03 Part 2 - Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered - Pragmatism - William James

Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taking retrospectively, point when we take them prospectively to

wholly different outlooks of experience.

For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the laws of redistribution of matter and motion,

though they are certainly to thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded us,

and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally certain to undo their work again,

and to re-dissolve everything that they have once evolved.

You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees.

I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words.

The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed,

and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.

Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.

The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has, for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.

Matter will know itself no longer.

Impericiable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been.

Nor will anything that is be better or be worse, for all that that the labor, genius, devotion and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

Footnote, the foundations of belief, page 30.

That is the sting of it.

That in the vast driftings of the cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears and many an enchanted cloudbank floats away, long-lingering air it be dissolved.

Even as our world now lingers for our joy, yet when these transient products are gun, nothing.

Absolutely nothing remains of represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined.

Gun utterly from the very sphere and room of being, without an echo, without a memory, without an influence on ought that may come after to make it care for similar ideals.

This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as that present understood.

The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see.

Mr. Spencer believes this as much as anyone.

So why should he argue with us as if we were making stylistic objections to the grossness of matter and motion?

The principles of his philosophy, when what really dismisses is the disconsolateness of its ulterior, practical results?

Know the true objection to materialism is not positive, but negative.

It would be physical at this stage to make complaint of it for what it is for grossness.

Grossness is what grossness does. We now know that.

We make complaint of it on the contrary for what it is not, not a permanent warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest hopes.

The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clear-ness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy has at least this practical superiority over them.

That it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved.

A world with a garden to say the last word may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition.

So that where his strategy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.

This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast, and those poets like Dante and Wordsworth who lived on the conviction of such an order owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse.

Here, then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope, and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism, not in hair-splitting abstractions about matters in our essence or about the metaphysical attributes of God.

Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes.

Spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.

Surely here is an issue genuine enough for anyone who feels it, and as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.

But possibly some of you may still rally to their defense.

Even whilst admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies of the world's future, you may yourselves poo-poo the difference as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind.

The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take short reviews and to feel no concern about such chimeras as the latter end of the world.

Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature.

Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity.

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns.

All superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.

The issues of fact at stake in the debate are, of course, vaguely enough conceived by us at present.

But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of disappointment.

Remember what I said of the absolute. It grants us moral holidays.

Any religious view does this.

It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments and it justifies them.

It pains the grounds of justification vaguely enough to be sure.

The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God ensures will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science.

We can study our God only by studying His creation, but we can enjoy our God if we have one in advance of all that labor.

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

When they have once given you your God, His name means at least the benefit of the holiday.

Do you remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to down each other?

The truth of God has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths.

It is on trial by them, and they on trial by it.

Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together.

Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi.

Let me pause to a very cognate philosophic problem, the question of design in nature.

God's existence has from time immorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts.

Many facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another.

Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc. fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon.

The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its race to a sharp picture on our retina.

Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held, and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.

The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.

Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted.

Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-utorine darkness and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other.

They are evidently made for each other.

Vision is the end-designed, light and eyes, the separate means devised for its attainment.

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the Darwinian theory.

Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth fit results if only they have time to add themselves together.

He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness.

He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer.

Here all depends upon the point of view.

To the grub under the bark, the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the Darwinian facts and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose.

It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism of one or the other.

It was as if one should say, my shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.

We know that they are both. They are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes.

Theology need only stretched similarly the designs of God as the aim of a football team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal.

If that were so, they would simply get up on some dark night and place it there.

But to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions, the game's rules and the opposing players,

so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to say them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature's vast machinery.

Without nature's dependence laws and counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be two insipid achievements for God to have designed them.

This saves the form of the design argument at the expense of its old EC human content.

The designer is no longer the old man like deity, his designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans.

The what of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for them becomes a very little consequence in comparison.

We can, with difficulty, comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars.

Or rather, we cannot by any possibility comprehend it.

The mere word design by itself has, we see no consequences and explains nothing.

It is the bareness of principles. The old question of whether there is a design is idle.

The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer, and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been fitted to that production.

The argument from fitness to design would consequently always apply, whatever were the product's character.

The recent Mount Pelé eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses,

sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc. in just that one hideous configuration of positions.

France had to be a nation and colonized Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there.

If God aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent the influences towards it showed exquisite intelligence.

And so at any state of things whatever, either in nature or in history which we find actually realized.

For the parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious.

When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it.

We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world of any conceivable character that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to produce it.

Pragmatically then, the abstract word design is a blank cartridge. It carries no consequences, it does no execution.

What sort of design and what sort of a designer are the only serious questions and the study of facts is the only way of getting even approximate answers.

Meanwhile, pending the slow answer from facts, anyone who insists that there is a designer and who is sure he is a divine one gets a certain pragmatic benefit from the term.

The same, in fact, which we saw that the terms God's spirit or the absolute yieldless design, worthless, though to be as a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things for our admiration, becomes, if our faith concretes it into something theistic, a term of promise.

Returning with it into experience, we gain a more confiding outlook on the future.

If not a blind force but a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better issues.

This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic meaning at the present discernible in the terms design and designer.

But if cosmic confidence is right, not wrong, better, not worse, that is a most important meaning.

That much at least of possible truth the terms will then have in them.

Let me take up another well-worn controversy. The free will problem.

Most persons who believe in what is called their free will do so after the rationalistic fashion.

It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented.

He ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists who deny it, who say that individual men

originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which

they are so small in expression, diminish man. He is less admirable stripped of this creative

principle. I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free will,

and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with our fidelity.

But free will has also been discussed pragmatically, and strangely enough, the same pragmatic

interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. You know how large a part questions of

accountability have played in ethical controversy. To hear some persons one would suppose that all

that ethics aims at is a code of merits and demerits. Thus does the old legal and theological

leaven the interesting crime and sin and punishment abide with us. Who's the blame? Whom can we

punish? Whom will God punish? These preoccupations hang like a bad dream of a man's religious history.

So both free will and determinism have been invaged against and called absurd,

because each in the eyes of its enemies has seemed to prevent the imputability of good or bad

deeds to their authors. Queer antinema this free will means novelty, the grafting on to the past

of something not involved therein. If our acts were predetermined, if we merely transmitted the

push of the whole past, the free will is to say, how could we be praised or blamed for anything?

We should be agents only, not principles, and where then would be our precious imputability

and responsibility. But where would it be if we had free will rejoin the determinists?

If a free act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo,

and simply tax itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?

How can I have any permanent character that will stand still enough, praise or blame to be awarded?

The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner

necessity is drawn out by the preposterist indeterminist doctrine. Mr. Fullerton and MacTaggart

have recently laid about them doubtfully with this argument. It may be good at hominem,

but otherwise it is pitiful. For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man,

woman or child, with a sense for realities ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as

either dignity or imputability. Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry

on the social business of punishment and praise. If a man does good acts, we shall praise him,

if he does bad acts we shall punish him anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the

acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a strict sense. To make our human

ethics revolve about the question of merit is a pituous unreality. God alone can know our merits

if we have any. The real ground for supposing free will is indeed pragmatic, for it has nothing to

do with this contemptible right to punish, which had made such a noise in past discussions of the

subject. Free will, pragmatically, means novelties in the world. The right to expect that in its

deepest elements, as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate

the past. That imitation and mass is there who can deny. The general uniformity of nature is

preciposed by every lesser law. But nature may be only approximately uniform, and persons in

whom knowledge of the world's past has bred pessimism or doubts as to the world's good character,

which becomes certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed, may naturally welcome

free will as a militaristic doctrine. It holds up improvement as at least possible, whereas

determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance,

and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.

Free will is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the absolute good,

spirit or design. Taking abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content.

None of them gives us any picture, and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value

in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the start. Elation at mere existence,

pure cosmic emotion and delight would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those speculations,

if the world were nothing but a labyrinth of happiness already.

Our interest in religious metaphysics arise in the fact that our empirical future feels to us

unsafe and needs some higher guarantee. If the past and present were purely good,

who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free will?

Who would not say, with Huxley, let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right

fatally and I ask no better freedom? Freedom in a world already perfect could only mean freedom

to be worse. And who could be so insane as to wish that? To be necessarily what it is, to be

impossibly odd elsewhere, would put the last touch of perfection upon optimism's universe.

Surely, the only possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things

may be better. That possibility, I need hardly say, is one that, as the actual world goes,

we have ample grounds for deciderating. Free will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of

relief. As such, it takes its place with other religious doctrines. Between them, they build up

the old wastes and repair the former desolations. Our spirit, shot within this courtyard of sense

experience, is always saying to the intellect upon the tower. Watchmen, tell us of the night,

if it ought to promise bear. And the intellect gives it then these terms of promise.

Other than this practical significance, the words God, free will, design, etc. have none.

Yet dark though they be in themselves or intellectually taken, when we bear them into

life's thicket with us, the darkness there grows light about us. If you stop in dealing with

such words, with their definition, thinking what to be an intellectual finality, where are you?

Stupidly staring at a pretentious sham. Deus est ends ase. Extra et supra omne genus,

necessarium, onum, infiniti perfectum, simplex, imotabile, imensum, atarnum,

intelligence, etc. wherein is such a definition really instructive. It means less than nothing

in its pompous robe of adjectives. Pragmatism alone can read a positive meaning into it,

and for that she turns her back upon the intellectualest point of view altogether.

Gods in his heaven, all's right with the world. That's the heart of your theology,

and for that you need no rationalist definitions. Why shouldn't we all of us? Rationalists as well

as pragmatists confess this. Pragmatism so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate

practical foreground as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the world's

remotest perspectives. See then how all these ultimate questions turn as it were up their hinges,

and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erakentnis teoretische ish, a god,

causality's principle, a design, a free will taken in themselves as something August and

exalted above facts. See, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts

themselves. The really vital question for us all is, what is this world going to be? What is life

eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place.

The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether,

must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will

fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than here too for.

Minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone, yet not irreligious either.

It will be an alteration in the seat of authority that reminds one almost of the Protestant

Reformation. And as to papal minds, Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of

honorkey and confusion, such no doubt will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in

philosophy. It will seem so much shared trash philosophically. But life wags on all the same,

and composes its ends in Protestant countries. I venture to think that philosophic Protestantism

will compose a not dissimilar prosperity. End of Lecture 3