrated the world's disunion. The great point is to notice that the oneness and the maniness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with space whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most so in our general dealings with the world of influences we now need conductors and now need non-conductors and wisdom lies in knowing which is which at the appropriate moment. 4. All these systems of influence or non-influence may be listed under the general problem of the world's causal unity. If the minor causal influences among things should converge towards one common causal origin of them in the past, one great first course for all that is one might then speak of the absolute causal unity of the world. God's fire on creation's day has figured in traditional philosophy as such an absolute course and origin. Transcendental idealism, translating creation into thinking or willing to think calls the divine act eternal rather than first but the union of the many here is absolute, just the same the many would not be, save for the one. Against this notion of unity of origin of all there has always stood the pluralistic notion of an eternal self-existing many in the shape of atoms or even of spiritual units of some sort. The alternative has doubtless a pragmatic meaning but perhaps as far as these lectures go we had better leave the question of unity of origin unsettled. 5. The most important sort of union that obtains among things pragmatically speaking is their generic unity. Things exist in kinds. There are many specimens in each kind and what the kind implies for one specimen it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and soul of its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless for logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say, the world is one. Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one sumum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. Beings, thinkables, experiences would be candidates for this position. Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or not is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now. Another specification of what the phrase the world is one may mean is unity of purpose An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose. All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military or what not exist each for its controlling purpose. Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They cooperate. According to the degree of their development in collective or tribal purposes larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose observed by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that their appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture may have been purposed in advance but none of the results we actually know in this world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details. Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich or great or good. Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight and shuts out older vistas and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed. What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed but it is always more complex and different. Our different purposes also are at war with each other where one can't crush the other out they compromise and the result is again different from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand. Vaguely and generally much of what was purposed may be gained but everything makes strongly for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its unification better organized. Whoever claims absolute teleological unity saying that there is one purpose that every detail of the universe observes dogmatizes at his own risk. Theologians who dogmatize thus find it more and more impossible as our acquaintance with a warring interest of the world's parts grows more concrete to imagine what the one climactic purpose may possibly be like. We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods that the bitter makes the cocktail better and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us agreeably to our trumps. We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection. But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance and transcendental idealism in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce brings us no farther than the book of Job did. God's ways are not our ways so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high. In other words, the absolute with his own purpose is not the man-like God of common people. 7. Aesthetic Union among things also obtains and is very analogous to the ideological union. Things tell a story. Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax. They play into each other's hands expressively. Retrospectively, we can see that although no definite purpose presided over a chain of events yet the events fell into a dramatic form with a start, a middle, and a finish. In point of fact all stories end and here again the point of view of a many is that more natural one to take. The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following our life history I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader's attention. It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to see the world's history pluralistically as a rope of which each fiber tells a separate tale but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact and to sum the whole longitudinal series of one being living an undivided life is harder. We have indeed the analogy of embryology to help us. The microscopist makes a hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo and mentally unites them into one solid whole. But the great world's ingredients so far as they are beings seem like the ropes fibers to be discontinuous crosswise and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction they are many. Even the embryologist when he follows the development of his object has to treat the history of each single organ in turn. Absolute aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal. The world appears as something more epic than dramatic. So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds, purposes and dramas that there is more union in all these ways than openly appears is certainly true that there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind and story is a legitimate hypothesis. All I say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than we possess at present. End of Lecture 4, Part 1 Lecture 4, Part 2 of Pragmatism This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Fredrik Carlson. Pragmatism by William James. 8. The great monistic denkmittel for a hundred years past has been the notion of the one knower. The many exist only as objects for his thought, exist in his dreams as it were and as he knows them, they have one purpose, form one system, tell one tale for him. This notion of an all enveloping noetic unity in things is the sublimest achievement of intellectualist philosophy. Those who believe in the absolute as the all knower is turned usually say that they do so for coercive reasons, which clear thinkers cannot evade. The absolute has far-reaching practical consequences, some of which I drew attention in my second lecture. Many kinds of difference important to us would surely follow from its being too. I cannot hear entering to all the logical proofs of such a being's existence farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must therefore treat the notion of an all knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with a pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extent from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once. God's consciousness says Professor Royce, footnote the conception of God, New York, 1897, page 292, forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent, conscious moment. This is the type of noetic unity on which rationalism insists. Empiricism, on the other hand, is satisfied with the type of noetic unity that is humanly familiar. Everything gets known by some knower along with something else, but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke. He may be liable to forget. Whichever type obtained, the world would still be a universe noetically. Its parts would be conjoined by knowledge, but in the one case the knowledge would be absolutely unified, in the other it would be strung along and overlapped. The notion of one instantaneous or eternal knower, either objective here means the same thing, is, as I said, the great intellectualist achievement of our time. It has practically driven out that conception of substance which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done. Universal substance which alone has been in and from itself and of which all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support. Substance has succumbed to the pragmatic criticisms of the English school. It appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given incoherent forms, the very forms in which we finite knowers experience or think them together. These forms of conjunction are as much parts of the tissue of experience as are the terms which they connect. And it is a great pragmatic achievement for recent idealism to have made the world hang together in these directly representable ways instead of drawing its unity from the inheritance of its parts. Whatever that may mean in an unimaginable principle behind the scenes. The world is one, therefore, just so far as we experience it to be concatenated, one by as many definite disjunctions as appear. But then also not one by just as many definite disjunctions as we find. The oneness and the meniness of it thus obtain in respects which can be separately named. It is neither a universe pure and simple, nor a multiverse pure and simple. And its various manners of being one suggest for their accurate assortment of the distinct programs of scientific work. Thus the pragmatic question what is the oneness known as what practical difference will it make, saves us from all feverish excitement over it as a principle of sublimity and carries us forward into the stream of experience with a cool head. The stream may indeed reveal far more connection and union than we now suspect, titled on pragmatic principles to claim absolute oneness in any respect in advance. It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean that probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude which we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a par. Union of various grades union of diverse types union that stops at non-conductors union that merely goes from next to next and means in many cases outer nextness only and not a more internal bond union of concatenation in short all that sort of things seem to you a half way stage of thought. The oneness of things appear to their manyness you think must also be more deeply true must be the more real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view you are sure gives us a universe imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an unconditional unit of being, something consolidated with its parts co-implicated through and through. Only then could we consider our state deeply rational. There is no doubt wherever that this ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal to many minds. One life, one truth, one love, one principle, one good, one God. I quote from a Christian science which the day's male brings into my hands beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically the value, and beyond doubt the word one contributes to the value quite as much as the other words. But if we try to realize intellectually what we can possibly mean by such a glut of oneness we are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations again. It means either the mere name one the universe of discourse or it means the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and concatenations. Or finally it means some one vehicle of conjunction treated as all inclusive like one origin one purpose or one knower. In point of fact it always means one knower to those who take it intellectually today. The one knower involves they think of the forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co- implicated in the one logical aesthetical teleological unit picture which is his eternal dream. The character of the absolute knower's picture is however so impossible for us to represent clearly that we may fairly suppose that the authority which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses and probably always will possess over some persons draws its strength far less from intellectual than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history usually though not always to make for the monistic view. This is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism but I will quote one mystical announcement to show just what I mean. The paragon of all monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindustan and the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekandanda who visited our shores some years ago. The method of Vedantism is the mystical method. You do not reason but after going through a certain discipline you see and having seen you can report the truth. Vivekandanda thus reports the truth in one of his lectures here. Where is any more misery for him who sees this oneness in the universe, this oneness of life, oneness of everything? This separation between man and man, man and woman, man and child nation from nation earth from moon, moon from sun this separation between atom is the cause really of all the misery. And the Vedanta says this separation does not exist. It is not real. It is merely apparent on the surface in the heart of things there is unity still. If you go inside you find that unity between man and man women and children races and races high and low rich and poor the gods and men all are one and animals too. If you go deep enough and he who has attained to that has no more delusion Where is any more delusion for him? What can delude him? Who knows the reality of everything the secret of everything where is there any more misery for him? What does he desire? He has traced the reality of everything unto the lord that center that unity of everything and that is eternal bliss, eternal knowledge eternal existence neither death nor disease nor sorrow nor misery nor discontent is there in the center the reality there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for he has penetrated everything the pure one the formless the buddlest the stainless he the knower he the great poet the self the existent he who is giving to everyone what he deserves Observe how radical the character of the monism here is separation is not simply overcome by the one it is denied to exist there is no many we are not parts of the one it has no parts and since in a sense we undeniably are each of us is the one indivisibly and totally an absolute one and I that one surely we have here a religion which emotionally considered has a high pragmatic value it imparts a perfect sumptuosity of security as our swami says in another place when man has seen himself as one with the infinite being the universe when all separateness has ceased when all men all women all angels all gods all animals all plants the whole universe has been melted into that oneness then all fear disappears whom to fear can I hurt myself can I kill myself can I injure myself do you fear yourself then will all sorrow disappear what can cause me sorrow I am the one existence of the universe then all jealousies will disappear of whom to be jealous of myself then all bad feelings disappear against whom will I have this bad feeling against myself there is none in the universe but me kill out this differentiation out this superstition that there are many he who in this world of many sees that one he who in this mass of insentions sees that one sentient being he who in this world of shadow catches that reality unto him belongs eternal peace unto none else unto none else we all have some air for this monistic music it elevates and reassures we all have at least the germ of mysticism in us and when our idealists recite their arguments for the absolute saying that the slightest union admitted anywhere carries logically absolute oneness with it and that the slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion remedeless and complete I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling that logic or no logic absolute oneness must somehow at any cost be true oneness overcomes moral separateness at any rate in the passion of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life this mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances acknowledges their authority and assigns to intellectual considerations a secondary place I will dwell no longer on these religious and moral aspects of the question in this lecture when I come to my final lecture there will be something more to say leave then out of consideration for the moment of authority which mystical insights may be conjectured eventually to possess treat the problem of the one and the many in a purely intellectual way and we see clearly enough where pragmatism stands with her criterion of the practical differences that theories make we see that she must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism starts hang together by any definite connection it is many just so far as any definite connection fails to obtain and finally it is growing more and more unified by those systems of connection at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on it is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere withness of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction and such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives the spaces and times of our imagination the objects and events of your daydreams are not only more or less incoherent intersay the out of definite relation with the similar contents of anyone else's mind our various reveries now as we sit here compenetrate each other idly without influencing or interfering they coexist but in no order and in no receptacle being the nearest approach to an absolute many that we can conceive we cannot even imagine any reason why they should be known all together and we can imagine even less if they were known together how they could be known as one systematic whole but add our sensations and bodily actions and the union mounts to a much higher grade our auditor at visa and our acts fall into those receptacles of time and space in which each event finds its date and place they form things and are friends too and can be classed yet we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist everything there might be inert towards everything else and refuse to propagate its influence or gross mechanical influences might pass but no chemical action such worlds would be far less unifying than ours again there might be complete physical chemical interaction but no minds but all together private ones with no social life or social life limited to acquaintance but no love or love but no customs or institutions that should systematize it no one of these grades of universe would be absolutely related inferior though it might appear when looked at from the higher grades for instance if our minds should ever become telepathetically connected so that we knew immediately or should under certain conditions know immediately each what the other was thinking the world we now live in would appear to the thinkers in that world to have been of an inferior grade with a whole of past eternity open for our lectures to range in it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of union now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly have been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now see human systems involving in consequence of human needs if such an hypothesis were legitimate total oneness would appear at the end of things rather than at their origin in other words the notion of the absolute would have to be replaced by that of the ultimate the two notion would have the same content the maximally unified content of fact namely but their time relations would be positively reversed footnote compare on the ultimate mr. Schilder's essay activity and substance in his book entitled humanism page 204 after discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way you ought to see why I said in my second lecture burrowing the word for my friend G. Papini that pragmatism tends to un-stiffen all our theories the world's oneness has generally been affirmed abstractly only and as if anyone who question it must be an idiot the temper of monist has been so vehement as almost at times to be convulsive and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions the theory of the absolute in particular has had to be an article of faith affirmed dogmatically and exclusively the one and all first in order of being and of knowing logically necessary itself and uniting all lesser things in the forms of mutual necessity how could it allow of any mitigation of its inner rigidity the slightest suspicion of pluralism the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of totality would ruin it absolute unity brooks no degrees as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera germ independence however infinitesimal of a part however small would be to the absolute as fatal as a cholera germ pluralism on the other hand has no need of this dogmatic rigoristic temper provided you grant some separation among things some tremor of independence some free play of parts of one another some real novelty or chance however minute she is amply satisfied and will allow you any amount however great of real union how much a union there may be is a question that she thinks can only be decided empirically the amount may be enormous colossal but absolute monism is shattered if along with all the union there has to be granted the slightest modicum the most incipient nasancy or the most residual trace of a separation that is not overcome pragmatism pending the final empirical ascertainment of just what the balance of union at this union among things may be must obviously range herself upon the pluralistic side some day she admits even total union with one knower one origin and a universe consolidated in every conceivable way may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypothesis meanwhile the opposite hypothesis of a world imperfectly unified still and perhaps always to remain so must be sincerely entertained this latter hypothesis is pluralism's doctrine since absolute monism forbids its being even considered seriously branding it as irrational from the start it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism and follow pluralism's more empirical path this leaves us with a common sense world in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined things then and their conjunctions what do such words mean pragmatically handled in my next lecture I will apply the pragmatic method to the stage of philosophizing known as common sense end of lecture 4