 Lecture 7 Part 2 of Pragmatism. You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle. You can't weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements. Physics, astronomy, and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already. These determined what we notice, what we notice determines what we do. What we do again determines what we experience. So from one thing to another, although the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation. We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is, does it with our additions rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? Suppose a universe composed of seven stars and nothing else but three human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the stars Great Bear. One calls them Charles Wayne. One calls them The Dipper. Which human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material? If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in turning down the American witness. Lots has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume, he says, a relation between reality and our minds, which may be just the opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects superveen with one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lots asks, be themselves important additions to reality, and may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as Charles and Hans the universe's total value. The Erho-Hung des Forge Funden, then designs, is a phrase used by Professor Euken somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotzi. It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive, as well as in our active life, we are creative. We add both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it. No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring notion. Signer Papini, the leader of Italian pragmatism, grows fairly ditherambic over the view that it opens of man's divinely creative functions. The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that, for rationalism, reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side, the universe is absolutely secure, on the other, it is still pursuing its adventures. We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being a doctrine of capris. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he understood his own doctrine, would have to hold any end, however perverted, to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea, however mad, to be the truth, if only someone is resolved that he will have it so. The humanist view of reality as something resisting yet malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken account of incessantly, though not necessarily merely copied, is evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on our right to believe, which I unluckily called the will to believe. All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The will to deceive, the will to make believe, were wittily proposed as substitutes for it. The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism in the shape in which we now have it before us is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself. On the pragmatist side, we have only one addition of the universe unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work. On the rationalist side, we have a universe in many additions. One real one, the infinite folio or addition deluxe, eternally complete and then the various finite additions, full of false readings distorted and mutilated each in its own way. So the rival metaphysical hypothesis of pluralism and monism here come back upon us. I will develop their differences during the remainder of our hour. And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion. The phrase must be is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky, unarchistic sort of creature. If I had to live in a tub like Diogenes, he wouldn't mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun. Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalist in much the same way as freedom of the press might affect a veteran official in the Russian Bureau of Censorship or as simplified spelling might affect an elderly school mistress. It affects him as the swarm of Protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as the backbone less and devoid of principle as opportunism in politics appears to an old-fashioned French legitimist or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of the people. For pluralistic pragmatism truth grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They lean on each other but the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All homes are in finite experience. Finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potences. To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world adrift in space with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the soul of its foot upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a center of gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of the state and that of an absolute moral law have resolved themselves into expediences and Holy Church has resolved itself into meeting houses. Not so as yet within the philosophic classrooms. A universe with such as us contributing to create its truth, a world delivered to our opportunisms and our private judgments. Home rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. We are no more fit for such a part than the Filipinos are fit for self-government. Such a world would not be respectable philosophically. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar, in the eyes of most professors of philosophy. What then would tighten this loose universe according to the professors? Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable. The mutable inexperience must be founded on immutability. Behind our de facto world, our world in act there must be a dejured duplicate fixed and previous with all that can happen here already there in Posse, every drop of blood, every smallest item appointed and provided, stamped and branded without chance of variation. The negatives that haunt our ideals here below must be themselves negated in the absolutely real. This alone makes the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the stormy surface but with this our anchor holds for it grapples rocky bottom. This is Wordsworth's central place subsisting at the heart of endless agitation. This is Vivekananda's mystical one of which I read to you. This is reality with a big R. Reality that makes the timeless claim reality to which defeat can't happen. This is what the men of principles and in general all the men whom I called tender-minded in my first lecture think themselves obliged to postulate. And this, exactly this, is what a tough-minded of that lecture find themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction worship. The tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are facts. Behind the bare phenomenal facts as my tough-minded old friend Chancy Wright, the great Harvard empiricist of my youth, used to say, there is nothing. When a rationalist insists that behind the fact there is the ground of the facts, the possibility of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of taking the mere name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact as a duplicate entity to make it possible. That such sham grounds are often invoked is notorious. At a surgical operation I heard a bystander ask a doctor why the patient breathed so deeply, because ether is a respiratory stimulant, the doctor answered. Ah, said the questioner, as if relieved by the explanation. But this is like saying that cyanide of potassium kills because it is a poison, or that it is so cold tonight because it is winter, or that we have five fingers because we are pentadectals. These are but names for the facts taken from the facts and then treated as previous and explanatory. The tender-minded notion of an absolute reality is, according to the radically tough-minded framed on just this pattern. It is but our summarizing name for the whole spread out and strong long mass of phenomena, treated as if it were a different entity, both one and previous. You see how differently people take things. The world we live in exists, diffused and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lots of each's, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees, and the tough-minded are perfectly willing to keep them at that valuation. They can stand that kind of world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity. Not so the tender-minded party. They must back the world we find ourselves born into by another and a better world in which the each's form and the all, a one that logically presupposes, co-implicates and secures each, each, without exception. Must we as pragmatists be radically tough-minded or can we treat the absolute addition of the world as a legitimate hypothesis? It is certainly legitimate, for it is thinkable whether we take it in its abstract or in its concrete shape. By taking it abstractly, I mean placing it behind our finite life as we place the word winter behind tonight's cold weather. Winter is only the name for a certain number of days, which we find generally characterized by cold weather, but it guarantees nothing in that line, for our thermometer tomorrow may soar into the seventies. Nevertheless, the word is a useful one to plunge forward with into the stream of our experience. It cuts off certain probabilities and sets up others. You can put away your straw hats, you can unpack your arctics. It is a summary of things to look for. It names a part of nature's habits and gets you ready for their continuation. It is a definite instrument abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality that you must take account of and which reflects you totally back into sensible realities. The pragmatist is the last person to deny the reality of such abstractions. They are so much past experience funded. But taking the absolute addition of the world concretely means a different hypothesis. Rationalists take it concretely and oppose it to the world's finite additions. They give it a particular nature. It is perfect, finished. Everything known there is known along with everything else. Here, where ignorance reigns, far otherwise. If there is want there, there also is the satisfaction provided. Here all is process, the world is timeless. Possibilities obtain in our world, in the absolute world, where all that is not is from eternity impossible, and all that is is necessary. The category of possibility has no application. In this world crimes and horrors are regrettable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order. Once more, either hypothesis is legitimate in pragmatist eyes, for either has its uses, abstractly or taking like the word winter as a memorandum of past experience that orients us towards the future, the notion of the absolute world is indispensable. Concretely taken, it is also indispensable. At least to certain minds, for it determines them religiously, being often a thing to change their lives by and by changing their lives to change whatever in the outer order depends on them. We cannot therefore methodically join the tough minds in the rejections of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience. One misunderstanding of pragmatism is to identify it with positivistic tough-mindedness, to suppose that it scorns every rationalistic notion as so much jabber and gesticulation, that it loves intellectual anarchy as such, and prefers a sort of wolf world absolutely un-pent and wild and without a master or a collar to any philosophic classroom product whatsoever. I have said so much in these lectures against the over-tender forms of rationalism that I am prepared for some misunderstanding here, but I confess that the amount of it that I have found in this very audience surprises me, for I have simultaneously defended rationalistic hypothesis so far as these redirect you fruitfully into experience. For instance, I received this morning this question on a postcard. Is a pragmatist necessarily a complete materialist and agnostic? One of my oldest friends, who ought to know me better, writes me a letter that accuses the pragmatism I am recommending of shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terror-terror naturalism. Let me read you some extracts from it. It seems to me, my friend writes, that the pragmatic objection to pragmatism lies in the fact that it might accentuate the narrowness of narrow minds. Your call to the rejection of the namby-pamby and the wishy-washy is of course inspiring, but although it is salutary and stimulating to be told that one should be responsible for the immediate issues and bearings of his words and thoughts, I decline to be deprived of the pleasure and profit of dwelling also on remote bearings and issues, and it is the tendency of pragmatism to refuse this privilege. In short, it seems to me that the limitations, or rather the dangers of the pragmatic tendency, are analogous to those which beset the unwary followers of the natural sciences. Chemistry and physics are eminently pragmatic, and many of their devotees smugly content with the data that their weights and measures furnish, feel an infinite pity and disdain for all students of philosophy and metaphysics, whomesoever. And of course everything can be expressed, after a fashion, and theoretically, in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, everything except the vital principle of the whole, and that they say there is no pragmatic use in trying to express, it has no bearings for them. I, for my part, refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest. How is such a conception of the pragmatism I am advocating possible, after my first and second lectures? I have all along been offering it expressly as a mediator between tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness. If the notion of a world anti-rem, whether taking abstractly like the word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an absolute, can be shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning works, it will have some truth that ought to be held to through all possible reformulations for pragmatism. The absolutistic hypothesis, that perfection is eternal, aboriginal and most real, has a perfectly definite meaning, and it works religiously. To examine how will be the subject of my next and final lecture. End of lecture seven. Lecture eight, part one of pragmatism, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Fredrik Carlson, pragmatism by William James. Lecture eight, pragmatism and religion. At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively rejects tender-mindedness's hypothesis of an eternal, perfect addition of the universe co-existing with our finite experience. On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. Universal conceptions as things to take account of may be as real for pragmatism as particular sensations are. They have indeed no meaning and no reality if they have no use. But if they have any use they have that amount of meaning, and the meaning will be true if the use squares well with life's other uses. Well the use of the Absolute is proved by the whole course of men's religious history. The eternal arms are then beneath. Remember Vivekananda's use of the Atman. It is indeed not a scientific use, for we can make no particular deductions from it. It is emotional and spiritual altogether. It is always best to discuss things by the help of concrete examples. Let me read therefore some of those verses entitled To You by Walt Whitman. You, of course, meaning the reader or hearer of the poem, whosoever he or she may be. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. Oh, I have been delitory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you. None have understood you, but I understand you. None have done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself. None but have found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you. Oh, I could sing such grand years and glorious about you, you have not known what you are, you have slumbered upon yourself all your life, what you have done returns already in mockeries. But the mockeries are not you, underneath them and within them I see you lurk, I pursue where none else has pursued you. Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine. If these concealed you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion. If these balk others, they do not balk me. The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you. There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you. No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you. No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. Whoever you are, claim your own at any hazard. These shows of the east and west are tame compared to you. These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they. You are he or she who is master or mistress over them, master or mistress in your own right over nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The couples fall from your ankles. You find an unfailing sufficiency. Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are, promulges itself. Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided. Nothing is scanted. Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance and newy, what you are picks its way. Verily a fine and moving poem in any case, but there are two ways of taking it, both useful. One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grand years, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacement. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, lie back on your true principle of being. This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium, yet pragmatism must respect this way for it has massive historic vindication. But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glorious partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then think only of the high. Identify your life therewith, then through anger, losses, ignorance and newy, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way. In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves. Both ways satisfy, both sanctify the human flux, both paint the portrait of the you on a gold background. But the background of the first way is the static one, while in the second way it means possibles in the plural, genuine possibles, and it has all the restlessness of that conception. Noble enough is either way of reading the poem, but plainly the pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best, for it immediately suggests an infinitely larger number of the details of future experience to our mind. It sets definite activities in us at work. Although this second way seems prosaic and earth-born in comparison with the first way, yet no one can accuse it of tough-mindedness in any brutal sense of the term. Yet if, as pragmatists, you should positively set up the second way against the first way, you would very likely be misunderstood. You would be accused of denying nobler conceptions and of being an ally of tough-mindedness in the worst sense. You remember the letter from a member of this audience, from which I read some extracts at our previous meeting? Let me read you an additional extract now. It shows a vagueness in realizing the alternatives before us, which I think is very widespread. I believe, writes my friend and correspondent, in pluralism, I believe that in our search for truth will leap from one floating cake of ice to another on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new truths possible and old ones impossible. I believe that each man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do this, it will be insofar left undone. Yet at the same time I am willing to endure that my children should be incurably sick and suffering as they are not, and I myself, stupid and yet with brains enough to see my stupidity, only in one condition, namely that through the construction, in imagination and by reasoning of a rational unity of all things, I can conceive my acts and my thoughts and my troubles as supplemented by all the other phenomena of the world, and as forming, when thus supplemented, a scheme which I approve and adopt as my own. And for my part I refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and pragmatist to a logical unity in which they take no interest or stock. Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer, but how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer consistently favor the monistic or the pluralistic interpretation of the world's poem? His troubles become atoned for when thus supplemented, he says, supplemented, that is, by all the remedies that the other phenomena may supply. Obviously, here the writer faces forward into the particulars of experience which he interprets in a pluralistic, mellioristic way. But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls the rational unity of things, when all the while he really means their possible empirical unification. He supposes at the same time that the pragmatist, because he criticizes rationalism's abstract one, is cut off from the consolation of believing in the saving possibilities of the concrete many. He fails in short to distinguish between taking the world's perfection as a necessary principle and taking it only as a possible terminus adquem. I regard the writer of this letter as a genuine pragmatist, but as a pragmatist sans lessoire. He appears to me as one of that numerous class of philosophic amateurs whom I spoke of in my first lecture, as wishing to have all the good things going without being too careful as to how they agree or disagree. Rational unity of all things is so inspiring a formula that he brandishes it offhand and abstractly accuses pluralism of conflicting with it, for the bare names do conflict. Although concretely he means by it just a pragmatistically unified and ameliorated world. Most of us remain in this essential vagueness, and it is well that we should. But in the interest of clear-headedness, it is well that some of us should go farther, so I will try now to focus a little more discriminatingly on this particular religious point. Is then this you of use, this absolutely real world, this unity that yields the moral inspiration and has the religious value to be taken monistically or pluralistically? Is it anti-rim or in rebus? Is it a principle or an end, an absolute or an ultimate, a first or a last? Does it make you look forward or lie back? It is certainly worthwhile not to clump the two things together, for if discriminated they have decidedly diverse meanings for life. Please observe that the whole dilemma revolves pragmatically about the notion of the world's possibilities. Intellectually, rationalism invokes its absolute principle of unity as a ground of possibility for the many facts. Emotionally, it sees it as a container and limiter of possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this way, the absolute makes all good things certain and all bad things impossible, in the eternal, namely, and may be said to transmute the entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who insist that the world must and shall be, and those who are contended with believing that the world may be saved. The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility. It is necessary, therefore, to begin by focusing upon that word. What may the word possible definitely mean? To unreflecting men, the possible means a sort of third state of being. Less real than existence, more real than non-existence. A twilight realm, a hybrid status, a limbo into which and out of which realities ever and non are made to pass. Such a conception is, of course, too vague and non-descript to satisfy us. Here, as elsewhere, the only way to extract a term's meaning is to use the pragmatic method on it. When you say that a thing is possible, what difference does it make? It makes at least this difference, that if anyone calls it impossible, you can contradict him. If anyone calls it actual, you can contradict him. And if anyone calls it necessary, you can contradict him too. But these privileges of contradiction don't amount to much. When you say a thing is possible, does not that make some farther difference in terms of actual fact? It makes at least this negative difference, that if the statement be true, it follows that there is nothing extant capable of preventing the possible thing. The absence of real grounds of interference may thus be said to make things not impossible, possible therefore in the bare or abstract sense. But most possibles are not bare. They are concretely grounded or well-grounded, as we say. What does this mean pragmatically? It means not only that there are no preventive conditions present, but that some of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here. That's a concretely possible chicken, means, one, that the idea of chicken contains no essential self-contradiction, two, that no boys, skunks or other enemies are about, and three, that at least an actual egg exists. Possible chicken means actual egg, plus actual sitting hen or incubator or whatnot. As the actual conditions approach completeness, the chicken becomes a better and better grounded possibility. When the conditions are entirely complete, it ceases to be a possibility and turns into an actual fact. Let us apply this notion to the salvation of the world. What does it pragmatically mean to say that this is possible? It means that some of the conditions of the world's deliverance do actually exist. The more of them that are existent, the fewer preventing conditions you can find. The better grounded is the salvation's possibility. The more probable does the fact of the deliverance become. So much for our preliminary look at possibility. Now it would contradict the very spirit of life to say that our minds must be indifferent and neutral in questions like that of the world's salvation. Anyone who pretends to be neutral writes himself down here as a fool and a sham. We all do wish to minimize the insecurity of the universe. We are an order to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft. Nevertheless, there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. There's is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable. Midway between the two, there stands what may be called the doctrine of Meliorism, though it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant doctrine in European philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards Meliorism. Some conditions of the world's salvation are actually extant and she cannot possibly close her eyes to this fact. And should the residual conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word salvation in any way you like and make it as diffuse and distributive or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please. Take for example any one of us in this room with the ideals which he cherishes and is willing to live and work for. Every such ideal realized will be one moment in the world's salvation. But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded. They are live possibilities for we are their live champions and pledges. And if the complementary conditions come and add themselves our ideals will become actual things. But how are the complementary conditions? They are first such a mixture of things as will in the fullness of time give us a chance, a gap that we can spring into and finally our act. End of lecture eight part one. Lecture eight part two of pragmatism. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Fredrik Carlson. Pragmatism by William James. Does our act then create the world's salvation so far as it makes room for itself so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create not the whole world's salvation of course but just so much of this as itself covers of the world's extent? Here I take the bull by the horns and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists of whatever brand they be I ask why not? Our acts, our turning places where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face value? Why may they not be the actual turning places and growing places which they seem to be of the world? Why not the workshop of being where we catch fact in the making so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this? Irrational, we are told. How can new being come in local spots and patches which add themselves or stay away at random independently of the rest? There must be a reason for our acts and where in the last resort can in a reason be looked for saving the material pressure or the logical compulsion of the total nature of the world? There can be but one real agent of growth or seeming growth anywhere and that agent is the integral world itself. It may grow all over if growth there be but that single parts should grow per se is irrational. But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things and insists that they can't just come in spots what kind of a reason can there ultimately be why anything should come at all? Talk of the logic and necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole philosophical machine shop as you will. The only real reason I can think of why anything should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here. It is demanded, demanded it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a fraction of the world's mass. This is living reason and compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral things. In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing caps the world of telepathy where every desire is fulfilled in standard without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be and it is exactly as he calls for it no other condition being required. In our world the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many and from compromise to compromise only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn to a faucet. We want a codec picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases we hardly need to do more than the wishing. The world is rationally organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation saying I am going to make a world not certain to be saved. A world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely. The condition being that each several agent does its own level best. I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety you see is unwarranted. It is a real adventure with real danger. Yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of cooperative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk? Should you in all seriousness if participation in such a world were proposed to you feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe you preferred to relapse into the slumber of non-intentity from which you had been momentarily arose from the tempter's voice? Of course if you are normally constituted you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer. Top. Unschlag aufschlag. It would be just like the world we practically live in and loyalty to our old nurse nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem rational to us in the most living way. Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the Creator. Yet perhaps some would not, for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down and we fall into the attitude of the projectile sun. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security deciderated at such moments, is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The Hindu and the Buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion religious monism comes with its consoling words. All is needed and essential, even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one with God and with God all is well. The everlasting arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to fail or to succeed. There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart within their beast. So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast, using our old terms of comparison we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough. Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all. They would call it moralistic and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme alone. Religion in the sense of self-surrender and moralism in the sense of self-sufficientness have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought. We stand here before the final question of philosophy. I said in my fourth lecture that I believe the monistic pluralistic alternative to be the deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame. Can it be that the disjunction is a final one that only one side can be true? Are a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles? So that if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributively and were made up of a lot of eaches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result of their behavior, and its epic history in no wise short circuited by some essential oneness in which the severalness were already taken up beforehand and eternally overcome? If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or the other. We could not say yes, yes, to both alternatives. There would have to be a no in our relations with the possible. We should confess an ultimate disappointment. We could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act. Of course, as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists or free will determinists or whatever else may occur to us as a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the questions forced upon us are frankly adopting either the tender or the robustius type of thought. In particular, this query has always come home to me. May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in total anyhow be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no prize to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all, yes, yes, in the universe? Doesn't the fact of no stand at the very core of life, doesn't the very seriousness that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable no's and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup? I can not speak officially as a pragmatist here. All I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view and giving up the claim of a total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatisting willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous without therefore backing out and crying no play. I am willing to think that the prodigal son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept. As a matter of fact, countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe and find it's disseminated and strung along successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unattuned for, even though the last element might be oneself. A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast bids you set sail, full many a gallant bark when we were lost weathered the gale. Those Puritans who answered yes to the question, are you willing to be damned for God's glory, wherein this objective and magnanimous condition of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it aufgehoben or preserved in the whole as an element essential but overcome. It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name. It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the element of seriousness is not to be expelled. Whoso does, so is, it seems to me a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts, willing to pay with his own person if need be for the realization of the ideals which he frames. What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to cooperate with him in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow men in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached, but are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said, there is no God but God. But the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself so far as it was religious and not a scheme of classroom instruction for the metaphysicians has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. I fear that my previous lectures, confined as they have been to human and humanistic aspects, may have left the impression on many of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave the superhuman out. I have shown small respect indeed for the absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see sufficiently that the absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it would combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I cannot start up on a whole theology at the end of this last lecture, but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve myself that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things, but just as many of the dogs and cats ideals coincide with our ideals and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe on the proofs that religious experience affords that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own. You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answers, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbelieves of men, their several faith ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severly. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with a more monistic form of religion. The pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough. But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radically sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extreme of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. The End of Pragmatism. End of Lecture 8. End of Pragmatism by William James.