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
I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some
illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin
with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will be the
problem of Substance. Everyone uses the old distinction between
substance and attribute, enshrined as it is in the very structure
of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and
predicate. Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes,
properties, accidents, or affections,--use which term you will,--are
whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility in water,
etc., etc. But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk,
which thereupon is called the substance in which they inhere. So the
attributes of this desk inhere in the substance 'wood,' those of my coat
in the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again,
in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth
they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance,
matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability.
Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our
several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own
right, for they are modes of the still deeper substance 'spirit.'
Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is
the whiteness, friability, etc., all WE KNOW of the wood is the
combustibility and fibrous structure. A group of attributes is what each
substance here is known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual
experience. The substance is in every case revealed through THEM; if we
were cut off from THEM we should never suspect its existence; and if
God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously
annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we
never could detect the moment, for our experiences themselves would be
unaltered. Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is
a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names
into things. Phenomena come in groups--the chalk-group, the wood-group,
etc.--and each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a
way supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day,
for instance, is supposed to come from something called the 'climate.'
Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is
treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and in general we place the name,
as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the
phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not
really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere
in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and the
notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts
for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of
mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all
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