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
There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types
of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage
have one kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is
impossible, however, to say that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely
more TRUE than any other. Common sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage,
because it got its innings first, and made all language into its ally.
Whether it or science be the more AUGUST stage may be left to private
judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are decisive marks of
truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had to
brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living
interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and
curves and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed
to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'?
Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister,
seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with,
to make them definite and fix them for eternity. Substantial forms (in
other words our secondary qualities) hardly outlasted the year of our
Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and Galileo, and
Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little later
their coup de grace.
But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and
etheric world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have
excited so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific
logicians are saying on every hand that these entities and their
determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held for
literally real. It is AS IF they existed; but in reality they are like
co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts for taking us
from one part to another of experience's flux. We can cipher fruitfully
with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their dupes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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