B I 945 J2453 lm CM 00 a o Q lihl lfi WILLIAM JAMES AND PEAGMATISM BY ETHEL ERNESTINE SABIN B.A. University of Wisconsin, 1908 M.A. University of Wisconsin, 1914 THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate School of the University of Illinois 1916 i OB YU% PRESS OF THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER, PA. WILLIAM JAMES AND PKAGMATISM BY ETHEL ERNESTINE SABIN B.A. University of Wisconsin, 1908 M.A. University of Wisconsin, 1914 THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate School of the University of Illinois 1916 PRESS OF THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER, PA. 4-S~ C^/^cX — cc*-*-< A_ TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I. Some Difficulties in James's Formulation of Prag- matism 1 Chapter II. The Question of Truth 16 Appendix : Vita 30 m PREFACE Among laymen it is unusual to find any discrimination between pragmatism and the philosophy of William James. Even among trained students of philosophy there is often little distinction. It is peculiarly necessary, however, that this distinction should be made, for the impetus which William James gave to the radical empiricism, which he at times called pragmatism, is not yet spent, and prag- matism in consequence is still growing in clearness of formulation and richness of content. It is moreover a commonplace that such growth involves changes. The belief that the changes which have been incident to the devel- opment of this philosophy are of utmost significance to the student of present philosophical tendencies led me to undertake an analysis of what we may call the old and the new pragmatism, or the pragmatism of James and that of the school most closely associated with the name of Professor John Dewey. The present monograph is a part only of a study which I am making of the entire complex relationship of; the two closely allied philosophies, and yet it is complete in itself, for in discussing the difficulties inherent in James's formulation of his final doctrine of consciousness, one comes upon the essential difference between the old pragmatism and the new; a difference from which the other divergences — such as the one included in this monograph in regard to the doctrine of truth — follow as by corollary. I consider it indicative of the lasting worth and sound virtue of James's contribution to philosophical thought that he bequeathed to his immediate successors no clear-cut dogmas, no polished philoso- phical system, but instead the inspiring example of original thinking, a zeal for scientific method, and a revelation, such as that of Socrates to Athens, of the value for ordinary human activity of correct phil- osophical conceptions. I owe my thanks to the editors of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods for permission to reprint Chapter I. of this monograph from the issue of June 6, 1918 (Vol. XV, No. 12) . To the graduate school of the University of Illinois, and especially to the department of philosophy of that university, I am indebted for the opportunity to undertake this study and to pursue it with helpful criticism and direction. CHAPTER I Some Difficulties in James's Formulation of Pragmatism WITH the growing importance of pragmatism in the philosoph- ical arena, there arises a corresponding need for a clear understanding of it. One of the most significant attempts at self- definition on the part of the pragmatists is the volume called, sug- gestively, Creative Intelligence. Its title calls attention to the pivo- tal position of the definition of consciousness in this philosophy, and emphasizes at the same time its functional nature. There is another, and a very important, approach which may and should be made to pragmatism, and that is an approach through the philosophy of William James. In studying the relationship be- \ tween James and pragmatism, there is need for careful analysis in order to discover wherein pragmatism has advanced beyond James's formulation of it.- It is my hope to show this advance in regard to the central prob- lem of consciousness, and for this purpose I shall discuss the sug- gestiveness of James's use of the fringe; his inability, however, to escape entirely from dualism, which asserted itself in the latter essays as well as in the Principles of Psychology ; the confusion between truth and reality which invalidated his two tests, whereby objects are distinguished from thoughts ; and finally his return to sensa- tionalism in the guise of "pure experience." How present-day pragmatism escapes these pitfalls of dualism by the insistence upon ! / consciousness as functional is the opposite side of the picture and the moral of the tale. As early as 1890 James suggested in his doctrine of the fringe the germinal idea that there is in conscious experience some element of indeterminateness, some need for reconstruction of the given data — the very aspect of consciousness which the authors of Crea- tive Intelligence find supremely significant. i This study was undertaken at the University of Illinois under the direc- tion of Professor B. H. Bode. 2 One commonly hears it said that the name pragmatism is outworn and that functionalism, behaviorism, instrumentalism or possibly Deweyism, are more adequate terms. I feel, however, that historically, for in its short existence it has made history, there is much to be said in favor- of the word pragmatism. 1 2 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM The pages of the Psychology in which James discussed the na- ture of the fringe are too familiar to call for direct quotation. 3 It will be remembered that James spoke of the fringe as "part of the object cognized." That object might itself be a problem, a gap, and the fringe might be relations of "unarticulated affinities." The most important characteristic of the fringe is, he repeated, "the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought." 4 This conception of harmony as implying growth or progressive development of the object of thought in a certain direc- tion was a revolutionary idea for 1890. 5 In 1918 it still needs to be explained. In James's later thought, the fringe as harmony or discord of direction was translated into the phrase ' ' continuity of experience, ' ' and in this connection reached the highest development James ever gave to it. Nowhere did James state the truly functional nature of relationships so clearly and so unambiguously as in his reply to Mr. Bode's criticism of his doctrine on the ground that it implied a necessary transcendence of experience. 6 In reply to his critic, James said that the objective reference contained in such a rela- tionship as and does not transcend experience, because we actually find the future within the present experience. James's own words were: "Radical empiricism alone insists upon understanding for- wards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the under- standing for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar to that which my critic seems to employ here should, it seems to me, forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed to our future, or that any physical movement can have direction until its goal is actually reached." 7 One can understand how James's reiteration that "we are ex- pectant of a 'more' to come, and before the 'more' has come, the transition nevertheless is directed towards it," 8 may appear to a reader an obvious misuse of objective reference, and so indeed it would be, were it not that James had insisted in this connection that i it is a fact of experience that the future is found within the present. ' s Cf. Principles of Psychology, Vol. I., p. 258 et seq. 4 Ibid., p. 261. 5 The fringe, we must not forget, had a static as well as dynamic aspect for James. It was a "halo" as well as a "tendency." e Cf. B. H. Bode, Pure Experience and the External World, this Journal, Vol. II., p. 128, and James, Essays in Eadical Empiricism, pp. 234-240. ilbid., 238-239. s Ibid., p. 237. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM 3 Here James is one with the pragmatists of to-day whose work may be regarded primarily as expository of the fact which James here affirms. That James did not always explain objective reference thus satis- factorily will be considered in the course of this review. We shall find that he did what he criticized rationalists for doing : he treated experience as chopped into discontinuous static objects, because he dropped the future reference out of the present. The force of his training in dualistic modes of thinking was too strong even for his genius, and he therefore failed to be wholly consistent with his own advanced position. This brings us to a consideration of the position which James called a "modified dualism." It was for James only another way of describing the object with its fringe of relationships and the im- portant truth which he meant to emphasize by it was not that two realities of different orders of existence face each other in experi- ence, but that reality may function in two ways, now as thought and now as thing. By good right is James high in the esteem of prag- matists, for thus freshly and vigorously envisaging the problem. This modified dualism, which is the theme of many of the Essays in Radical Empiricism, marked a distinct advance beyond the posi- tion taken in his Principles of Psychology in regard to the ' ' Stream of Thought," for he no longer held that thoughts and things be-/ longed to different orders of existence, but said instead that they are! the selfsame piece of experience taken twice over in different con- texts, now as thought and now as thing. 9 In his own words we find : "My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which every- thing is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation into which parts of experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known." Further quotations will serve to make his meaning clear. He wrote : "The one self -identical thing has so many relations to the rest of 9 Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 4. It is disconcerting to find that James added a footnote at this point to this effect: "In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the passing thought." This would seem to indicate that he felt a fundamental agreement between the two views and that the twenty years of doubting the existence of consciousness as an entity, of which he spoke at the beginning of the essay, had not made him wholly dissatisfied with his earlier dualism. 4 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it as belonging with opposite contexts. In one of these con- texts it is your field of consciousness ; in another it is ' the room in which you sit, ' and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretexts for being said to attach itself to consciousness by one of its parts or aspects and to outer reality by another. . . . The physical and the mental operations form curiously incompatible groups. As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now. ... In the real world fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it without effect. As an outer object you must pay so much a month to inhabit it. As an inner content you occupy it for any length of time rent free. If in short you follow it in the mental direction, taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all sorts of things are true of it which are false, and false of it which are true, if you treat it as a real thing experienced, follow it in the physical direction and relate it to asso- ciates in the outer world." 10 Once having said that thoughts and things are not different (^/ forms of existence, James was bound to make the further explana- tion of how, then, they manage to separate sharply into the two con- texts, the thought, or personal biography context, and the thing con- text, formed of purely physical, and non-biographical relations. We do speak of thoughts and we do speak of things, and how do we make the distinction? We know his answer, namely that the distinction between a thought and* a thing is a dualism based upon function. Unfortu- nately the precise nature of this functionalism escaped him, and the consequences of this failure were momentous. James offered two apparently unrelated explanations of the method by which we distinguish between thoughts and things. The first and simplest test rests upon the relative stability of relation- ships and might suffer translation into the phraseology of the Psy- chology as harmony or lack of harmony of the fringe. Thus accord- ing to the test of stability we are able to distinguish between a real room and a thought of a room, because the real room has stable relationships, whereas the idea of the room has not. The second functional test, upon which James placed much emphasis, is that the idea leads us toward reality : the idea of the room, for instance, en- ables us to reach the room. Here we see the feeling of direction, so ■•■» ■ ' ■ • 10 Ibid., pp. 12-15. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM 5 characteristic of the fringe, now fully developed into actual guid- ance, as expressed in terms of behavior. Let us examine each of these tests in turn. When we examine the first we find much plausibility in it. Every one will admit that real knives will cut real sticks, and will admit no less readily that a little boy's most vivid thought of a knife has never yet cut a willow whistle. In the boy's dreams the knife may or may not fashion the coveted whistle, but in the world of things a certain knife applied in a certain way produces a definitely calculable result. It was this certainty of result which led James to speak of "the stubborn, cohesive, and permanent relationships" 11 which constitute the context of what we know as things. This sta- bility inevitably comes to be contrasted with the unstable relation- ships, fleeting as dreams, which constitute the context of what we' know as thoughts. Thus James said, once more using the room as an example: "The room thought-of, namely, has many thought-of couplings with many thought-of things. Some of these couplings are inconstant, others are stable. In the reader's personal history the room occupies a single date — he saw it only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house's history, on the other hand, it forms a perma- nent ingredient. Some of the couplings have the curious stubborn- ness, to borrow Eoyce's term, of fact, others show the fluidity of fancy, we let them come and go as we please. . . . The two collections, first of its cohesive and second of its loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted. We call the first collection the system of external relations, in the midst of which the room as real exists, the other we call the stream of our internal thinking, in which as a mental image it for a moment floats. " u > James realized, as others had not, T. H. Green, for example, who considered unalterableness the test of reality, 13 that to name the re- lationships of things coherent, stable, or unalterable, in distinction to the relationships of thoughts, was merely to state the problem. The terms unalterableness and stability needed explanation them- selves, and as James saw, this explanation could be given only in functional terms. Accordingly he translated stability of relation- ship into its equivalent in terms of behavior, saying that we sift out the "real" from the "mental" objects because with real objects "Consequences always accrue." 14 As many critics of pragmatism 11 Ibid., pp. 21, 22 ff. 12 Ibid., pp. 21-22. i3 Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena: The Spiritual Principle in Nature, p. 24. ^Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 33. ^ V 6 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM have followed James in believing that this is indeed the real meaning of functionalism, it will be well for us to understand what James meant when he said that when we deal with real objects "conse- quences always accrue." Taking a pen as an example of the appli- cation of the functional criterion, he writes: "To get classed either as a physical pen or as some one's percept of a pen, it must assume a function, and that can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical pen. That is what we mean by being physical in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous with subsequent ex- perience of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it is the percept of a pen in my mind. These peculiarities are what we mean by being conscious." 15 The example is apparently definite enough and simple enough, yet one soon finds that its meaning is far from clear. One explana- tion of the example may be that James considered the stable rela- tionships constitutive of reality as existing between objects inde- pendent of experience, objects which form the subject-matter of the physical sciences for instance, but which, as soon as brought into relationship with an experiencing organism, become mental exist- ences. If this is a true interpretation, the significance of the func- tional test is gone and a dualism unmodified and dangerous nulli- jfies James's effort to advance. For if stable relationships can exist f only outside of experience, James, no less than the idealist or the realist, should ascribe thinghood in an absolutistic sense to a world independent of experience. Indeed, the logical result of this inter- pretation of his definition of reality would be to deny that reality ever enters into experience, for it would mean a reinstatement of the belief in the duality of the real and the apparent, in such sense that the real would be an unmeasurable, unapproachable absolute, a be- lief which was repellent to James. It may puzzle one to discover that James listed among the stable relationships of a pen, linking it with reality, "obeys the guidance of a hand," which is certainly a relationship to the organism, and listed among the fluctuating relationships which link it with ideas, "coming and going with the movements of my eyes," which, is like- wise a relationship to the organism. What is the difference between the two relationships, that of the pen guided by the hand and that is iud., pp. 123-124. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM of the pen seen or not seen by the eyes ? Certainly in each case the conditions governing the consequences which accrue may be stated in terms of the physical sciences. The laws of optics are no more subjective than the laws of pressure and resistance. It is the next item in the list which offers the clue to the criterion toward which James should have worked. He spoke of the pen's altering with one's fancy and said that this is one of the possible relationships of a percept of a pen. It is, indeed, but the reason for this cleavage between the physical and the psychical James appar- ently failed to grasp fully. He limited himself to judgments in re- trospect concerning ' ' the consequences which always accrue, ' ' which is indeed one way, but not the most significant way in which we dis- tinguish between thoughts and things. If, in retrospect, we find that the promise of fulfilment made by any object of experience was indeed "made good," — if the promise of the pen to mark paper, for in- stance, was carried out, we continue to call our experience an experi- ence of reality, or we may call it true, but if in retrospect we find that the promise of fulfilment was not "made good" we say that we merely thought it was a pen, but that our idea was erroneous. Now\ the pragmatist insists that this is only a secondary interpretation of stability and that we do not need to wait for a judgment in retro- spect to distinguish between thoughts and realities, since that dis- tinction lies at the very heart of every present experience. Just in so far as the object controlling our behavior is in need of further reconstruction, just in so far as it is yet undetermined, in so far as it lacks stability, in the sense of guiding behavior by a clear forecast of the future, and finally just in so far as these inadequacies are in process of purposive reconstruction, just in so far are we conscious of the object; in other words, the experience as indeterminate is a "thought." James was quite right in connecting stability with ob- jectivity, for real objects are experience as determined, as furnishing a basis for further determinatiofi, but he missed the full significance of stability by confusing reality with truth. Thus James misused the functional test of stability, which be- came in his hands a means for distinguishing truth from error, but not, as he thought, for making the further distinction between idea and object. If I try to warm myself by putting an imaginary log on my dying fire, consequences of a satisfactory nature do not, it is true, follow, although, as freezing mortals have uniformly testified, there is a fatal dependability and stability about the consequences of this act. There was ambiguity in James's statement of his prob- 8 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM lem, for what he actually meant was not merely a thought of a log as opposed to a real log in such a case, but an absent log-as-promising- the-sanie-results, as a present log promises. Then in retrospect he should have seen that whereas one promise is uniformly fulfilled, the other is not, and that a true experience is thus separated from I one full of error. Being, we must assume, unaware of this am- biguity in the statement of, his problem, James used stability as a test of truth, with the confident assurance that he was using it as a test for the distinction between ideas and objects, which, as we have seen, is a further distinction which may arise from an experience of error, but is not to be identified with it. The second test by which he proposed to distinguish between a thought and a thing, namely the character of experience as leading, brought him no nearer a satisfactory conclusion because it rested on the same fundamental confusion of the knowledge of the reality of an object with the knowledge of the truth of a judgment. Here, again, had James fully realized the significance of his doctrine of the fringe in respect to "the future within the present" his doctrine of leading might easily have been made consistently pragmatic. But this motivation by the future James dropped out with the result that his doctrine of leading became essentially unintelligible. Yet he worked with the idea so long, so brilliantly and so honestly, that it became the very core of his philosophy and the foundation of his doctrine of truth. It is the key to the proper interpretation of his Essays in Radical Empiricism to a large part of The Pluralistic Universe and to the two closely allied volumes Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. He stated the position in its simplest terms in speaking of the knowing of perceptual experiences. "One experi- ence would be the knower, the other the reality known ; and I could perfectly well define without the notion of 'consciousness' what the knowing actually and practically amounts to — leading towards, namely, and terminating in percepts, through a series of transitional experiences which the world supplies." 16 In pursuance of this conception of consciousness he said that the knower and the known are either (1) "the self -same piece of ex- perience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are (2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject with defi- nite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them or (3) the knower is a possible experience of that subject or of another, to which the said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged. ' ' 17 ie Ibid., p. 25. « Ibid., p. 53. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM . 9 It was, as we have seen, by the test of stability of relationships that he sought to determine in the first case whether the self -same piece of experience was to be considered) as a thing or as a thought. In the second and third types knowing is considered as a transition, actual or possible, from one piece of actual experience to another. As an example James took the cognitional relation existing between his thought of Memorial Hall while sitting in his library at Cam- bridge, and Memorial Hall. Again, James's explanation missed the significance of cognition and described verification in its stead. He said: "My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but such intrinsic differences in the image make no difference in its cognitive function. Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experience of cognition, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its know- ing office. For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image and I can tell you nothing ; or if I fail to lead you towards the Harvard Delta, or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind or not ; you would rightly deny that I had 'meant' that particular hall at all, even though my mental image might to some degree have resembled it." 18 It is evident that James was here describing, not as he supposed cognition or forward-looking, but verification or backward-looking. He held that fulfilment of meaning is cognition, and not merely verification as he should have held, and then he doubled the failure by advancing no definition of meaning, except as he called it lead- ing or "mental pointing" which had no cognitional value until identified with truth. He said of an idea that, if fulfilled, then ' ' my soul was prophetic and my idea must be and by common consent would be called cognizant of reality. ' ' 19 If this statement could be taken as a description of verification only, as was not intended, it is one with the genuinely pragmatic tenet that effective leading is the test of truth. But James was careful to establish the fact that he was using leading as the functional test of cognition. He said : " In this con- tinuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but de- noting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify. Whenever such trans- itions are felt, the first experience knows the last one. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop toward ^Ibid., p. 55. is Ibid., p. 56. 10 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one di- rection followed and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known." 20 Evidently, as a description of knowing, this again raised the vexed question of objective reference. James did not hold consist- ently to the truly pragmatic conception of objective reference made intelligible by the presence of the future as a present quality of ob- jects, which we have seen him expressing in his reply to his critic, but instead he held that an idea, or, as he sometimes said, an experience, is the starting point of knowledge, that there are intermediaries in continuous development from point to point, that there is a definite direction of development, and finally a terminus, which is the object meant or known. Now witness the confusion which was caused by substituting this description of a process of verification or fulfilment of meaning for the description of a process of cognition or expecta- tion of a fulfilment which may or may not come. James said that the transition, the development and the continuing must be taken in no transcendental sense, but simply as denoting definitely felt trans- itions, relations which "unroll themselves in time." Then, however, he introduced a non-experiential and purely transcendental element by saying that they develop toward a terminus, 21 a terminus, by definition not yet within experience, yet guiding experience ; that the development has a direction — a direction given by the object still out- side of experience — and! the result is a fulfilment, an end intended from the first but known only when reached. James completed the confusion by saying of the fulfilment, that the starting point thereby becomes a knower and the terminus an object meant or known. By completing its promise, a promise, which was not a promise, becomes a promise. And then once more James distinctly said that he was not talking of truth but of cognition for he said that when the ob- ject is reached "the percept here not only verifies the concept, proves its function of knowing that percept to be true, but the per- cept's existence as the terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates the function. Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept 'had in mind.' 22 James was not blind to the dilemma involved in this theory of ohjective reference and proposed a solution for it which unfortu- 20 Ibid., p. 56. 2i Ibid., p. 57 et seq. 22 Ibid., pp. 60-61. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM 11 nately takes away the last hope of interpreting the objective refer- ence in truly functional terms. He stated the dilemma thus : ' ' Can the knowledge be there before those elements that constitute its be- ing have come? And if knowledge be not there, how can objective reference occur ? ' ' 23 The solution he found in a distinction between knowing as verified and completed and the same knowing in transit. This knowledge in transit, or virtual knowledge, not ' ' completed and nailed down" constitutes, he said, the greater part of our knowing. "To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical siibstitute for knowing in the completed, sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure." 24 The difficulty with the solution for the dilemma is that one cannot discover what James could possibly mean by ''virtual knowledge." He had insisted that the end known creates the function of knowing. Here he plainly said that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the end does not create the function. However, what does "create the func- tion" in these ninety-nine exceptions to the rule James did not and could not say. At this point, had he been a consistent pragmatist. James would rightly have emphasized the functional nature of the cognitive relation. But he said not a word at this crucial point of this relation of simultaneous stimulus and response between organism and environment, in which the leading is done by the future, which, in the form of a present quality of the environment, shows the con- sequences of possible action. This contrast between virtual and completed knowledge played an important part throughout James's system. It is the same idea which appeared in the contrast which he made between conceptual and perceptual knowledge or what he calls more descriptively still, "knowledge about" versus "direct acquaintance." The respective values which James set on these types of knowing is most significant of his failure to be pragmatic. That he could say that "knowledge as direct though 'dumb' acquaintance is superior to knowledge about" 25 places him among the dualists who find in sensations a direct revelation, and a miraculous as well, of the independent, ex- ternal world. He said also : "it is always the speechlessness of sensa- zzlMd., p. 67. 24 ma., p. 69. 25 The Meaning of Truth, p. 39. 12 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM tion, its inability to make any statement, that is held to make the very notion of it meaningless, and to justify the student of knowl- edge in scouting it out of existence. . . . But in this universal liquid- ation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct acquaintance into knowledge about, until at last nothing is left about which the knowl- edge can be supposed to obtain, does not all significance depart from the situation?" 26 Accordingly an interesting difference appears between the at- titude which James took toward conceptional and perceptional knowl- edge and the attitude which the pragmatist takes. Since James had defined knowledge as an affair of leading, the spatial metaphor took its tribute, as metaphors will. Perfect knowledge, accurate and complete, meant closeness of approach to the object, an actual face- to-faceness. This was "direct acquaintance," also perception, also, sometimes, sensation. "Direct knowledge," so described, became static, a mere spectator, and "knowledge about" was no less inher- ently static, for it meant simply the removal of thought from its object by a series of static mediating acquaintances. This happened because the leading became for James a mechanical conception with no inner spring of purpose. This the pragmatist supplies by in- terpreting the leading in functional or instrumental terms freed from the spatial metaphor. He says that knowing, whether per- ceptual or conceptual, means that some part of the organism's en- vironment controls or directs the behavior of the organism in a new way, meaning by new, non-mechanical, since it is a control by the future as an experienced quality of the object. But leaving aside the pragmatic solution for the time, we find that James's theory of consciousness as leading destroys itself at either of the two possible turnings on its road to reality. James said that "knowledge about" is a stage only on the path to "direct acquaint- ance" and that the latter corresponds to reality. Correspondence he explained as meaning that "direct knowledge," if valid, will terminate in the reality meant. 27 It was a case again of the idea of Memorial Hall leading to Memorial Hall, and again James sub- stituted a test of truth, namely, fulfilment of promise, for a criterion of the presence of knowing, the proper criterion being, as a prag- matist would hold, the future acting in the present. But it was more serious than that, for what becomes of a thought when it reaches reality? Does the thought of Memorial Hall wait outside ze Ihid., pp. 13-14. 27 Cf. ibid., p. 17 et seq. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM 13 on the doorstep when it happily "terminates in" Memorial Hall? 28 We must reluctantly admit that the "mental pointing" and "effec- tive leading" prove meaningless even for purposes of verification, when stated as James proposed. A thought can not approach a thing; it can not "terminate in" an object. One body can approach another, and a thing, through its meaning, can direct a conscious or- ganism's approach. The church bell summons to prayer, the bugle calls to arms, and a spring day invites to the woods and hills. But James did not so provide for the functioning of the object, and so missed the only possible basis for "the effective relationship" in con- sciousness. Some one may well object that it is a misrepresentation of James to ask what becomes of the thought of Memorial Hall when it termin- ates in the reality, because James had already answered the question in such a way as to avoid representationism. He spoke, as we saw in the beginning, of the point at the intersection of two lines, ap- pearing in one context as a thing and in another as a thought, and by this identity of thought and thing, it may be claimed that James had set himself beyond the reach of all criticism to which an unmodified dualism is subject. But this is the point under discussion. James tried in two ways to establish this identity and failed in both. We have seen what became of his test of! stability, and we are now in a position to see the dilemma to which his theory of consciousness as ambulatory brought him. For having defined consciousness as a leading toward reality, any stage of the process before the reality was reached might be considered a more or less perfect representation of the object, depending upon proximity, but the absolute termi- nation of the process could bring only unconsciousness, and not con- sciousness. And so it was that his theory set him, if he had but known, this fruitless choice: direct knowledge was either an un- mediated mirroring of reality, and hence representationism and dual- ism with their attendant enigmas ; or else direct knowledge was un- consciousness, for having defined consciousness as leading, what terminated the process would terminate the consciousness and a by- 28 It is needless to say that for the consistent pragmatist this question does not arise. Insisting as he does that a thought is a certain functioning of the object in relation to the body, he has no superfluous tertium quid to dispose of, when a particular function has been performed. He needs to say only, that the object has changed and the body is responding differently. James was trying to establish just such a functional identity of thought and object, but mistook the proper method of proof. H WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM stander, the Absolute once more, would be needed to recognize the cognitive quality of this way of knowing. But James, it must be confessed, would not have welcomed this criticism, for he felt that he had met it and escaped from it once for all by his doctrine of pure experience. 29 That this doctrine could not save him from the consequences of dualism, moreover that it further committed him to them, has, I think, become apparent to most stu- dents of James, for pure experience is only another name for simple sensations. To define pure experience he said that "the instant field of the present is always experience in its pure state, plain, unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as some one's opinion about a fact." 30 And then, as we saw, James used the test of stability to break pure experience apart into thoughts and realities. If, however, we try to define pure experience which is not yet thought and not yet objective reality, the sense of bewilderment grows upon us. James called it also the perceptual order and the "immediate flux of life," 31 but he elsewhere tells us that it is the essence of the perceptual order to stand face-to-face with a reality in which it terminates. Therefore pure experience can not be the same as the perceptual order, and it is a confusion to say so, because it con- tains within itself in undifferentiated state the thought and the re- ality thought-of, whereas James had made it the essence of the per- ceptual order to oppose these two. Moreover pure experience with all its self-sufficiency is in flattest contradiction to the conception of the fringe, wherein the struggle to fill the "aching gap" is all important, for James felt that the stream of pure experience yields content rather than problems and he warned us in regard to our thoughts that: "Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible ex- 29 For a discussion of this concept cf. Wendell T. Bush, The Empiricism of James, this Journal, Vol. X., pp. 534-35, 537. so Ibid., p. 74. si Cf. ibid., p. 93. Here in speaking of pure experience as a feeling of a that which is not yet a what, and as being therefore the sort of experience which only new born babies or men in semi-coma may have in its purity, we return to the point of view of the Principles of Psychology in regard to sensation and are forced to recall the typical experience of the "child new-born in Boston" and the italicized statement that "Pure sensation can only be realized in the earliest days of life" (Vol. II., p. 7). In other words James had not progressed as far from his earlier views as he himself thought. JAMES'S FORMULATION OF PRAGMATISM 15 perience again, are our abstracts and universale true or false at all." 32 Thus, at this final point, we are forced to conclude that once again James failed to see the proper functional nature of a sug- gestive conception. Had he been able to identify pure experience with the dynamic conception of the fringe as a that which is indetermin- ate ; is in need of reconstruction ; is concrete in the sense that it is a concrete problem; and is indeed "the immediate flux of life," out of which of a truth come distinctions between ideas and objects; then James might have escaped dualism. Regretfully, however, we are forced to admit that James failed to reinterpret dualism as a satisfactory philosophical creed, primarily because he slipped over the real problem of knowing altogether, and dealt with the problem of verification, which he mistook for it. Consequently the pragmatism which he defined is not an adequate explanation for the problem of knowledge, but is, at best, as he him- self called it, a new name for traditional ways of thinking. More- over his failure came because he did not hold closely enough to his own statement that "our present is, while present, directed toward our future." Yet, notwithstanding this, we must not lose sight of his im- measurable service to philosophy. James's suggestions, with all the brilliancy and charm of their execution, did much to foster the "curious unrest" which he himself noticed in the philosophical at- mosphere of the time; 33 to loosen old landmarks, and above all, to stimulate the many students of philosophy who recognized him as a leader to renewed efforts in their "unusually obstinate attempts to think clearly." 32 ibid., p. 100. 33 ibid., p. 39. CHAPTER II The Question of Truth IT is safe to say that nowhere was James more confused, and no- where has he been more eagerly quoted than on the subject of truth. A popular notion of pragmatism, gained from James, has been, and is still, thalt pragmatism is a theory of truth, and that truth is "what works." It is under this guise that pragmatism is generally presented from the pulpit and from the lecture platform. This is not a misquotation of James for it is clearly the position as- sumed repeatedly in the three well-known volumes of essays : Prag- matism (1907), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and The Will to Be- lieve (1912). A quotation from Dewey will show at once wherein the pragmatic definition of truth differs from this blanket assertion that truth is that which works. Dewey saj^s: "The right, the true and good difference is that which carries out satisfactorily the specific purpose for the sake of which knowing occurs. All manufactures are the product of an activity, but it does not follow that all manu- factures are equally good. And so all 'knowledges' are differences made in things by knowing, but some differences are not calculated or wanted in the knowing, and hence are disturbers and interlopers when they come — while others fulfil the intent of the knowing, being in such harmony with the consistent behavior of the organism as to reinforce and enlarge its functioning." 1 The reason for the different definitions of truth given by James and Dewey, respectively, lies in their radical difference in interpret- ing consciousness. James never reached a dynamic conception of consciousness. In his earlier writing consciousness was "the faithful psychic concomitant of changing brain states" and in his later writ- ing it was "ambulatory" still, being "the instant field of the pres- ent" moving from point to point, from concept to concept by "defi- nitely felt transitions." There is no dynamic element in such change. It may be as mechanical a process as digestion. But James identi- fied anticipation with just such change by taking the position of a spectator, and reading back into the conscious process, as the essence of anticipation, the fact that while consciousness is at each moment 1 Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 69. 16 THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 17 confined to "the instant field of the present," this field moves, and thus the future is constantly becoming the present. For Dewey, consciousness is dynamic because of a very different interpretation of anticipation. For if one would speak as a pragmatist of the in- stant field of the present he must recognize that it is nothing less than an organic response in process toward some future consequence which is present as a stimulus. Thi,s contrast between James an I pragmatism must be sharply drawn. James wrote of the present moment of consciousness, "the specious present," as of something which a spectator could regard as in the process of becoming future, because it slips along an abstraction called time, as the concomitant of changing brain states. Dewey, speaking for consistent pragma- I tists, says that the future lives within the present as meaning, as in- I tention, as anticipation. Since for an ambulatory consciousness, anything which any successive moment holds, is as much, and as little, anticipated as anything else, James had to. find an external standard by which to judge of things as true or false, when the pres- ent should arrive within the bewildering novelty of the future. He ,•■ showed his pragmatic spirit, in selecting the standard of use, but be- cause the standard was external to his theory of consciousness he employed it too widely. It failed naturally to check with his theory . of consciousness or to be checked by it. But for a pragmatist with a truly dynamic theory of anticipation, the standard is given by . consciousness itself. For the pragmatist consciousness implies the anticipation of a specific future and the consequent adjustment toward that future. Accordingly, if, when the future comes, it ful- fils this definite anticipation, then the adjustment proves smooth and useful and Dewey speaks of it as being harmonious. James's essay on The Sentiment of Rationality shows the result of his too wide application of the standard of truth, with the conse- quence that the question of truth is confused with the question of morality. For if not checked by specific intentions, the useful may as easily be interpreted as that which is emotionally satisfying, or ethically satisfying as anything else. For to be satisfying in any way is beyond question to be useful in some sense. And upon this ambiguity the argument of the essay rests. One must not forget that in the first place by rational James meant acceptable as true. One must bear that in mind as he reads James's summary of the argument, which is in part as follows: "No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men, which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree \ 18 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a direct appeal to all those powers of onr nature which we hold in highest esteem."- Earlier in the essay this was his statement: "Well; of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which awakens the active impulses, or satisfies other esthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more rational conception and will deservedly prevail." 3 I am tempted here to an aside, for one can not help recognizing in these quotations a very just description of James's own philosophy. He tried to meet logical demands, but in a still greater degree he ,made a direct appeal to "all those powers of our nature which we hold in highest esteem," and one must pause to ask thoughtfully, whether, therefore, his philosophy should deservedly prevail. In his Phi Beta Kappa oration on James in 1911 4 Koyce answered this question with an emphatic affirmative. Such, I feel, has been the customary answer, and I believe that it is an answer dangerous for philosophy, if philosophy is to remain, as James defined it "an un- usually obstinate attempt to think clearly." For this answer is in accord with James's claim that the demands which can justly be made of a philosophy are, specifically, that "it must, in a general \way at least, banish uncertainty from the future" 5 and "it must) define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers." G Not \for a moment would science be willing to accept these strictures upon her mode of advance. The scientist tells us, often until we are weary, that he is not bound to please any one; what he is after is the truth ! The standard of truth does not differ for science and for philosophy, although James urged in this essay that we must accept that philosophy of life as truest which 'brings the most satisfactory results, taking "satisfactory" in its widest sense. The following is the argument which he made for this claim and we must grant its persuasiveness, unless we see its ambiguity. "If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the crime. If I refuse to bail out a boat because I am in doubt whether my efforts will keep her afloat I am really helping to sink her. If in the mountain preci- pice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively connive at my de- struction. He who commands himself not to be credulous of God, 2 The Will to Believe, etc., p. 110. 3 Ibid., p. 76. 4 Cf. William James and Other Essays. s Will to Believe, etc., p. 77. olbid., p. 82. THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 19 of duty, of freedom, of immortality may again and again be indis- tinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. AVho is not for, is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In theory, as in practise, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side or the other." 7 In each instance chosen we find James dealing with a situation of doubt, the doubtful murder, the boat which may float or may sink, the risk of the leap from the mountain precipice, and the ques- tions of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality. James meant these as genuinely doubtful situations, in which you can not foretell in which way the issue will turn, but situations in which by courage- ous action you may turn that doubtfulness into victory for the inter- est dearest to you. Again we meet James's "head for risks and sense for living on the perilous edge" and all that is heroic in us rises to his challenge to meet him on this dizzy slope of valiant effort, but the question of truth he has not raised. James was dealing not with truth but with morality. Here is the boat. It may sink. The truth of that anticipation we are not in a position to test experi- mentally beforehand. There are, however, moral alternatives before us. Is it better to exert ourselves, quite painfully perhaps, on the chance of being saved, or is the chance worth so little that we had better enjoy what leisure life still affords us? But if James should add triumphantly, "Your belief that the boat would not sink saved it from sinking! Belief created its own verification"; "Not so," we could reply, "not the truth of our belief but the effectiveness of our bailing kept us afloat ! ' ' That belief, which is lively anticipation, may give a man courage to achieve a notable victory in a situation of unstable organization is, let me again repeat, a proposition in ethics. For in such a situation there is a conflict of ends, as, for example, is it better to lie back passively and take what comes? or is it better to exert myself to bring What I wish to pass? All the time, however, the question of truth may be interwoven with this larger question of the value of effort. For instance, the question of truth appears in this form : "If I do nothing will the boat sink, as it now looks as if it would?" And the answer comes, possibly from a spectator: "He did nothing and the boat sank," or "If he had done nothing the boat would, have sunk, for it was fast filling with water." The only "working" TlMd., p. 109. 20 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM which one can identify with truth in this case is that the anticipa- tion that the boat would or would not sink is fulfiled. The larger "working" of this anticipation, if it leads to reconstructing the conditions on a more desirable basis, is still guidance by the future, but with the question of desirable or undesirable there enters the moral question of, a conflict of ends. But this does not mean that our belief must define the future congruously with our desires — we should be woefully betrayed by sinking crafts did it do so, neither must we take as literal the statement that the belief creates its own verification. It is not the belief that a certain thing is true which makes it true, but the belief, if correct, guides conduct effectively. If our faith, or lack of faith, in immortality is compared to our belief that the boat will or will not sink, the divergence of the ques- tion of truth from the question of the value of certain modes of conduct becomes even more apparent. A man may be genuinely doubtful whether or not his individual life will survive the ship- wreck of his body, and yet make moral decisions daily and hourly until that very moment of shipwreck comes. The course which James took was to say that, because a man's life is made more humanly worthy by a faith in immortality, the belief, m so far forth, is true. He had a right to say that a belief in so far as it leads to desirable conduct is morally useful and emin- ently practical, because it serves social ends. This is so tautological as to be incontestable. But to say that it is in so far forth true as well, is to make truth meaningless in contradistinction to goodness and utility. It does even more. It culminates in a defense of irrationality, for this essay on The Sentiment of Rationality unless accepted as an essay on The Sentiment of Morality, and as such valu- able, is a renunciation of reason. It is this because it contains the emotional demand that our philosophy must define the future con- gruously with our desires. Such has been the dream of romanticists, haunted by visions which have led them to deny the rationality of the empirical world and to substitute for it Utopian visions of a golden age, "a future congruous to our desires." Perhaps the errors of this position may be made more evident by showing how, at times, James used the consistent pragmatic defi- nition of truth. It Was to be expected that in taking truth broadly las that which works he would include within that conception the obvious case in which the working consists in the fulfilment of ex- pectation. And beyond a doubt James expressed that view, but he failed to see that it exhausted the truth function and so he obscured THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 21 the whole question, as in the essay just considered, by adding prac- tical consequences which were foreign to the problem. We must recall James's illustration of knowing Memorial Hall, as given in the essay Does Consciousness Exist f He supposed that sitting in his study in Cambridge he had an idea of Memorial Hall. Then he proposed to test this idea. He concluded that unless his idea should prove able to lead him to Memorial Hall, or enable him in some way to point to Memorial Hall and say "This is what my idea meant," it was open to question whether he had actually had an idea of Memorial Hall. The idea made a promise. If unfulfiled or unfulfilable he said one could rightly doubt whether he had meant that particular hall after all. In the essay on Knower and Known James used the same example of knowing Memorial Hall and signifi- cantly enough the adverb "truly" slipped into the first sentence. ' ' Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from 'Memorial Hall' and to be thinking truly of the latter object." 8 Then he continued: "If in its presence I feel my idea, however imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now terminated, . . . why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality. That percept was what I meant, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfiled intention. Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one." 9 This, by the way, James called a complete descrip- tion of knowing, showing that he confused the process of cognition with the process of verification. I believe that James nowhere expressed this idea of truth as ful- filment of promise more clearly than in the article on the ' ' Notions of Truth." He said: "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can- not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas ; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as. "This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, it is made true by events. Its verity is in fact, an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its verifi- cation. Its validity is the process of its validation. "But what do the words verification and validation themselves s The Meaning of Truth, p. 104. 9 Ibid., p. 105. 22 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical conse- quences of the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these consequences better than the ordinary agreement formula — just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas 'agree' with reality. They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while — such feeling being among our potentialities — that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connections and transi- tions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea's 'verification' ". 10 I wish particularly to emphasize the difference in the definiton of "practical consequences" in the above quotation from James's definition of "the practical consequences" of a belief in the Absolute, which were considered as proof of the truth of the idea, in so far as the belief granted moral holidays. In contrast to this the "prac- tical consequences" just mentioned have to do with the continuous, harmonious and satisfactory adjustment of the organism to the en- vironment in a direction intended. It means, in less abstract terms, that a man understands the nature of the world in which he is living, and acts accordingly, and moreover that his acting by its smooth ac- complishment proves the correctness of his estimate of the world. He knows, for instance, that it is a world in which water will quench his thirst, food satisfy his hunger, sleep renew his strength, friends cheer his heart, and knowledge give him added power over nature. In so far as acting upon this knowledge, its promises are met, the knowledge may be called true ; in so far as the world makes a promise which it does not keep, so that when the person trusts himself to the promise, he finds that satisfactory adjustment is impossible in the way indicated, error enters, and the knowledge may be called false. However, this essay on The Notion of Truth gives striking proof of the persistent ambiguity which beset James. That he began with the pragmatic conception of truth as the fulfilment of intention is evident, but in the course of a few pages this definition of. truth was identified with his dominant idea of the true as the useful in an unrestricted sense. He wrote : ' ' Agreement thus turns out to be es- sentially an affair of leading — leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important." 11 In this fashion 10 Pragmatism, pp. 201, 202. ii Ibid., p. 215. THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 23 James has brought us back once more to a consideration of truth as that which gives emotional satisfaction. Again he has strayed from the narrow pragmatic path where truth means the fulfilment of anticipations, to wander in a pathless place where truth means the achievement of consequences which are useful but are not originally intended. It is with an understanding of this distinction that one should read his essay on "The Will to Believe." To begin with, his prob- lem was artificial, because he had abruptly severed the future from the present. He asked us to suppose that it is just as genuinely possible that any one religious creed is as true as another, and this he called a "living option" but he proceeded to make it a blind option, one which could not be decided on intellectual grounds. 12 To illustrate James's meaning, against the belief that there is a God, one may place the belief that there is no God. If we have here a "living option," a case of genuine doubt, and of that case alone James was speaking, then nothing in the universe up to date would support either creed, and within themselves the creeds would contain no suggestions which could be "checked up" in any "intellectual" way. It is as if a child stood before another child saying: "Which hand will you take?" In one hand is an apple while in the other there is nothing, (but the child to choose has no evidence which is w T hich. All he knows is that in one ease he will be sorry, in the other glad. He may, if he is a normal, healthy child and not too scrupulous of the game, resort to a "passional decision" of getting the apple at all costs. This is what James did, and he called it, not snatching the apple, but arriving at the truth. For James held that if the truth of rival creeds can not be decided intellectually, a. man has the right to throw the weight of his action on the side which he would like to see prevail. Who will deny this moral right which James defended so ably ? Surely no courage- ous heart. But the question remains whether we can accept James's statement of the ease as a fair description of a " living option, ' ' and in the second place whether, if a "living option" is what he claimed Ave can accept his definition of truth as the attainment of emotionally satisfactory results. Taking the second question first, I have al- ready indicated why pragmatism can not use truth as coextensive with utility. In regard to the first problem, the question of the "living option'' itself, offers a striking parallel to the situation proposed for solution 12 Vide, The Will to Believe, p. 11. 24 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM in The Dilemma of Determinism. There too, James assumed a "living option." He said that he might equally well choose to go home by either of two streets, and since in attractiveness the streets were equal, a "free" act of volition could alone start him homeward by way of either street. In The Will to Believe the bifurcations were creeds, instead of streets. But The Merchant of Venice offers us a more accurate description of a situation of choice than is to be found in James's description of these featureless alternatives. Shakespeare did not find it necessary to represent a scene of "living option" by having Portia's suitors brought blindfolded be- fore the caskets, knowing only that the choice of the casket with Portia's portrait would bring untold happiness. Desirable as that prize was, it could have given the suitors no clue as to which one of the three caskets would bring its fulfilment. The actual scene is very different. The suitors use their eyes. The caskets have their legends. They are of different metals: of gold, of silver, of lead, Each suitor speaks of the promise or the threat which he sees in the objects between which he must choose. Portia, in jest, suggests that if an ill-favored suitor should be about to choose the casket with her portrait, a deep glass of wine upon some other casket would turn his choice to that. She would increase the promises and suggestions made to this hapless man by the gold and silver caskets. When, too, Bas- sanio comes to the trial, Portia has no need to tell him that it would be useful, or desirable, or agreeable even, for him to choose the casket with her portrait. He is fully aw T are of that, and his anxious con- cern is with the truth of the pretension of the rival caskets to further that end. Portia has sweet music sung which suggests to him the falseness of apparent worth, and in so doing she helps him to the truth by adding to the suggestions made by the situation. Thus, in this familiar scene there is a more accurate presentation of a truth-situation, than in the "living option" James proposed. To the question, "What shall I believe?" there is but one answer, "That depends upon the nature of the alternatives." If, for in- stance, the idea of immortality bears a promise which experience fulfils, then we may rightly call it true. If the other alternative is the one which becomes verified by all the tests of truth within ex- perience, then it is worthy of belief. For just as it is a thoroughly artificial problem to erect as a symbol of choice two streets which are rivals only in their strict neutrality before the free agent, so it is equally artificial to consider two contrary beliefs as equally pos- sible from the standpoint of truth. When such a situation of doubt THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 25 does occur freedom comes not in maintaining the deadlock of equal stimuli but in finding in the object a new stimulus to end the inac- tivity, and truth enters not with keeping the alternatives meaning- less, but, on the contrary, in discovering other and more adequate meanings which shall explain more and more simply the data in hand. Whether or not a belief is true and is worthy of credence, de- pends therefore not upon any emotional satisfaction which accom- panies the belief, but solely upon whether or not the promises of the object of belief are, or may 'be, fulfiled within experience. But some one may object that this is to forget, as James did not, that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen and that precisely because the promises of the object of faith can not be fulfiled within experience, we have the right to believe as true, whatever will produce the best results. This objec- tion, it is to be feared, rests still upon a misunderstanding. Faith and belief are not mysterious faculties which enter where knowledge ends. They are simply affirmations, generally with emotional color- ing, of the truth or falsity of propositions. But when the proposi- tions which they affirm can not be ' ' checked up ' ' within experience, as truth must be, they have not on that account the right to go be- yond experience, to find another test of truth, nor yet to apply the wider test of utility within experience. Beyond doubt this raises grave questions, since the search for truth is entangled here with emotional demands. If the belief in question is faith in immortality, tradition and affection and habit must often first be answered before one can come to the questions of truth at all. But when we do come to the question of truth we must ask first of all what the belief in immortality means, and then whether that meaning is consonant with experience. There is also the question of whether it is true that such a belief does bring cer- tain desirable results. And if it does bring these results, is it true that they are the best results ? For the pragmatic definition of truth is a corollary to the pragmatic definition of consciousness. As con- sciousness is behavior guided by the anticipation of consequences, so truth signifies that the activity so guided does, or may, reach the end intended. A pragmatist, then, can not accept James's definition of truth as it appears in the thesis of The Will to Believe. James, it will be re- membered, said: "Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that can not by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; 26 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM for to say, under such circumstances, 'Do not decide, hut leave the question open,' is itself a passional decision, just like deciding yes or no — and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.' nz He must object in the first place to James's use of "living option" as an inaccurate description of the situation of choice, for he holds that instead of blank alternatives to be taken, not for their intrinsic worth, but because of a prize which is to be added to one of them, without changing its character of blankness — a curious contradic- tion — that a "living option" means that there is a genuine problem for investigation. Each alternative is worthy of examination, for each is full of hints and promises of fulfilment. Either may be true. As a scientist tests his hypothesis, so must every seeker after relig- ious truths, fearlessly, honestly test his alternatives. If neither can be fully verified within a lifetime, or within centuries, or within hu- man experience, yet so long as they are "living options" just so long the honest man who wishes truth is under an obligation to be open- minded. It may be he will never know, it may be that "the gulfs will wash him down" but in the meantime there are the countless vital truths of daily life, which challenge that equal temper of heroic hearts, ' ' To do, to strive, to dare, and not to yield. ' ' James said: "The 'scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being, which that expression may serve to symbolize), is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here declined to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon, after a great victory had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! "We fought at Arques and you were not there!" 14 Exactly ! Lack of definite and final knowledge does not benumb moral endeavor, as too many moralists have insisted. Too many have told us that the nerve of moral effort is cut, unless we know beforehand that, in the end, the good will win. James saw more dearly that the very doubtfulness of the issue spurs the strenuous man to his best achievement, and that to be out of the conflict, and to take no share in the danger, is to be truly ignoble. But James lost this insight when he made obscure the distinction between the good and the true. A very bad thing may be true — many very bad things are true. Sickness, vice, "Brocton" murders, defeats are facts to be reckoned with in our world. Science, disdaining to define the future 13 The Will to Believe, p. 11. i*Ibid., p. 62. THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 27 congruously with our desires, does nevertheless strive to ascertain the truth about the present, asking what sickness, vice, murders and defeats mean, with the purpose to direct the slow and painful and heroic process of making the future congruous with our desires. Philosophy, like science, must disdain to define the future congru- ously with our desires and must instead dispassionately discover the truth about the actual relation of man to his world. What does life mean? What does consciousness mean? What further light does our knowledge of the nature of consciousness throw upon the prob- lems of the will, of instinct, of immortality? And finally in what manner and to what extent are these meanings verified by fulfilment within experience ? — such are the outlines of some of the broad ques- tions of truth with which philosophy must deal. I have, so far, hardly touched upon James 's service to philosoph- ical thought in exposing the error of "Truth" with a capital "T," by consistently maintaining that there is no such Truth, but that there exists instead a pluralism of truths, which are particular and relative to definite situations. Abstract "Truth," pictured as the agreement of the mind with reality, received at his hands a thrust of inimitable satire, 15 yet it can not be denied that James never quite cleared his skirts of a very similar copy theory of knowledge with its corollary of truth as the agreement between an idea and a thing. One finds this in the dialogue with which James closed the volume on The Meaning of Truth. He said that while the absolutist sees three distinct entities, "the reality, the knowing and the truth," he as a pragmatist could see but two, namely, the reality and what it is known as, and truth is only another name for the knowing of reality, or as he repeatedly said 16 truth is the agreement of our ideas with reality. This dualism was most explicit in the answer which James made to Professor Pratt : "Experience leads us ever on and on, and objects and our ideas of objects may both lead to the same goal. The ideas being in that case shorter cuts, we substitute them more and more for their objects ; and we habitually waive direct verification of each one of them, as their train passes through our mind, because if an idea leads as the object would lead, we can say, in Mr. Pratt's words, that in so far forth the object is as we think it, and that the idea, verified thus, in so far forth is true enough." 17 is Vide, Pragmatism, pp. 234-235. i6 Vide, The Meaning of Truth, preface, p. v. 17 Ibid., p. 167. 28 WILLIAM JAMES AND PRAGMATISM Then, once having made the mistake of separating the idea from the object, which as a pragmatist, he should not have done, James was unable to show even by his many essays (1) how an object would "lead" apart from an idea, (2) how an idea can lead apart from an object, and (3) how, on this assumption, verification can mean any- thing other than static copying of a meaningless object by an idea, which (a) is meaningful and so fails to copy the object faithfully, or (&) is exactly like the object and so meaningless. 18 Moreover this separation of the idea from the object is but another aspect of the separation of the future from the present, with a criticism of which error, this study of James's doctrine of truth was begun. There I showed that for lack of the criterion of specific meaning James identified truth with the larger category of utility. | Approaching truth from the side of the separation of idea from ob- ject the result is the same. For James spoke of true ideas as those which have the practical value of terminating in objects which are ' ' worth while. ' ' For failing to use the particular standard of truth supplied by the object, because he held the idea apart from the ob- ject, he supposed that the particular standard must be given in terms of consequences to the agent. Accordingly he wrote : "If I am lost in the woods, and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so, and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house, which is its object, is useful." On the following pages this concrete example is generalized. "From this simple cue (that true ideas are useful) pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us toward other moments which it will he worth while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while. " 19 ^ Again contrast with this what the pragmatist means, if he is con- sistent, when he says the truth is what works ; namely, that the antic- ipations aroused in him by the object are fulfiled. Truth means for him, that, when questioned, some experience has made a promise and that the promise has been kept. Truth is practical in the sense that an object permits one to "bank" on its promises. Truth again is satisfaction, not because an object fulfils emotional demands, but because it fulfils the letter of its contract. is Vide, especially ibid., p. 166, and preface, p. xi. ™ Pragmatism, pp. 203, 204, 205. THE QUESTION OF TRUTH 29 Is it true that it will rain? That cloud looks threatening. The rain comes. The truth of the rain-promising aspect of the cloud is proved. That a picnic is spoiled and that crops are saved are facts irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of the original meaning. It was because James lost sight of the function of the object in the truth situation that he failed to keep to this pragmatic interpretation. Furthermore by merging truth in the conception of utility in its widest sense, he lost the distinction between truth and goodness. Yet it was not strange that his understanding of truth was imper- fect, for he worked it out consistently with his theory of conscious- ness, and so shows, but in one case the more, how far reaching are the errors attendant upon a false definition of knowledge. VITA The writer was born July 25, 1887, in Windsor, Wisconsin. She was graduated from Milwaukee-Downer Seminary in 1904 and from the University of Wisconsin, with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, in 1908. During the year 1913-1914 she was a scholar in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin and received the degree of Master of Arts in June, 1914. During the years 1914-1916 she was a fellow- in philosophy at the University of Illinois. At the University of Wis- consin she had courses in philosophy with Professor E. B. McGilvary, Professor F. C. Sharp, Professor M. C. Otto and Dr. H. M. Kallen, and at the University of Illinois with Professor A. H. Daniels and Professor B. H. 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