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'Truth, I there say, 'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life? How will the truth be realized?
They were invented by intellectualists who felt themselves capable of maintaining a kind of comradeship with their deities. Men and gods were practically on a level. They walked hand in hand over the earth. These gods belonged to what one might call the horizontal or downstairs variety." "And those others?" "Oh, they are the upstairs or vertical type. They live overhead. Why overhead?
We think that we have observed that in high politics, for example, the only irreparable mistakes are those which are made by logical intellectualists. We would rather trust our fortunes to an honest opportunist, who sees by a kind of intuition what is the next step to be taken, and cares for no logic except the logic of facts.
This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far.
The adherents of the traditional theology are 'intellectualists, and their conception of reality is 'static. The meaning of the latter charge may perhaps be best explained from Laberthonnière's brilliantly written essay, 'Le Réalisme Chrétien et l'Idéalisme Grec. The Greeks, he says, were insatiable in their desire to see, like children.
It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not, that the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and only the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of life. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr.
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. So far, intellectualists can raise no protest. They can only say that we have barely touched the skin of the matter.
For the multiplication of what may be conveniently, if somewhat unkindly, classed together as "freak" schools, breaks no fresh ground at all. Boys who have been brought up in an "intellectualist" atmosphere, and those alone, are sent there; and even if there were no schools to which they could be sent, home influence would turn them out intellectualists still.
But he does not on that account consider truth in posse, truth not alive enough ever to have been asserted or questioned or contradicted, to be the metaphysically prior thing, to which truths in act are tributary and subsidiary. When intellectualists do this, pragmatism charges them with inverting the real relation.
They are not indifferent to fame, because they desire influence; but they will do nothing to advertise themselves. The public must come to them; they will not go to the public. There have been other great men who have been as indifferent as Newman to the applause of the vulgar. But they have been generally either pure intellectualists or pure artists, in whom
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