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
It is so difficult to see definitely what absolute oneness can mean,
that probably the majority of you are satisfied with the sober attitude
which we have reached. Nevertheless there are possibly some radically
monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the
many on a par. Union of various grades, union of diverse types, union
that stops at non-conductors, union that merely goes from next to next,
and means in many cases outer nextness only, and not a more internal
bond, union of concatenation, in short; all that sort of thing seems to
you a halfway stage of thought. The oneness of things, superior to their
manyness, you think must also be more deeply true, must be the more
real aspect of the world. The pragmatic view, you are sure, gives us
a universe imperfectly rational. The real universe must form an
unconditional unit of being, something consolidated, with its parts
co-implicated through and through. Only then could we consider our
estate completely rational. There is no doubt whatever that this
ultra-monistic way of thinking means a great deal to many minds. "One
Life, One Truth, one Love, one Principle, One Good, One God"--I quote
from a Christian Science leaflet which the day's mail brings into my
hands--beyond doubt such a confession of faith has pragmatically an
emotional value, and beyond doubt the word 'one' contributes to the
value quite as much as the other words. But if we try to realize
INTELLECTUALLY what we can possibly MEAN by such a glut of oneness we
are thrown right back upon our pragmatistic determinations again. It
means either the mere name One, the universe of discourse; or it means
the sum total of all the ascertainable particular conjunctions and
concatenations; or, finally, it means some one vehicle of conjunction
treated as all-inclusive, like one origin, one purpose, or one knower.
In point of fact it always means one KNOWER to those who take it
intellectually to-day. The one knower involves, they think, the other
forms of conjunction. His world must have all its parts co-implicated
in the one logical-aesthetical-teleological unit-picture which is his
eternal dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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