Edwin Emery Slosson

“ How many of us, for example, really now believe that mere descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the House of Lords? If we continued to value fighting qualities as highly as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. When we want really to defend the House of Lords, we point to its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses. ”

“ Since Oxford has been in existence for about eight hundred years it must have had a considerable influence on the reduction of British genius.
As Schiller points out, any measures to be eugenically effective must apply to the young. The rewards bestowed upon ability are not only frequently misapplied but they are invariably too long delayed. The youthful genius is too often forced to give up having a family or compelled to support it on faith, hope and charity. To this defect in our civilization Schiller has given the apt name of "social hysteresis." ”

“ Now it is doubtless true that the primary need of society is to find persons capable of conducting its affairs ably, and that a social order which does not allow ability to rise is therefore bad: but nations cannot with impunity so order themselves as to eliminate the very qualities they most admire and desire, and must husband their resources in men as in the other sources of their wealth and welfare. ”

“ The peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover a form of "valid inference." By this was meant a form of words so fool-proof that it could not be misapplied, and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been fortunate enough to start from true premises. In the syllogism it was supposed that such a form had been found. From all swans are white and this bird is a swan it was to follow inevitably that this bird is white, and the course of nature would eternally conform to the prophetic demonstrations of logic. ”

“ The men I selected for study were those who, whether they called themselves philosophers or not, seemed to me to have a definite philosophy of life, those who had a message for their own times of sufficient importance and distinctiveness to merit public attention. It is my purpose in these sketches to show the trend and importance of these diverse theories, so that a reader who had not had the opportunity to range over the complete works of a dozen authors might find which of them was best adapted to serve him as "guide, philosopher, and friend." ”

“ No improbability, no absurdity, no atrocity has been too great to win credence, and the uniformity of human nature has been signally attested by the way in which the same stories (mutatis mutandis) have been credited on both sides.
Since the controversy over pragmatism hinges on this theory of truth, I will quote in condensed form what Schiller says in his discussion with Miss Stebbing: [9]
It is an inevitable corollary of the belief in absolute truth that absolute truth cannot find lodgment in human mind, nor be attained by way of human science. ”

“ The humanistic view of metaphysics Schiller expresses in the preface to the 1910 edition of his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx."
Practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may start is always in the end one man's personal vision about the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe what one thinks of it. ”

“ But if Spencer is right in defining life as the power of adaptation to environment, the Oxford dons are most alive of any human beings. They have shown the adaptability of hermit crabs in fitting themselves into their awkward environment. They somehow manage to make themselves comfortable in buildings that a New York tenement house inspector—who is never regarded as unduly particular—would order torn down. They work contentedly under conditions that would cause a strike in any well-regulated union. ”

“ Selection, moreover, is a voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical. Finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude, abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision. ”

“ Schiller conceives every thought as some one's experiment for which he is responsible.
"Every thought", he says, "is an act and even the most 'theoretical' assertions are made to gratify an interest." He finds in the present war a most unpleasant confirmation of his theory that thought is subordinate to action and never free from human volitional influence: [8]
If only philosophers could be got to face the facts of actual life, could any of them fail to observe the enormous object-lesson in the truth of pragmatism which the world has been exhibiting in the present crisis? ”

“ Schiller wears the pointed beard that was the distinguishing mark of the radical of the nineties. He has a Shakespearean-shaped forehead, but wears un-Shakespearean glasses. He is as interesting to converse with as he is to read, which is more than you can say of many authors. He talks best while in motion, a real peripatetic philosopher. I wondered why he did not take his students out of the old gloomy lecture room and walk with them as he did with me, up and down the lawn between the trees and the ivy-clad walls of the college garden. ”

“ The British system is built upon competitions, prizes, and examinations. The American state universities in the days of their pristine purity—I mean by that of course, when I was a student—regarded competition as vicious, prizes as demoralizing, and examinations as an evil to be eliminated if possible. But it ill becomes a pragmatist to condemn a system that works so well as the British, whatever theoretical objections may occur.
Much as Schiller detested making verses in a dead language, he did it so well that he got a Major Exhibition. ”

“ He does not seem from his published work to have yet obtained any satisfactory experimental evidence of a future life, but he regards immortality as an ethical postulate, necessary to the conceptions of a moral universe, for if we reject it "we should be plunged in that unfathomable abyss where fraternizes with Pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised." ”

“ Now if philosophers are wise, they will accept this sort of truth, and admit that any truth is "absolute" enough so soon as it is equal to the demands made upon it, while none must ever be so absolute as to become incorrigible and incapable of further growth.
A human factor, an element of personal desire, enters into all our thinking ”

“ The difference between Truth and Error, therefore, is ultimately one in value. The "true" way of conceiving an object or judging a situation is simply the way most valuable for our purpose; the "false" way is one which is, at least relatively, worthless. "Truth" is a eulogistic, "error" a dyslogistic, way of valuing a cognitive situation. ”

“ The English keep their King and make use of him for spectacular and advertising purposes. Oxford is Cluny and Sorbonne in one, a curious combination of old and new, useful and superfluous, progress and reaction, that puzzles and fascinates every American visitor. ”

“ The pragmatic demand for God is, first, as "a human moral principle of help and justice", and second, as "an aid to the intellectual comprehension of the universe", but the metaphysical Absolute satisfies neither of these cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to explain anything. ”

“ Schiller himself employs the term "humanism" instead which being less novel is less disturbing to the conventional mind but on the other hand has the serious disadvantage of having been applied to a very different thing, namely, the spirit of the Renaissance. Since C. S. Peirce who invented the term "pragmatism" and William James who popularized it are both dead, the word finds few defenders, although the mode of reasoning it tried to stand for is obviously permeating all fields of thought. Like many other things pragmatism seems likely to conquer the world incognito. ”

“ The reader who loves a fight and does not faint at the sight of inkshed will find what he wants in almost any volume of the Oxford Mind or the Columbia Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. Where the conflict rages most fiercely there Schiller will be seen in the midst of the combatants, thrusting in all directions at the weak points in their armor. ”

“ The great mass of logicians have always been true to their salt. For Aristotle is still very heavily endowed.
In the University of Oxford alone three philosophy professors, twenty-eight literæ humaniores tutors, and about 460 classical scholars and exhibitioners are paid, at an annual cost of over £50,000, to believe that the theory of thought has stood still, or stumbled into error when it tried to move, ever since the composition of the "Organon", and that all modern science may be read into and out of the obscurities of the "Posterior Analytics." ”

“ But unless it engenders a real belief, it will become inefficacious. Hence, to conceive of Pragmatism as ultimately sanctioning an "act-as-if" attitude of religious make-believe is a misapprehension; it is to confound it with the discredited and ineffectual dualism of Kant's antithesis of practical and theoretic "reason." Lastly, it should be noted that any theory which works must evoke some response from the objective nature of things. If there were no "God", i.e., nothing that could afford any satisfaction to any religious emotion, the whole religious attitude would be futile. ”

“ The story is told of a college woman who was asked what Professor James's lecture on pragmatism was going to be about and replied that she thought it had something to do with the royal succession in Austria. Schiller's own definition is to be found in his "Studies in Humanism:"
Pragmatism is the doctrine (1) that truths are logical values; (2) that the "truth" of an assertion depends on its application; (3) that the meaning of a rule lies in its application; (4) that ultimately all meaning depends on purpose; (5) that all mental life is purposive. ”

“ What seriously aggravates the evil is the whole trend of social legislation. Social reform costs money, and the money is raised by taxation, which bears very hardly on the middle classes, who cannot curtail luxuries like the rich, and will not lower their standard of comfort. ”

“ While traditional logic has much to say about truth, the truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since it declines to consider the material application of its premises. Relevance—a fundamental conception of concrete thought—is excluded because it goes with selection, with selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic professes an all-inclusive ideal. ”

“ Yet the existing practice is largely due to unintentional stupidity, and failure to discover ability soon enough. Now to the individual this system brings compensation, if he lives long enough, because he continues to be rewarded for work he has done long ago, and even is no longer capable of doing, and is eventually raised to the status of a "grand old man" whom ancient institutions delight to honour, by dint of sheer longevity. ”

“ The mind as it thinks makes such facts as it can to best serve its use. Out of the facts so come by is made a law, and this law in turn serves as a rule to guide one's acts.
But the reader should be warned that no two pragmatists can be got to agree upon any definition of pragmatism, and that the opponents of pragmatism differ still more widely in their conception of it. Schiller says that the most serious drawback in the name is that "it condemns every exponent of pragmatism to consume at least half an hour of his limited time in explaining the word." ”

“ As against all such attempts, however, we must hold fast to the principle that the truest religion is that which issues in and fosters the best life.
The pragmatic criterion of truth, that all truths must work, is not a lax one as its opponents assert but the most stringent that can be applied. ”

“ Truth and Error therefore are continuous, as history shows. Either may develop out of the other, and both are rooted in the same problems of knowing, which are ultimately problems of living. The "truths" of one generation become the "errors" of the next, when it has achieved more valuable and efficient modes of interpreting and manipulating the apparent "facts", which the new "truths" are continuously transforming. ”

“ Some have transplanted ivy and it is growing. Some have transplanted tutors and they are growing. But one Oxford custom has not yet been introduced into our universities, the custom of giving the professors time to think. In Oxford all the men have time to think and some of them do. In America if a man shows a tendency to become absorbed in thought he is made a dean or put on the committee of accredited high schools, which cures him.
In the British "Who's Who" Mr. Schiller's recreations are ordinarily put down as "mountaineering, golf, etc." ”

“ Is not the real reason plainly that the former is the beneficiary of a long social development which has liberally endowed the Church, while the social appreciation of the value of science is only just beginning, and has not yet raised the makers of new truths to a par with the custodians of time-honoured revelations? ”

“ A man in Schiller's position must gain his disciples chiefly through his books, and for a man of Schiller's attractive personality this is a great disadvantage. Print can never take the place of "the spoken word", but to have its effect the spoken word must be widely heard. The American visitor to Oxford meets a double mystery: how it is that Oxford accomplishes so much with a poor and antiquated plant and how it is that American universities do not accomplish more with their modern and convenient plants. One hates to conclude that plumbing and ventilation are incompatible with high thinking. ”

“ Raising an army by appeals to patriotism as was done in England means sending to the front to bear the brunt of battle longest those who are most energetic, self-sacrificing, and intelligent, while the slackers, the incompetent, the weaklings, the selfish, and the dull were left to the last or not taken at all. ”