1 is, if it calls into operation those powers of ours which tend to the realisation of the best life and at the same time harmonise with experience. Or, as it has otherwise been expressed,2 the belief which works is true; but it must work all round. It must satisfy our needs, but it must satisfy them all, the needs of reason not less than those of the will and emotions, the desire for harmony in our intellectual as well as for harmony in our moral world." Prof. Muirhead suggests that perhaps the needs of the will and emotions are not different from the needs of reason; Humanism, on the other hand, appears to deny that reason has any needs distinguishable from those of our emotional and active nature. To this point we shall return. It is clear that some important assumptions are necessary, without which the Pragmatist method becomes illusory. (1) In order that our action should have any results at all, there must surely be certain relatively permanent characteristics of human nature and a relatively permanent structure of reality at the basis of experience. (2) Since the experience which gives us abiding satisfaction is held by Pragmatism to satisfy the universe also, we must presuppose that the universe is revealed to us in our experience, or, in Mr. Balfour's words, that "There is some kind of harmony between our inner selves and the universe of which we form a part". (3) We must be able to know what the results of working out our beliefs really are, in our own and other lives: this implies self-knowledge and knowledge of other selves; and above all, there is required a standard for comparing the various purposes which the working power of our belief hinders or promotes. The test is always practical utility; to be useful means to serve the purposes of life; we therefore require to know what are the constituents of life at its best, and what is the nature of their enrichment, which is to be subserved. Manifestly, then, the Pragmatic method, as outlined so far, though it is sound in principle, could not be put forward as a complete philosophy of truth and reality. One cannot help remarking that a genuine curiosity of philosophic controversy is the way in which the critics of the "Will to Believe" doctrine. ignored the essential point in it-which is, verification by experience (in the widest sense of this word). Prof. James, however, carries the question a step farther 1 See Prof. Pringle-Pattison's criticism of Balfour in Man's Place in the Cosmos, second ed., pp. 194-195, 216, 241, etc. 2 By Prof. Muirhead in International Journal of Ethics, January, 1903, pp. 245-246. 3 Op. cit., p. 247. when he maintains that "Faith in a fact may help to create the fact" in cases where our own personal action enters largely into the determination of the fact. To believe that life is worth living makes it so. Hos successus alit; possunt quia posse videntur.2 Faith in a fact may help to create the fact, provided our own activity enters into the determination of the fact." The essential possibility or impossibility of the Humanist position, as worked out since Prof. James. published The Will to Believe, depends on the wider or narrower extent given to this qualification. How far is it true that our own activity enters into the determination of every fact? In answering this question, we must bear in mind two things: (a) All consciousness is purposive activity; "our existence as conscious beings is essentially an activity, and activity is a process which by its very nature is directed towards an end, and can neither exist nor be conceived apart from this end". This conclusion rests on no special psychological theory, as for example regarding the nature of Attention. It is, rather, a comprehensive induction. As Prof. W. Caldwell has said, "Human beings themselves and history and literature all seem to speak of a life of effort and creative activity and spontaneity as of the very nature of man"." Hence also all cognitive activity is at the same time volitional activity: "the ultimate basis of all mental activities, for the right conduct of which we seek a clue in Methodology, is a will which sets before itself definite ends; and to this is due the motive force which impels us to investigation, while the most general principles of investigation are derived from the ends pursued by it". For philosophy to ignore this, in the pretence of "distinguishing between logic and psychology," seems really to be a case of irrational subservience to a blind and lazy tradition. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph makes a sharp distinction between an idea considered as a mere presentation, and an idea considered as being true or false, and again between "a psychological compulsion that drives you to think in a certain way, and a logical recognition that you ought to think in that way, 6 5 Will to Believe, p. 25. Cf. also pp. 24; 59, 60; and 97. "Because they think they can (Conington). " International Journal of Ethics, July, 1898, p. 466, from an article on 'Philosophy and the Activity-experience," which, together with a discussion by the same writer and Mr. H. R. Marshall, International Journal of Ethics, April, 1899, and an article by Mr. Caldwell in MIND, No. 36, N.S., constitute an instructive survey of the earlier form of Pragmatism. Sigwart, Logic, § 105. 5 Cf. Humanism, pp. xii., xiii.; 8; 51-54; etc. " MIND, N.S., No. 53, pp. 31, 37. and that others ought to, whether psychologically they are compelled to or not". In each of these cases there is of course a distinction to be made, and the universal recognition of this is due to the work of Mr. Bradley more than to anything else; but in each case the whole problem lies. in showing what is the connexion between the two things. A mere distinguo is idle. No one has done more than Mr. Bradley to enforce the conclusion that the logical idea, the pure "meaning," if we try to work with it per se, is a worthless abstraction. Only in experience is its working power shown. (b) All experience, so far as it consists of discriminated facts, depends on our personal activity. My experience is what my interests lead me to notice, and that is what comes home to me as real. "For our interests. impose the conditions under which alone reality can be revealed. Only such aspects of reality can be revealed as are not merely knowable but are objects of an actual desire, and consequent attempt, to know. All other realities or aspects of reality, which there is no attempt to know, necessarily remain unknown, and for us unreal, because there is no one to look for them.' The direction of our effort, itself determined by our desires and will to know, enters as a necessary and ineradicable factor into whatever revelation of reality we can attain." Thus our personal activity enters into the determination of every fact: and if so, it follows from Prof. James's principle above quoted that every fact is partly brought into being by our belief in it. By the direction of our own purposes we to a certain extent make both truth and reality. This brings us to the position of Humanism. Whether or not Humanism is to be regarded as a philosophical advance, depends on the answers it gives to two questions which we have already formulated. The first of them related to the account vouchsafed by Humanism of the intellect and its place in mental life. What is this account? It is admitted that the word truth stands for something really attainable, and that there is such a thing as an effective desire to know the truth. Humanism is primarily "a new analysis of truth," inspired by such psychological conclusions. as those outlined in the preceding paragraph. Its professed aim is "not to assign to the will' the functions of the 'intellect,' but rather so to analyse the latter phrase as to bring out the volitional structure and dependence of every intellectual function ”.1 θεωρία is derived from πρᾶξις; for "whatever forms of the real we may have discovered, some purposive activity, some conception of a good to be attained, was involved as a condition of the discovery; if there had been no activity on our part, or if that activity had been directed to ends other than it was, there could not have been discovery, or that discovery ". The attempt is made to dispense with the notion of an objective counterpart to which our ideas must correspond as copies, and to explain truth and reality as consisting in postulates necessary for the "practical utilities” of life. All forms of good are realised as conscious purposes, hence the terms "practical" and "useful, constantly occurring in humanist writings, mean simply serving some conscious purpose" or 'leading to the development of life". Is the true, then, merely what it pleases any one to believe (the usual rough-and-ready criticism)? No; there are as many forms and degrees of truth or validity as there are forms and degrees of good. Here we see the bearing of the doctrine of Degrees of Truth on the humanist position. Purposes are always higher or lower relatively to one another; and that truth is most true which serves the highest purpose. Truths which serve a purpose less than the highest have only a relative validity. Individual caprice is controlled by the combined pressure of the needs of consistent personal living and of social intercourse. Thus higher degrees of validity are worked out. "As regards the objects valued as true, truth is that manipulation of them which turns out upon trial to be useful, primarily for any human end, but ultimately for that perfect harmony of our whole life which forins our final aspiration.”3 2 In order not to be lost in a maze of details, we must concentrate attention on the application of these ideas to the truth of the first principles of knowledge and to the manner of their derivation. There are certain truths which are necessary to all knowing, which are implied in the existence of every act of knowledge"; "fundamental assumptions of our conceptual interpretation of reality "5 These principles begin their career as demands we make upon our experience, or, in other words, as postulates," designed to render the 4 Humanism, pp. xiii., 30, 34, and 12. 2 Personal Idealism, pp. 53; 69, note 2. * Humanism, pp. 55, 58-61. It is really curious to notice the direct antithesis between this contention and that of the older "Idealism," which the late Prof. Ritchie once summed up thus: "A thing is that way of thinking about it which fits it into its place in an intelligible system of the universe " * Personal Idealism, p. 68. * Humanism, p. 57. world conformable to our wishes"; "their subsequent sifting, which promotes some to be axioms and leads to the abandonment of others, will depend on the experience of their working" Now a postulate must involve something of the nature of an idea, an awareness, an element of knowledge, prior to the "experience of its working": where, then, are ideas, as such, derived from? How is it possible that there is such a thing as an idea at all? This difficulty comes clearly to light when we ask: What makes these postulates? The further we probe this question, the more unsatisfactory seems the answer that Humanism has to give. All notions experimented with are suggested by immediate experience with the felt unsatisfactoriness of the latter the whole cognitive process starts; 2 but if so, it can start at all only because in the beginning the germs of cognition are present. Primordial postulates may have been blindly made and for long imperfectly understood, but, unless knowledge can be manufactured out of feelings and actions which are ex hypothesi blind, some kind of germinal awareness must have been present in order that it should later develop. The author sometimes speaks as if emotion and action manufactured everything, and as if postulation were merely a form of the effort in suo esse perseverare. He suggests that the mental order might have been constructed otherwise. Does this mean that there is nothing in consciousness to tend towards any special kind of postulate? In that case, primordial postulates are "accidental variations" in the sense well explained in Humanism, page 132: that no 4 3 5 6 special tendency to vary in any direction rather than in any other was to be assumed, and that the causes of variation, which Darwin forbore to investigate, did not favour one sort of variation rather than another". But the postulates require an origin as much as new variations in evolution. When he comes to face the derivation of the axioms, Mr. Schiller seems to start with a consciousness which excludes knowledge, but has other characteristics.s How did any knowledge or recognition arise? "The felt self-identity of consciousness, which, however it arises, is a psychical fact, is, I contend, the ultimate psychical basis for raising the great postulate of logical identity," a postulate "more or less consciously felt to be such ".10 This "feeling" contains the germ of knowing, or the phrases used become incomprehensible, 7 1 Personal Idealism, p. 64. 8 P. 96. 2 Humanism, p. 193. 9 P. 97. |