A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
matter what, is that we should have so much of it, that we are
fortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of it
altogether. Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to
accompany it. Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything.
Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of
tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens
in either kind being realized! The gold-dust comes to birth with the
quartz-sand all around it, and this is as much a condition of religion
as of any other excellent possession. There must be extrication; there
must be competition for survival; but the clay matrix and the noble
gem must first come into being unsifted. Once extricated, the gem can
be examined separately, conceptualized, defined, and insulated. But
this process of extrication cannot be short-circuited--or if it is,
you get the thin inferior abstractions which we have seen, either
the hollow unreal god of scholastic theology, or the unintelligible
pantheistic monster, instead of the more living divine reality with
which it appears certain that empirical methods tend to connect men in
imagination.
Arrived at this point, I ask you to go back to my first lecture and
remember, if you can, what I quoted there from your own Professor
Jacks--what he said about the philosopher himself being taken up into
the universe which he is accounting for. This is the fechnerian as
well as the hegelian view, and thus our end rejoins harmoniously our
beginning. Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, they
express something of its own thought of itself. A philosophy may
indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself. It
may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequence
of us philosophers, with our theories, being here; it may trust itself
or mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one or the other,
deserve more the trust or the mistrust. What mistrusts itself deserves
mistrust.
This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense. Our
philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to it.
They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be. As
a French philosopher says, 'Nous sommes du réel dans le réel.' Our
thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine the previous
nature of the world.
Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more so
when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it
monistically. We are indeed internal parts of God and not external
creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet
because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system
is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly
dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,--as similar to our
functions consequently.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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