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
All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that
the one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and
not being made. But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with
his abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose
among the theatres with his idea of 'the' mother-tongue, or a professor
setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic
notion of 'the Truth' with a big T, and what progress do they make?
Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch
of novel fact. These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go. Our rights,
wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so
many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.
Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law,
language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things.
Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of
'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths
are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions,
human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a
human twist. This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr.
Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether
there be anything else. "The world," he says, "is essentially [u lambda
nu], it is what we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it
originally was or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it.
Hence ... the world is PLASTIC." [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.]
He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying,
and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting
methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are
decisively rebuked.
This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist
position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the
humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at
this point.
Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting
factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the
new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce
to 'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in any
particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing
FOUND, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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