The Letters of William James, Vol. 2James, William
Philosophy
The Letters of William James, Vol. 2
James, William
Intellectuals -- United States; James, William, 1842-1910; Philosophers -- United States; Psychologists -- United States
You ask what I am going to "reply" to Bradley. But why need one reply to
everything and everybody? B.'s article is constructive rather than
polemic, is evidently sincere, softens much of his old outline, is
difficult to read, and ought, I should think, to be left to its own
destiny. How sweetly, by the way, he feels towards me as compared with
you! All because you have been too bumptious. I confess I think that
your _gaudium certaminis_ injures your influence. _We_'ve got a thing
big enough to set forth now affirmatively, and I think that readers
generally hate _minute_ polemics and recriminations. All polemic of ours
should, I believe, be either very broad statements of contrast, or fine
points treated singly, and as far as possible impersonally. Inborn
rationalists and inborn pragmatists will never convert each other. We
shall always look on them as spectral and they on us as
trashy--irredeemably both! As far as the rising generation goes, why not
simply express ourselves positively, and trust that the truer view
quietly will displace the other. Here again "God will know his own."
False views don't need much direct refutation--they get superseded, and
I feel absolutely certain of the supersessive power of pragmato-humanism,
if persuasively enough set forth.... The world is wide enough to harbor
various ways of thinking, and the present Bradley's units of mental
operation are so diverse from ours that the labor of reckoning over from
one set of terms to the other doesn't bring reward enough to pay for it.
Of course his way of treating "truth" as an entity trying all the while
to identify herself with reality, while reality is equally trying to
identify herself with the more ideal entity truth, isn't _false_. It's
one way, very remote and allegorical, of stating the facts, and it
"agrees" with a good deal of reality, but it has so little pragmatic
value that its tottering form can be left for time to deal with. The
good it does him is small, for it leaves him in this queer, surly,
grumbling state about the best that can be done by it for philosophy.
His great vice seems to me his perversity in logical activities, his bad
reasonings. I vote to go on, from now on, not trying to keep account of
the relations of his with our system. He can't be influencing disciples,
being himself nowadays so difficult. And once for all, there _will_ be
minds who _cannot_ _help_ regarding our growing universe as _sheer
trash_, metaphysically considered. Yours ever,
W. J.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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