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
But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must be
postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim
I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer
of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human
beings.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me
to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy
with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of
idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned
theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch,
made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so
long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch
with concrete realities. Since, however, darwinism has once for all
displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost
that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working
IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our
contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a
rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards
the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still
counts able defenders.
But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is
hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically
minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon
pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming
the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational
presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it
remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world
actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like
the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den,
but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of
particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences
of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives
you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal
way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by
your own temporal devices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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