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
If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic
and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example
will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an
ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily
practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is
simply Truth.[1] Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent.'
Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities,
terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when
so broken it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all
undistinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction without
oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but the theoretic problem is
not solved' (p. 23). The question is, '_How_ the diversity can exist
in harmony with the oneness' (p. 118). To go back to pure experience
is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' (p. 104).
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is
a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view' (pp. 108-109).
The experiences offered as facts or truths 'I find that my intellect
rejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of
diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which
it cannot repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must
understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in
the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of
'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back on
finite
[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 152-133.]
experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction,
the direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism and
naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward
upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most
true which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to
symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other,
those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite
stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular
wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the intellectual
operation to have been true (as an addition may 'prove' that a
subtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes,
according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only in
so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.
III
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account