03 Part 1 - Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered - Pragmatism - William James

Lecture 3. Some metaphysical problems pragmatically considered.

I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems.

I will begin with what is driest and the first thing I shall take will be the problem of substance.

Everyone uses the whole distinction between substance and attribute and trained as it is in the very structure of human language, in the difference between grammatical subject and predicate.

Here is a bit of blackboard crayon. Its modes, attributes, properties, accidents or affections, use which term you will, are whiteness, friability, cylindrical shape, insolubility and water, etc. etc.

But the bearer of these attributes is so much chalk which they are upon is called the substance in which they inherit.

So the attributes of this desk inherit in the substance would, those of my coat in the substance will, and so forth.

Chalk, wood and wool show again in spite of their differences, common properties, and insofar forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter.

The attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability.

Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right for they are modes of the still deeper substance spirit.

Now it is very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc. All we know of the wood is the combustibility and freebre structure.

A group of attributes is what each substance here is known as, they form its sole cash value for our actual experience.

The substance is in every case revealed through them. If we were cut off from them we should never suspect its existence, and if God could keep sending them to us in an unchanged order,

miraculously annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them we never could detect the moment for our experiences themselves would be unaltered.

Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things.

Phenomena coming groups, the chalk group, the wood group etc. And each group gets its name.

The name within treat us in a way supporting the group of phenomena, the low thermometer today for instance is supposed to come from something called the climate.

Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day.

And in general we place the name as if it were a being behind the fact it is the name of.

But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not really adhere in names. And if not in names then they do not adhere in anything.

They adhere or cohere rather with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it as cement might support pieces of mosaic must be abandoned.

The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.

Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate.

Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them.

Yet in one case, Scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance idea by treating it pragmatically.

I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value.

Since the accidents of the wafer don't change in the Lord's supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely.

The bread substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties.

But though these don't alter a tremendous difference has been made, no less are one than this, that we who take the sacrament now feed upon the very substance of divinity.

The substance notion breaks into life then with tremendous effect if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange these latter.

This is the only pragmatic application of the substance idea with which I am acquainted, and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the real presence on independent grounds.

Material substance was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy.

Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than I mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it.

It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable bias behind the external world deeper and more real than it and needed to support it which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality.

A bullish that substance, he said, believe that God whom you can understand and approach sends you the sensible world directly and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority.

Berkeley's criticism of matter was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of color, figure, hardness and the like. They are the catch value of the term.

The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations by not being is that we lack them.

These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then he simply tells us what it consists of.

It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations.

Locke and later Yume applied a similarly pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our personal identity.

He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means he says so much consciousness, namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments and feel them all as part of one and the same.

Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul's substance. But Locke says, suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul principle.

Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls. Should we, as we realize ourselves, be any the worse for that fact?

In Locke's days the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke discussing it from this point of view keeps the question pragmatic.

Suppose he says, want to think of himself to be the same soul that once was nester or theretitis. Can he think their actions, his own, any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed?

But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of nester. He then finds himself the same person with nester.

In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think no one shall be made to also for what he knows nothing of, but shall receive his doom, his consciousness accusing or excusing.

Supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable?

Our personal identity then consists for Locke solely in pragmatically definable particulars.

Whether apart from these verifiable facts it also inheres in a spiritual principle is a merely curious speculation.

Locke compromises that he was passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness.

But his successor Yume and most empirically psychologists after him have denied the soul save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life.

They re-descend into the stream of experience with it and cash it into so much small change value in the way of ideas and their peculiar connections with each other.

As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is good or true for just so much, but no more.

The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of materialism.

But philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief in matter as a metaphysical principle.

One may deny matter in that sense as strongly as Berkeley did.

One may be a phenomenalist, like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider sense of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones and leaving the destinies of the world

at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces.

It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is supposed to spiritualism or theism.

The laws of physical nature are what run things materialism says.

The highest productions of human genius might be siphoned by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts out of their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds as idealist content, were not.

Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics.

This is the complexion of present-day materialism which may better be called naturalism.

Overgains that stands theism or what in a wide sense may be termed spiritualism.

Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things but also runs and operates them.

The world being thus guided not by its lower but by its higher element.

Treated as it often is, the question becomes little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences.

Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy.

Spirit is pure, elevated, noble.

And since it is more consonant with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle.

To treat abstract principles as finalities before which our intellects may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation is the great rationalist failing.

Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a state of admiration for one kind and of dislike for another kind of abstraction.

I remember a worthy spiritualist Professor who always referred to materialism as the mod philosophy and deemed it thereby refuted.

To such spiritualism as this, there is an easy answer and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively.

In some well-written pages at the end of the first volume of his psychology, he shows us that matter so infinitely subtle and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those which modern science

postulates in her explanations has no trace of grossness left.

He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals here to have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenivity of nature's facts.

Both terms, he says, are but symbols pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.

To an abstract objection, an abstract rejoinger suffices.

And so far as one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of matter as something crass, Mrs. Spencer cuts the ground from under one.

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined.

To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent, the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form ought to make matter sacred ever after.

It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial.

Matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matters possibilities.

But now, instead of resting in principles of this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the question.

What do we mean by matter? What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit?

I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different character, and first of all I call your attention to a curious fact.

It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the post of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit puts its author.

Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all irrevocably given.

Imagine it to end this very moment and to have no future.

And then let a theist and a materialist apply their rebel explanations to its history.

The theist shows how a god made it. The materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces.

Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world is already completed?

The concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences.

But by hypothesis there is to be no more experiences and no possible differences can now be looked for.

Both theories have shown all their consequences, and by the hypothesis we are adopting these are identical.

The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal.

I am opposing, of course, that the theorists have been equally successful in their explanations of what is.

For just consider the case sincerely and say, what would be the worth of a god if he were there, with his work accomplished a rid his world run down?

He would be worth no more than just that world was worth.

To that amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects his creative power could attain but go no farther.

And since there is to be no future, since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing and now go with it in the ending, since it draws no supplemental significance, such as our real world draws, from its function of preparing something yet to come, why then, by it we take God's measure as it were?

He is the being who could once for all do that, and for that much we are thankful to him, but for nothing more.

But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them?

Wherein should be suffer lost, then, if we dropped God as a hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible?

Where would any special deadness or craftness come in?

And how, experience being what is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living or richer?

Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, the same for our praise or blame, as Browning says.

It stands there indefeasibly, a gift which can't be taken back. Calling matter, the course of it, retracts no single one of the items that are made it up, nor does calling God the course augment them.

They are the God, or the atoms, respectively, of just that, and no other world.

The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do, appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak, and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms and no more.

If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity, nor would indignity count to it where he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage.

When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.

Thus, if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant.

Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same thing, the power, namely neither more nor less, that could make just this completed world.

And the wise man is he, who in such a case would turn his back on such a super-irragatory discussion.

Accordingly, most men instinctively and positivists and scientists deliberately do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow.

The verbal and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we are but too familiar.

If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be.

The common man and the scientists say they discover no such outcomes, and if their metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it as against him.

His science is then but pompous trifling, and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly.

Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate, some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved.

To realize this, revert with me to our question and place ourselves this time in the world we live in, in the world that has a future that is yet uncompleted whilst we speak.

In this unfinished world, the alternative of materialism or theism is intensely practical, and it is worthwhile for us to spend some minutes over our hour in seeing that it is so.

How indeed does the program differ for us according as we consider that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations of blind atoms moving accordingly to eternal laws, or that on the other hand, they are due to the providence of God.

As far as the past fact go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in, are backed, are captured, and the good that's in them is gained.

Be the atoms, or be the God, the course.

There are accordingly many materialists about us today who, ignoring all together the future and practical aspects of the question, seek to eliminate the oldium attaching to the word materialism, and even to eliminate the word itself by showing that if the matter could give birth to all these gains, why then matter functionally considered, is just as divine and entity as God.

In fact, coalesce with God is what you mean by God.

Seize these persons' advices to use either of these terms with their outgrown opposition.

Use a term free of the clerical connotations on the one hand of the suggestion of grossness, coarseness, ignobility on the other.

Talk of the primal mystery of the unknowable energy of the one and only power, instead of saying either God, or matter.

This is the course to which Mrs. Spencer urges us.

And if philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself an excellent pragmatist.

But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question, what does the world promise?

Give us a matter that promises success, that is bound by its laws, to lead our world ever nearer to perfection.

And any rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mrs. Spencer worships his own so-called unknowable power.

It not only has made for righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever, as that is all we need.

Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God. Its function is a God's function, and is exerted in a world in which a God would now be superfluous.

From such a world, a God would never lawfully be missed. Cosmic emotion would here be the right name for religion.

But is the matter by which Mrs. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is carried on, any such principle of never-ending perfection as this?

Indeed, it is not. For the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or system of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy.

And Mrs. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic, and ignoring the practical side of the controversy has really contributed nothing serious to its relief.

But apply now our principle of practical results and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism immediately acquires.

End of Lecture 3, Part 1