01 Part 1 - The Present Dilemma in Philosophy - Pragmatism - William James

Lecture 1. The present dilemma in philosophy. In the preface to that admirable collection

of essays of his called heretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words. There are some people,

and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man

is still his view of the universe. We think that, for a landlady considering a larger,

it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We

think that, for a general about a fighting enemy, it is important to know the enemy's

numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question

is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run,

anything else affects them. I think, with Mr. Chesterton in this matter, I know that

you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting

and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your

several worlds. You know the same of me, and yet I confess to a certain tremor at the

audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important

in each of us is not a technical matter, it is our more or less dumb sense of what

life, honestly and deeply, means. It is only partly gut from books. It is our individual

way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right

to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense, yet here

I stand, the Cyrus of interesting you in a philosophy which, to no small extent, has

to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency

in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are

not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe

that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something

for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind.

I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but

they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging.

So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism in self recently gave a course

of lectures at the Lowell Institute, with that very word in its title flashes of brilliant

light revealed against Sumerian darkness. None of us, I fancy understood all that he said,

yet here I stand, making a very similar venture. I risk it because the very lectures are

to speak of Drew. They brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious

fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants

understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let

our controversy begin in a smoking room anywhere, about free will or gods, some nissians,

so good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophists

results concern us all most vitally, and philosophers' coerest arguments tickle agreeably our

sense of subtlety and ingenuity. Believing in philosophy myself devoutly and believing

also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, perifas

et nephas, to try to impart to you some use of the situation. Philosophy is at once the

most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the manitest crannis and

it opens up the widest vistas. It bakes no bread, as has been said, but it can inspire

our souls with courage, and repugnant, as its manners, its doubting and challenging,

its quibbling and dialectics of an hour to common people, no one of us can get along

without the far flashing beams of light its sense of the world's perspectives. These

eliminations at least, and the contrast effects of darkness and mystery that accompany

them, give it to what it says in interest that is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take

account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of philosophers by it.

Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the

fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he

urges in personal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger

bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one

way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe,

just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe

that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels

men of opposite temper to be out of key with a world's character, and in his heart considers

them incompetent and not in it in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in

dialectical ability. Yet in the forum he can make no claim on the bare ground of his temperament

to superior discernment or authority. There arises, thus, a certain insincereity in our

philosophic discussions. The potent test of all our premises is never mentioned. I'm sure

it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention

it, and I accordingly feel free to do so. Of course, I'm talking here of very positively

marked men, men of radical idiosyncrasy who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy

and figure in his history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer are such temperamental thinkers. Most

of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament. We are a mixture of opposite

ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract

matters. Some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or

taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he

may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should

see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite

way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is

from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.

Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks

is one that has counted in literature, art, government, and manners as well as in philosophy.

In manners we find four lists and three uneasy persons, in government, authoritarians,

and anarchists, in literature, purists, or academics, and realists, in art, classics,

and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar. Well, in philosophy we have

a very similar contrast expressed in the parot terms, rationalist and empiricist, empiricist

meaning your lover of facts in all the crude variety, rationalist meaning your devotee

to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and

principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis. Yet it breeds and typethists

of the most pognite character between those who lay the emphasis differently, and we

shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in man's ways of

taking the universe by talking of the empiricist and of the rationalist temper.

These terms make the contrast simple and massive, more simple and massive than are usually

the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination

is possible in human nature, and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind

when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary

qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary.

I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly,

and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing

pragmatism. Historically, we find the terms intellectualism and sensationalism used as synonyms

of rationalism and empiricism. Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism

and idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists, on the other hand, are not uncommonly

materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous.

Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from holes in universals and makes much of the

unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts and makes of the whole a collection.

It's not a verse, therefore, to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers

itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I

merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called

a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed.

In that case, the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free will,

and the empiricist will be a fatalist. I use the terms most popularly current. The

rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist

may be more skeptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns.

I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental makeup that I mean if

I had the columns by the titles, tender-minded and tough-minded, respectively. The tender-minded,

rationalistic, going by principles, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist,

monistic, dogmatical, the tough-minded, empiricist, going by facts, sensationalistic, materialistic,

pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, skeptical. Pray postpone for a moment the question

whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent

and self-consistent or not. I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It

suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I've

written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example

of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of

the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whatever as individuals

their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere

of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere today. The tough think of the tender

as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous or brutal.

Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists

mingle with a population like that of a cripple creek. Each type believes the other to be

inferior to itself. But the stain in the one case is mingle with amusement. In the other,

it has a dash of fear. Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-footed Bostonian's

pure and simple, and few are typically rocky mountain tuffs in philosophy. Most of us have

a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course,

given lots of facts. Principles are good. Give us plenty of principles. The world is

indubitally one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitally is it many, if you look

at it in another. It is both one and many. Let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything

of course is necessarily determined, and yet, of course, our wills are free. A sort

of free will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but the

whole can't be evil. So practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism.

And so forth your ordinary philosophic lame and never being a radical, never straightening

out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to

suit the temptations of successive hours. But some of us are more than mere lame in philosophy.

We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and

vassalation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience, so long as

we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line. And now I come to the first

positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist

proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost

born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us our religiousness. It is

itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type and let him

be also a philosophic amateur unwilling to mix a hodgepodge system after the fashion of a common

layman and what does he find his situation to be in this blessed year of our Lord 1906.

He wants facts, he wants science, but he also wants a religion. And being a amateur and not an

independent originator in philosophy, he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals

whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority

of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered

to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough and a religious

philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts

are most considered, you find the whole tough-minded program in operation and the conflict between

science and religion in full blast. Either it is the rock-and-mont and tough of a heckle with his

materialistic monism, his ethoguard and his jest at our guard as a gaseous vertebrate. Or it is

Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely and bowing religion

politely out at the front door. She may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her

face inside the temple. For 150 years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement

of the material universe and the diminution of man's importance. The result is what one may

call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an

absorber. She it is who stands firm, he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth

in human though it be and submit to it. The romantic spontaneity in courage are gone,

the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert byproducts of physiology.

What is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of nothing but,

nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe

in which only the tough minded find themselves continually at home. If now, on the other hand,

you turn to the religious quarter for consolation and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies

what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and the generation is among us English reading

people of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive. The other has more the

air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy, I mean the so-called

transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Higurian school. The philosophy of such man as green,

the carrots, boson key, and roise. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more

studious members of our Protestant ministry. It is pantheistic and undoubtedly it has already

blunted the edge of the traditional theism in Protestantism at large. That theism remains,

however. It is the lineal descendant through one stage of concession after another

of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the Catholic Church.

For a long time, it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school.

It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat.

Between the accroachments of the Higilians and other philosophers of the absolute,

on the one hand and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics on the other,

the man that gives us this kind of philosophy, James, Martino, Professor Bound,

Professor Lad and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed.

Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper.

It is eclectic, a thing of compromises that seeks a modus vivendi above all things.

It accepts the facts of Darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active

or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in

consequence, whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school.

And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent

of rationalism of intellectualism over everything that lies on that side of the line.

You escape indeed the materialism that goes with a reigning empiricism,

but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life.

The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even

try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by

thinking it might, for what they show us to the country, have made any one of a million other

universes just as well as this. You can't deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it.

It is compatible with any state of things, whatever being true here, below.

And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. We have to go to the world which he

has created to get any inkling of his actual character. He is the kind of God that has once for

all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights

as does the absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual

theism is more incipient, but both are equally remote and vacuous.

What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction,

but that will make some positive connection with this actual world of finite human lives.

You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and

willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation in short,

but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the

religious or the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma. You find the two parts of your

queer system hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion,

where else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious,

but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.

I'm not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this

last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer on that and reality in all rationalistic systems

by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled. I wish that I'd say the

first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my

point so clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man who was a graduate of

some Western college began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered

a philosophic classroom, you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one

you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed to have so little to do with each other

that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete,

personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled,

muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy professor introduces you is simple,

clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic.

Principles of recent trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts.

Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

End of Lecture 1, Part 1.