“Genius ... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
Certain
Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs,
that being the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the
first orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the
first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes,' having been accustomed to see his
'eggs' broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding
pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any one
of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us
grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have
once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating
impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the
inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate
our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account of
at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to
admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it
were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from
our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of
perceiving in an unhabitual way.
On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end
of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each
threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as
it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old
friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact
the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is scientific
curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation
is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning
things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or
standards by which to measure them.[43] The Fuegians, in Darwin's
voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter
of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire
to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in
metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground,
absolute existences which awaken no ideas.
“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible”
That element in
reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh,
sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
democratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
communion. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly
constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to
escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the
reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
can act _with_; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
_against_.
Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
pretension to found systems of absolute certainty. I mean the element
of faith. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in
fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. Absolutely certified
philosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mental
natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode
of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous
power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to
create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is
willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.
“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
This life is
worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral
point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of
view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the
unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?
Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence
of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in
short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If
this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like a
real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
adapted. The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and
crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and
crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished
facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe
that life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the
day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve
to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or
the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to
the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those
with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory
had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques,
and you were not there."
[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol. Compare A.
Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
{63}
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
I.
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyones actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truths cash-value in experiential terms?
Even tho it should shrink to the
mere word 'works,' that word still serves you truly; and when you
speak of the 'time-keeping function' of the clock, or of its spring's
'elasticity,' it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.
You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy
definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean?
Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what
God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the
copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just
in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal
way of thinking.
These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great
assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially
an inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything,
there's an end of the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have
fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally;
you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need
follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you
are in stable equilibrium.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea
or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being
true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized?
What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if
the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in
experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS
ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY.
FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference
it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of
truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
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.
But what do the words verification and validation themselves
pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of
the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase
that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary
agreement-formula--just such consequences being what we have in mind
whenever we say that our ideas 'agree' with reality.
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.
I should not mention this, but for the fact that it
throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have
opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from
facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.
This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility
and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc.,
suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame
second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth.
Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must
be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted.
It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally
absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT to think, unconditionally.
The conditioned ways in which we DO think are so much irrelevance and
matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this
question!
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings
to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular
cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all
sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it
remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.
When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer,
the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; whereas we have
only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought
to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at
concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and
spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the
skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much
purer, clearer, nobler.
I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness to
facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves itself
to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the
example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the
observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the
absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' (what
that may mean we must ask later) between our minds and reality, into
that of a rich and active commerce (that anyone may follow in detail and
understand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe
of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.
But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be
postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim
I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer
of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human
beings.
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
The individual’s religion may
be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may
be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow
and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on
taking no account of anything private at all.
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word “raisin,”
with one real egg instead of the word “egg,” might be an inadequate meal,
but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the
survival‐theory that we ought to stick to non‐personal elements
exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with
reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however
particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be
answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and
living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become
profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly
repudiate the survival‐theory of religion, as being founded on an
egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many
errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should
therefore leave off being religious at all.(335) By being religious we
establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points
at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our
private destiny, after all.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures,
and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in
religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded
in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of
character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in
the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is
actually done.(336) Compared with this world of living individualized
feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect
contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or
kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,
the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture
of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I
have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?(337)
Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal
destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities
which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
[156] The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical
student, he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who
speculated about brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his
account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe
of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley,
Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr. S. Carpenter, and other authors were cited
as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped
because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these
authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its
reality. Later it seemed to him that whatever _proofs_ existed really
told in favor of their view.
[157] Chas. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), p. 9.
[158] _Op. cit._ p. 11.
[159] See in particular the end of Chapter IX.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MIND-STUFF THEORY.
The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the
last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one, which is
exclusively metaphysical. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually
obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of
psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are
very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this
science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties
they involve. When these assumptions have once established themselves
(as they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the phenomenal
facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them afterwards or to make
any one see that they are not essential features of the subject. The
only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and
make them give an articulate account of themselves before letting them
pass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which I speak is _the
assumption that our mental states are composite in structure, made up
of smaller states conjoined_. This hypothesis has outward advantages
which make it almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and
yet it is inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility,
however, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As our own aim is
_to understand_ if possible, I make no apology for singling out this
particular notion for very explicit treatment before taking up the
descriptive part of our work.
There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
In the function of knowing there is a
multiplicity to be connected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside
the mind. The Reality becomes a mere empty _locus_, or unknowable, the
so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in the mind. We, on the
contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave
the mind simple. Both of us deal with the same elements--thought and
object--the only question is in which of them the multiplicity shall
be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it
comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the
better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the
'mystery of synthesis' least hard to understand.
Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion
of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop
stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages
276 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed
its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it
to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the
notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in
her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all,
the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former
member of the couple of related terms. The parts and their relations
surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.
But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would
in no whit be _explained_ by calling the inside of the mind its seat.
No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much
a puzzle _how_ the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to
make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which
Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible
Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts.
Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: _the Many
known by the One_. Or does one seriously think he understands better
_how_ the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a
transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when
one calls them Thought and Things respectively?
An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective
moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of
facts with which they are incompatible; 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 between the stock and the new experience
and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older
stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just
enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as
familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree explanation, violating
all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a
novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something
less excentric. 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; but that
means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize
their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree,
therefore, everything here is plastic.
The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by
the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of much
of the unjust criticism leveled against pragmatism.
we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood
All such qualities sink
to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly
truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities
are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any
habit to exist in the intervals.
'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of
our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the
long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all
the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all
our temporary truths will some day converge. 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 to-day by what truth we can
get to-day, and be ready to-morrow 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; for we
know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho 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.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist
notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future.
“Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.”
“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult undertaking which, more than anything else, will determine its successful outcome.”
“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”
“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”
“The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.”
“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”
“When you have to make a choice and dont make it, that is in itself a choice.”
“Some days there wont be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”
“In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.”
