(3) References have already been made to the failures of our
Anglo-American pragmatists to attain to any intelligible and consistent
kind of reality, whether they conceive of this latter as the sum-total
of the efforts of aspiring and achieving human beings, or with Schiller
as an “original, plastic sub-stratum,” or as the reality (whatever it
is) that is gradually being brought into being by the creative efforts
of ourselves and of beings higher or lower than ourselves in the scale
of existence. Their deepest thought in the matter seems to be that
the universe (our universe?) is essentially “incomplete,” and that
the truth of God, as James puts it, “has to run the gauntlet of other
truths.” One student of this topic, Professor Leighton, has arrived
at the conclusion that pragmatism is essentially “acosmistic,”[244]
meaning, no doubt, and with good reason, that Pragmatism has no place
of any kind for objective order or system. Now it is just this palpable
lack of an “objective,” or rational, order that renders the whole
pragmatist philosophy liable to the charges of (1) “subjectivism,”
and (2) irrationality. There are in it, as we have tried to point
out, abundant hints of what reality must be construed to be on the
principles of any workable or credible philosophy, namely something
that stimulates both our thought and our endeavour. And there is in
it the great truth that in action we are not only in contact with
reality as such, but with a reality, moreover, that transcends the
imperfect reality of our lives as finite individuals and the imperfect
character of our limited effort and struggle. But beyond the vague
hints that our efforts must somehow count in the final tale of reality,
and that what the world of experience seems to be, it must somehow be
conceived ultimately to be, there is no standing-ground in the entire
pragmatist philosophy for want of what, in plain English, must be
termed an intelligible theory of reality. “You see,” says James, “how
differently people take things. The world we live in exists diffused
and distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches,
coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees; and the tough-minded are
perfectly willing to take them at that valuation. They can stand the
world, their temper being well adapted to its insecurity.”[245]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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