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
Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims
neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example
to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded
in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation
of a wicked deed. The Socinians and Hobbes objected to this punitive
justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved
for himself at many junctures. ... It is always founded in the fitness
of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise
lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture
satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the
damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from
sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm
no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties
by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their
unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of
fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I
have already said."
Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from
me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned
soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to
him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul'
whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably
grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary
exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.
And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist
philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The
optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the
fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but
rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in
practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of
achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite
and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally
complete.
I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism
of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant
anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a
little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a
good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his
dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins
his pamphlet on 'Human Submission' with a series of city reporter's
items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as
specimens of our civilized regime. For instance:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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