THE PRAGMATISM OF WILLIAM

JAMES

It is one of the difficulties of coping with a philosophy of the flux, that no sooner have you come to grips with it than it flows into another form and eludes your grasp. To read the bold frontal attacks of Messrs. Schinz and Pratt1 and then to find that the adversary in a simultaneous publication2 has already slipped to one side, is to recall the Homeric wrestling match with the wily old man of the sea. No doubt he is Proteus still, and the contest is with the same foe, but the weapons must be changed and the grip altered.

1 Pragmatism—A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. By William James. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907.

Anti-Pragmatisme.

Par Albert Schinz, Professeur à l'Université de Bryn Mawr. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1909. What is Pragmatism? By James Bissett Pratt, Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Williams College. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1909.

2 A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. By William James. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909.

The chief concern of Professor Schinz is to lay bare the social milieu out of which Pragmatism has grown, and his conclusions touch the problem of democracy and aristocracy. Professor Pratt is concerned more with the religious outcome of the movement than with its social meaning. The new philosophy is to him only a part of the scientific tendency of thought which, in the words of a distinguished biologist, describes the Moral Imperative as a "psychic correlate of a reflective, cerebro-spinal, ideo-motor process, the efferent end of which is organised into motor tracts coördinated for a specific action." Whereupon Mr. Pratt remarks gravely that this method "has pressed its splendidly useful and illuminating formulæ too far, it has attempted to simplify too much, and in doing so it has become somewhat narrow, somewhat blind, and somewhat unempirical." And he adds: "To my thinking, the pendulum has now swung too far in the antiintellectualistic direction." Both writers make easy work with the equivocations of Mr. James's preceding book on Pragmatism. And indeed it needs no profound study to see the weak joints in a logic which would determine the inmost nature of things by what we regard as pragmatically useful in our own lives, and would find the limits of truth in what we think it expedient to believe.

There is something like the hilarity of sport

in dragging out the inconsistencies, if not insincerities, of a philosopher who has tried to defend rationally a system which is professedly an attack on rationalism. For just that, and nothing more, is Pragmatism. It is easy to show that such a philosopher ought, so far as the correspondence of logic and reality goes, to be a complete skeptic. Well and good. But what will you do if, before the ink is fairly dry on your book, this Proteus of the lecture hall is before the world with a recantation of his errors and a frank retreat to just such logical skepticism as you denounced him for not confessing. In one sense, Professor James's Hibbert Lectures are consistent with his past; they are in the right line of development from that temperamental impetus which by his own theory is the source of every philosophy, however he may have sloughed off various inconsistencies to attain this position. As a matter of fact, the word Pragmatism scarcely occurs in these lectures, and the attempt at their end to tack on a theory of creating, or even discovering, truth by the "practical reason" is purely perfunctory. Their central point, their crisis, so to speak, is the magnificent repudiation of the whole process of metaphysics:

I saw [he says] that philosophy had been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting in

the discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's ears to the question. When conceptualism summons life to justify itself in conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign language to some one who is absorbed in his own business; it is irrelevant to him altogether— he may let it lie unnoticed. I went thus through the "inner catastrophe"; . . . I had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I was bankrupt intellectualistically, and had to change my base.

To such an inner catastrophe, not unlike one of the conversions he has described so luminously in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he was brought after long struggling with the problem of reason and after covering hundreds of sheets of paper with memoranda of his self-questioning. As the worldling under the stroke of heaven forswears the world, so now he is "compelled to give up logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably." The apostle to him in this agony was the young sage of Paris, Henri Bergson, to whom many others, indeed, in these times of perplexity are turning inquisitive eyes, and to whom Mr. James devotes one of the most brilliant of his lectures. To that lecture itself, or to G. H. Luquet's Idées générales de psychologie, the questioner must be referred who hesitates to plunge into M. Bergson's own uncoördinated works.1 Mr. James

1 One may question, nevertheless, whether Mr. James has actually found in M. Bergson's writings just what he reports. It is a trait of Mr. James's generosity to attribute to others his own spontaneous ideas.

centres his exposition about the hoary and awful paradox which sets Achilles forever approaching and never overtaking a tortoise, since by the time he reaches the tortoise's first starting-point, the tortoise has already got beyond that startingpoint to another, and so on ad infinitum, the interval between the two being endlessly subdivided but never obliterated-just as 1⁄2 plus 14 plus 18 may be prolonged into an infinite series without equalling unity. The solution, which Mr. James reports from M. Bergson, is a statement of the absolute divorce between reason and sensuous experience; the former is discrete, the latter is concrete and continuous. To analyse actual experience into the terms of the intellect is simply to use words without meaning:

You cannot explain [by abstract concepts] what makes any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuous being out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The stages into which you analyse a change are states, the change itself goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual explanation altogether.

With this sling of metaphysical negation he attacks Mr. Bradley, the champion of monism, or abstract idealism, or pantheism, or whatever you choose to call it; and, believe me, he makes good sport with the doughty Goliath of Oxford.