Pragmatism quotes

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called Heretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words: “There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.

We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.

We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy.

I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use.

No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one.

For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means.

It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated.

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It “bakes no bread,” as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage;

These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it.

The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek.

Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tenderfoot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line.

They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere today.

The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal.

Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself;

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day.

Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific.

But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses.

It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present.

It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.

Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind.

Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show.

Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of “samples” of the genus “lost-soul” whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest.

What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hellfire does not warm.

And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind.

And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind.

The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed.

For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete.

Not only Walt Whitman could write “who touches this book touches a man.”

The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men.

Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God.

We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged.

The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.

One word more—namely about philosophies necessarily being abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are fat, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper, with the aid of ruler and compass.

Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right place philosophically.

His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of this, particular world’s carcase.

The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters, the citations of fact never cease, he emphasizes facts, turns his face towards their quarter; and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.

… on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away.

Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute.

You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel?

In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare.

Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority.

and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.

What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?

If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.

What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.

Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

A glance at the history of the idea will show you still better what pragmatism means. The term is derived from the same Greek word πράγμα, meaning action, from which our words “practice” and “practical” come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.

Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects;

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.

Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.

Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.

As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.

Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties.

They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.

Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic.

If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of additional names.

or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.

He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives.

So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates …

We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched.

New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

We hold a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this “problem of maxima and minima.” But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory;

The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for “to be true” means only to perform this marriage-function.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly—or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers;

It disdains empiricism’s needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world’s richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service.

In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is “noble,” that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification.

The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is “noble,” that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification.

The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit …

Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones?

In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs.

In my last lecture I shall return again to the relations of pragmatism with religion. But you see already how democratic she is.

Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.

To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder 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.

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.

so that, where he 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 live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse.

The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimaeras 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.

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.

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.

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 desiderating.

Freewill 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:

and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a Freewill, 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 centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place.

The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.

To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either.

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 penetrate it.

We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, 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.

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 manyness are absolutely coordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other.

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 one purpose, is not the manlike God of common people.

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.

… 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.

‘He who, in this world of many, sees that One; he who in this mass of insentiency 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 ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures.

We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us.

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.

The 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.

Your mind in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread.

But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in;

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.

We patch and tinker more than we renew.

The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and cooperates;

You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists—you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple.

You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can’t get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.

My thesis now is this, that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time.

On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Peking to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to feel the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed.

Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show.

The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander.

With these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes.

Our later and more critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother-tongue of thought.

Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think. “Things” do exist, even when we do not see them. Their “kinds” also exist.

… of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield.

He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bathtub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.

The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power.

No one can fail to admire the “energetic” philosophy. But the hypersensible entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with most physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too economical to be all-sufficient.

Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality’s keynote.

I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the better for my conclusion, however, which at this point is this.

but I want you to tell me the particular go of it!”

Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it.

I believe that our contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only tenable account of this subject.

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you.

This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

The object’s advent is the significance’s verification. Truth, in these cases, meaning nothing but eventual verification, is manifestly incompatible with waywardness on our part.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections.

By “realities” or “objects” here, we mean either things of common sense, sensibly present, or else commonsense relations, such as dates, places, distances, kinds, activities. Following our mental image of a house along the cow-path, we actually come to see the house;

They turn us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs “pass,” so long as nothing challenges them, just as banknotes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them.

Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience.

Here rationalism is instantaneously up in arms against us. I can imagine a rationalist to talk as follows:

It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together.

Meanwhile we have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Ptolemaic astronomy, Euclidean space, Aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience. “Absolutely” they are false;

When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even though no past thinker had been led there.

We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards.

The present sheds a backward light on the world’s previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story.

Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely.

The “facts” themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are.

Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

Though neither man nor God should ever ascertain truth, the word would still have to be defined as that which ought to be ascertained and recognized.

There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from.

Philosophy and common life abound in similar instances. The “sentimentalist fallacy” is to shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc., and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street, because there the circumstances make them vulgar.

but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient. A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as falsehood.

If you ask me what o’clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you don’t see why it is my duty to give it.

A false address would be as much to the purpose.

If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science.

It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy.

The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which “works.”

What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I cannot fathom.

When the Irishman’s admirers ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, “Faith, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot.”

So here: but for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate);

All the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role.

By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers.

the Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: “In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong.”

and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up.

Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law.

Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste:—and presto, a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts:—and our mind finds a new truth.

… law, or a censor of speech let loose among the theatres with his idea of “the” mother-tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of “the Truth” with a big T, and what progress do they make?

Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.

These things make themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.

Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.

These things make themselves as we go.

Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact. These things make themselves as we go. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things. Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of “Humanism” for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.

We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far.

A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.

Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field’s extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background;

What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it.

The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the which depends on us.

Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H.

By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field’s extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that.

We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.

This applies to the “eternal” parts of reality as well: we shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely.

Not being reality, but only our belief about reality, it will contain human elements, but these will know the nonhuman element, in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything.

Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river?

Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience.

All these treatments are true treatments—the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them.

You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.

We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so—though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them.

To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.

We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will.

We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.

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.

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.

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 caprice. Mr.

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 anarchistic sort of creature.

If he 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.

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 potencies.

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’re 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.

Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. We’re 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?

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 and ought to be unhappy when we regard it as exposed to every enemy and open to every life-destroying draft.

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 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.

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 instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute’s own world.

The peace and rest, the security desiderated 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.

The peace and rest, the security desiderated 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.