William Caldwell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, as typical of the kind of final philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer and our refuge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of humanity. ”

“ Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different tendencies of human thought. ”

“ Another lesson that we may learn from Pragmatism and Humanism is the truth of the contention that there can be no philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, without facts and intuitions and immediate experiences. A philosophy itself is an act or a creation, representative of the attention of the thinker to certain aspects of his experience and of the experience of the world which he shares with other thinkers and with other agents. ”

“ Indeed, it is probable that most thinking people may be credited with the ability to have formed some sort of judgment of their own about a philosophy whose main contention is that true ideas are working ideas, and that truth itself, like a creed or a belief, is simply a working valuation of reality. ”

“ It is the creation of only one of our many human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of knowledge and feeling and conduct. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Perception, in other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to be something given instead of something that is constructed by our activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and the world as it really is. ”

“ We perceive in childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our reason and our will and our selective attention. ”