Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of ThinkingJames, William
Philosophy
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
James, William
Pragmatism
Those puritans who answered 'yes' to the question: Are you willing to be
damned for God's glory? were in this objective and magnanimous condition
of mind. The way of escape from evil on this system is NOT by getting
it 'aufgehoben,' or preserved in the whole as an element essential but
'overcome.' It is by dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard
and getting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall forget its
very place and name.
It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a
universe from which the element of 'seriousness' is not to be expelled.
Whoso does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist. He is willing to
live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts; willing
to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the
ideals which he frames.
What now actually ARE the other forces which he trusts to co-operate
with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow
men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But
are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the
pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their
words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but
God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and
vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far
as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the
metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter
pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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