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Updated: May 11, 2025
Speculation was the breath of life to him. He had metaphysical genius. He tended to transform in this direction everything which he touched. Religion is thought. He criticised the rationalist movement from the height of vantage which idealism had reached. But as pure intellectualist he would put most rationalists to shame.
The text-books of psychology now warn every student against the 'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified.
The intellectualist accounts of truth have all failed to make this vital distinction between 'truth-claim' and validated truth. They rest on a confusion of formal with absolute truth, and it is on this account that they cannot distinguish between 'truth' and error.
What should be the relation between these officials and the elected representatives? On this point English opinion already shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative government.
The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the intellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in many relations. This follows of course from the concepts of the two relations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such' something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means.
We may ignore and denounce certain phases of phenomena, but the phenomena work on just the same, unaffected by our beliefs or disbeliefs. The loss is ours if we willfully close our eyes and ears against the enlightening message which it would bring to us in passing our way. Confucius, the moralist, Buddha, the intellectualist, Jesus, the loving.
Intellectualist truth is then only pragmatist truth in posse. That on innumerable occasions men do substitute truth in posse or verifiability, for verification or truth in act, is a fact to which no one attributes more importance than the pragmatist: he emphasizes the practical utility of such a habit.
This evidently makes all truths in some sense dependent upon the personality of those who assert and accept them. Intellectualist logic, on the other hand, has always proclaimed that mental processes, if true, are 'independent' of the idiosyncrasies of particular minds.
Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences a and b must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors, be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be freshly bridged. Instead of hooking a to b, it needs itself to be hooked by a fresh relation r to a and by another r to b.
But place yourself at a bound, or d'emblée, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist substitutions to your heart's content.
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