Accordingly, when Mr. James says: "Other than this _practical_
significance, the words God, free will, design, _have none_. Yet dark
though they be in themselves, or intellectualistically taken, when we
bear them on to life's thicket with us, the darkness then grows light
about us" (p. 121, italics mine), what is meant? Is it meant that when
we take the intellectualistic notion and employ it, it gets value in
the way of results, and hence then has some value of its own; or is it
meant that the intellectual content itself must be determined in terms
of the changes effected in the ordering of life's thicket? An explicit
declaration on this point would settle, I think, not merely a point
interesting in itself, but one essential to the determination of what
is pragmatic method. For myself, I have no hesitation in saying that
it seems unpragmatic for pragmatism to content itself with finding out
the value of a conception whose own inherent significance pragmatism
has not first determined; a fact which entails that it be taken not as
a truth but simply as a working hypothesis. In the particular case in
question, moreover, it is difficult to see how the pragmatic method
could possibly be applied to a notion of "eternal perpetuation,"
which, by its nature, can never be empirically verified, or cashed in
any particular case.
This brings us to the question of truth. The problem here is also
ambiguous in advance of definition. Does the problem of what is truth
refer to discovering the "true meaning" of something; or to
discovering what an idea has to effect, and how, in order to be true;
or to discovering what the value of truth is when it is an existent
and accomplished fact? (1) We may, of course, find the "true meaning"
of a thing, as distinct from its incorrect interpretation, without
thereby establishing the truth of the "true meaning"--as we may
dispute about the "true meaning" of a passage in the classics
concerning Centaurs, without the determination of its true sense
establishing the truth of the notion that there are Centaurs.
Occasionally this "true meaning" seems to be what Mr. James has in
mind, as when, after the passage upon design already quoted, he goes
on: "But if cosmic confidence is right, not wrong, better, not worse,
that [vague confidence in the future] is a most important meaning.
That much at least of possible 'truth' the terms will then have in
them" (p. 115). "Truth" here seems to mean that design has a genuine,
not merely conventional or verbal, meaning: that something is at
stake. And there are frequently points where "truth" seems to mean
just meaning that is genuine as distinct from empty or verbal. (2) But
the problem of the meaning of truth may also refer to the meaning or
value of truths that already exist as truths. We have them; they
exist; now what do they mean? The answer is: "True ideas lead us into
useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful
sensible termini.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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