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To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always remains what it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is growing now. Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously held to be true. But such modifications are apt to be gradual.
What God is to us we can know simply as religious men and solely upon the basis of religious experience. God is holy love. That is a religious value-judgment. But what sort of a being God must be in order that we may assign to him these attributes, we cannot say without leaving the basis of experience. This is pragmatism indeed.
Such mediating events make the idea 'true. The idea itself, if it exists at all, is also a concrete event: so pragmatism insists that truth in the singular is only a collective name for truths in the plural, these consisting always of series of definite events; and that what intellectualism calls the truth, the inherent truth, of any one such series is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act, for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a way that we consider satisfactory.
Shall we believe and join ourselves with other believers, for no better reason than that something happens to tempt our will? I beg the reader, if he will be just to my thought, to follow me here with close attention. ETHICS AND BELIEF. Under this heading I must call attention to several points. I deny that I advocate Pragmatism at all.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
If the notion of a world ante rem, whether taken abstractly like the word winter, or concretely as the hypothesis of an Absolute, can be shown to have any consequences whatever for our life, it has a meaning. If the meaning works, it will have SOME truth that ought to be held to through all possible reformulations, for pragmatism.
Schiller, with his two 'practical' aspects of truth, relevancy to situation, and subsequential utility, is only filling the cup of concreteness to the brim for us. Once seize that cup, and you cannot misunderstand pragmatism.
Sharon Whipple, the Philistine, never quite knew whether pragmatism was approved or condemned by Schilsky, and once he asked the dark-faced young man what it meant. He was told that pragmatism was a method, and felt obliged to pretend that this enlightened him. He felt a reluctant respect for Schilsky, who could make him feel uncomfortable. And there was the colourful, youngish widow, Mrs.
This reaction takes many forms, the most characteristic perhaps of which is a renewed interest in Mysticism. It leads also to a strong insistence on the practical aspect of philosophic thought, and to a view of its bearing on what had been regarded as primarily theoretical issues, which is known by the rather unfortunate name of Pragmatism.
It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions. All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant.
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