Pragmatism: a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

Chesterton quoted. Everyone has a philosophy. Temperament is a factor in all philosophizing. Rationalists and empiricists. The tender-minded and the tough-minded. Most men wish both facts and religion. Empiricism gives facts without religion. Rationalism gives religion without facts. The layman's dilemma. The unreality in rationalistic systems. Leibnitz on the damned, as an example. M. I. Swift on the optimism of idealists. Pragmatism as a mediating system. An objection. Reply: philosophies have characters like men, and are liable to as summary judgments. Spencer as an example.

Lecture Ii

What Pragmatism Means

The squirrel. Pragmatism as a method. History of the method. Its character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of truth, equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental' view. The formation of new beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept account of. Older truth arose similarly. The 'humanistic' doctrine. Rationalistic criticisms of it. Pragmatism as mediator between empiricism and religion. Barrenness of transcendental idealism. How far the concept of the Absolute must be called true. The true is the good in the way of belief. The clash of truths. Pragmatism unstiffens discussion.

Lecture Iii

Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered

The problem of substance. The Eucharist. Berkeley's pragmatic treatment of material substance. Locke's of personal identity. The problem of materialism. Rationalistic treatment of it. Pragmatic treatment. 'God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more. Pragmatic comparison of the two principles. The problem of design. 'Design' per se is barren. The question is WHAT design. The problem of 'free-will.' Its relations to 'accountability.' Free-will a cosmological theory. The pragmatic issue at stake in all these problems is what do the alternatives PROMISE.

Lecture Iv

The One and the Many

Total reflection. Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality. Rationalistic feeling about unity. Pragmatically considered, the world is one in many ways. One time and space. One subject of discourse. Its parts interact. Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate. Question of one origin. Generic oneness. One purpose. One story. One knower. Value of pragmatic method. Absolute monism. Vivekananda. Various types of union discussed. Conclusion: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow empirical findings.

Lecture V

Pragmatism and Common Sense

Noetic pluralism. How our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time. 'Things.' Kinds. 'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due to geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, compared with common sense. Impossible to say which is the more 'true.'

Lecture Vi

Pragmatism's Conception of Truth

The polemic situation. What does agreement with reality mean? It means verifiability. Verifiability means ability to guide us prosperously through experience. Completed verifications seldom needful. 'Eternal' truths. Consistency, with language, with previous truths. Rationalist objections. Truth is a good, like health, wealth, etc. It is expedient thinking. The past. Truth grows. Rationalist objections. Reply to them.

Lecture Vii

Pragmatism and Humanism

The notion of THE Truth. Schiller on 'Humanism.' Three sorts of reality of which any new truth must take account. To 'take account' is ambiguous. Absolutely independent reality is hard to find. The human contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given. Essence of pragmatism's contrast with rationalism. Rationalism affirms a transempirical world. Motives for this. Tough-mindedness rejects them. A genuine alternative. Pragmatism mediates.

Lecture Viii

Pragmatism and Religion

Utility of the Absolute. Whitman's poem 'To You.' Two ways of taking it. My friend's letter. Necessities versus possibilities. 'Possibility' defined. Three views of the world's salvation. Pragmatism is melioristic. We may create reality. Why should anything BE? Supposed choice before creation. The healthy and the morbid reply. The 'tender' and the 'tough' types of religion. Pragmatism mediates.

PRAGMATISM

Lecture I

The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

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. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them."

I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. 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 class-room sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. 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. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title-flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood ALL that he said--yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW--they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity.

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; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. 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. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

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