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.
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 un-distinguished. Intellectualized, it
is all distinction without oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but
the theoretic problem is not solved.' The question is '_how_ the
diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness.' To go back to pure
experience is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle.'
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is a
mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view.' The experience
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 can not
repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand,
and it can not understand by taking a congeries in the lump.'[44] So Mr.
Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that
function), turns his back on finite 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, back into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.[45]
III
In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted in a general way the
common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which
maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for its
being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand
in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours;
whereas a term taken in a second relation can not logically be the same
term which it was at first.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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