William Caldwell

“ And even if we accept this idea of the supremacy of the doctrine of man over both philosophy and science, this does not mean that we exalt the worker and the prophet over all knowledge, but simply that philosophy must have a theory of reality that provides for their existence and function alongside of those of the thinker or the student as such. The true philosophy is in fact the true doctrine of man. ”

“ It is easy to see how ideas and ideals and facts, how reason and sense, causation and free will, hedonism and asceticism, can all, and in fact all do, exist in the same world; how in fact the universe is God, and God is the universe; but what we want to say of a completed philosophy is one of two things, or perhaps both of them: either to know what aspect of reality is for us the highest aspect of reality, or to know what are the different points of view that the mind must take about the world, and how they can be logically connected. ”

“ Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which all great work springs. ”

“ We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology. ”

“ Are we then to hold that only a completed science can be a complete philosophy? We are apt to ask this in reading the book, for our author is always able to point out that such and such a state of science results in such and such a conception of the world; indeed, he calls this fact the supreme law of philosophical evolution. The strength of the book lies in its successful presentation of the evolution of nineteenth century philosophy in its relation to the history and problem of philosophy in general, and in the criticism it offers especially of Positivism and of Evolution. ”

“ How any supposed mere physical order can ever come to know itself as such, either in the minds of men or in the minds of beings other than men, is of course the crowning difficulty of what we call a physical philosophy—a difficulty that transcends altogether the many familiar and universally admitted difficulties in respect of topics like the origin of motion and the origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments and adaptations involved in the development of the world of things and men with which we are acquainted. ”

“ Russell might remember, for one thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws, and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven for the spirit of man, without an examination of the mind of the mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that he uses in his researches? ”

“ There are in it, as we have tried to point out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect character of our limited effort and struggle. ”

“ Then again, despite the large element of truth that there is in the idea of philosophy “discovering” (rather than itself “being”) the true “dynamic” or “motive-awakening” view of the system of things in which we live, philosophy itself was never intended to bear the entire weight and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists. In their enthusiasm they would make out of it, as we have seen, a religion (and a new one at that!) and a social philosophy, as well as the theory of knowledge and the “approach” to reality that we are accustomed to look for in a system of philosophy. ”

“ The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things are independently of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things—the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from matter in the life of the spirit. ”

“ It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain, and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable. ”

“ My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. ”

“ If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust. ”

“ In view of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and “voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to feel that it is the living reality of the world that we know and that we experience, that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy. ”

“ A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to maintain—-if it could do so logically—-that in human volition, we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the “developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes” and in our ideals, and not something different from this. ”

“ Any one who has lived in the United States must in fact have become so habituated and so accustomed to think of his thought and his knowledge and his capacities in terms of their possible social utility, that he simply cannot refrain from judging of any scheme of thought or of any set of ideas in the same light. Anywhere, to be sure, in the United States will they allow a man to think all he pleases about anything whatsoever—even pre-Socratic philosophy, say, or esoteric Buddhism. ”

“ There is no belief and no contemplation that is not practical as well as theoretical, no truth that fails to shape and to mould the life of the person who entertains it. I quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech, and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas, however lofty. ”

“ This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted” (Creative Evolution, pp. 134–5; italics mine) . It is surely needless to point out how much truer to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in the preceding chapter. ”

“ Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested—ions and radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.
Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the development of life as a whole. ”

“ The reason why the idealists and the dialecticians of our time have so often fought shy of beginning with the immediate or the “given,” is partly that they are not yet in their thoughts perfectly free of some taint or tincture of the supposed realism or dualism of the common-sense philosophy or the correspondence view of truth. They seem to have the fear that if they admit a given element of fact in speculation they will unconsciously be admitting that there is something outside thought and immediate experience in the true sense of these terms. ”

“ The study of the facts either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense for reality) , that is man’s measure of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their implications—of our sense of the different ways in which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. ”