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Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr.
And if you allow theoretic satisfactions to exist at all, do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she admits them at all? The destructive force of such talk disappears as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist.
I have already said something about this misconception under the third and fourth heads, above, but a little more may be helpful. Pragmatists can leave the question of identity open; but they cannot do without the wider knower any more than they can do without the reality, if they want to prove a case of knowing.
The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own handiwork.
I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you. Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, 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.
And he seems to sneer the insult where Mr. Chesterton would have roared it. Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way in which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other "ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the territories of mediaeval Christendom. But while Mr.
"We," said William James, meaning the Pragmatists, or the Humanists, "turn to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes."
William James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors: the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington rather than a George III." A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the sense in which their psychology is to be taken.
Since the world changes, his 'truths' must change to fit it. He is faced with the necessity of a continuous reconstruction of beliefs. This influence of Darwin has inspired the logical theories of Professor Dewey and the 'Chicago School' of Pragmatists. Thought in their writings is essentially the instrument of this readjustment.
I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
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