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
that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.
Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But tho these don't alter, a tremendous difference
has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament,
now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion
breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that
substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.
This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with
which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated
seriously by those who already believe in the 'real presence' on
independent grounds.
MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect
that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.
Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need
hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which
we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a
material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world,
deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley
maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external
world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God,
whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world
directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine
authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely
pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure,
hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The
difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such
sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then
are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply
tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the
way of sensations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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