05 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Common Sense - Pragmatism - William James

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Electronic Payments Coalition. Kinds and the sameness of kind. What colossally useful

denkmittel for finding our way among the many? The manyness might conceivably have been absolute.

Experiences might have all been singular. No one of them occurring twice. In such a world,

logic would have had no application. For kind and sameness of kind are logics only instruments.

Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of that kind's kind, we can travel through

the universe as if with seven league boots. Brutes surely never used these abstractions and

civilized men used them in most various amounts. Corsial influence again.

This, if anything, seems to have been an anti-deluvian conception, for we find primitive men thinking

that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the

more definite influences seems to have started in the question, who or what is to blame?

For any illness, namely or disaster or untoward thing. From this center the search for

causal influences has spread. June and science together have tried to eliminate the whole notion

of influence, substituting the entirely different dank middle of law. But law is a comparatively

recent invention and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of the common sense.

The possible has something less than the actual and more than the holy unreal is another of these

magisterial notions of common sense. Criticize them as you may, they persist, and we fly back to

them the moment critical pressure is relaxed. Self, body, in the substantial or metaphysical sense,

no one escapes subjection to those forms of thought. In practice, the common sense,

dank middle, are uniformly victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks of a thing

in the common sense way as a permanent unit subject that supports its attributes interchangeably.

No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion of a group of sense qualities united

by a law. With these categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together and connect

all the reboter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more critical

philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural mother tongue of thought.

Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding of things,

a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the purposes for which we think.

Things do exist, even when we do not see them. Their kinds also exist. Their qualities are what

they act by, and are what we act on, and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light

on every object in this room. We intercept it on its way whenever we hold up an opaque screen.

It is the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your ears. It is the sensible heat of the

fire that migrates into the water in which we boil an egg, and we can change the heat into coolness

by dropping in a lump of ice. At this stage of philosophy, all non-European men without exception

have remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life, and, among our own race even,

it is only the highly sophisticated specimens, the minds deborched by learning as Berkeley calls them,

who have ever even suspected common sense of not being absolutely true.

But when we look back and speculate as to how the common sense categories may have achieved

their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not have been by a process just like that

by which the conceptions due to democratives, Berkeley, or Darwin achieved their similar

triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have been successfully discovered by pre-historic

geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up. They may have been verified by the

immediate facts of experience which they have first fitted, and then from fact to fact and from

man to man they may have spread, until all language rested on them, and we are now incapable of

thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved

elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that

we can observe at work in the small and near. For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions

amplifies, but that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually spread from

one thing to another seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their application today.

We assume for certain purposes one objective time that aqua-bellieter flute, but we don't

livingly believe in or realize any such equally flowing time. Space is a less vague notion,

but things, what are they? Is a constellation properly a thing or an army,

or is an ence-racionist such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are

changed the same? Is the changeling whom locks so seriously discusses of the humankind?

Is telepathy a fancy or a fact? The moment you pass beyond the practical use of these

categories used usually suggested sufficiently by the circumstances of the special case

to a merely curious or speculative way of thinking you find it impossible to say within just

what limits of fact anyone of them shall apply. The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist

propensities, has tried to eternalize the common sense categories by treating them very technically

and articulately. A thing for instance is a being or ance, an ance is a subject in which qualities

in here. A subject is a substance, substances or of kinds and kinds are definite in number and

discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of discourse they are

indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean apart from their use in steering our discourse

to profitable issues does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be

in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, it simply says that your intellect

knows perfectly what the word means. But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself

and its steering function. So it comes about that intellects, CB permissi, intellects only

curious and idle, have forsaken the common sense level for what in general terms may be called

the critical level of thought. Not merely such intellects either, your jumes and burglars and

heagles, but practical observers of facts, your Galileos, Dalton's fair days, have found it

impossible to treat the naïve's sense-terminy of common sense as ultimately real. As common sense

interpolates her constant things between our intermittent sensations, so science extra-polates

her world of primary qualities, her atoms, her ether, her magnetic fields and the like,

beyond the common sense world. The things are now invisible, impalpable things,

and the old visible common sense things are supposed to result from the mixture of these

invisibles. Who else the whole naïve conception of things gets superseded, and a thing's name

is interpreted as denoting only the law or regal de verbindung by which certain of our sensations

habitually succeed or coexist. Science and critical philosophy thus

burst the bounds of common sense, with science naïve realism ceases,

second-air qualities become unreal, primary ones alone remain. With critical philosophy,

Havok is made of everything. The common sense category is one and all ceased represent anything

in the way of being. There but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment

in the midst of sensations irremediable flow.

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But the scientific tendency in critical thought, though inspired at first by purely

intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our

astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery practice.

The chemists flew us with new medicines and die-stuffs.

Have period and a fair day have endowed us within New York subway and with Marconi telegrams.

The hypothetical things that such men have invented,

defined as they have, defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in consequences

verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions,

we can then bring about the conditions and press them, the consequences there before our eyes.

The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of

thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense.

Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit. One may even fear that the

being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove

adequate to stand the strain of the ever-increasingly tremendous functions,

almost divine creative functions which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield.

He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bathtub who has turned on the water and who cannot

turn it off. The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than the

scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power. Lock, zoom, Berkeley,

can't, higgle, have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature

goes, and I can think of no invention or discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their

peculiar thought, for neither with Berkeley's tar water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had

their respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to their

disciples are intellectual, not practical, and even then we have to confess that there is a large

minus sign to the account. There are thus at least three well-characterized levels,

stages, or types of thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have one

kind of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible, however, to say that any

stage as yet inside is absolutely more true than any other. Common sense is the more consolidated

stage because it got its innings first and made all language into its alley, whether it or science

be the more August stage may be left to private judgment, but neither consolidation nor

Augustness has decisive marks of truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had to

brand the secondary qualities to which our world owes all its living interest as false,

and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical equations instead?

Why should it have needed to transform courses and activities into laws of functional variation?

Vainly did scholasticism, common senses, college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotypes the forms

the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity.

Substantial forms, in other words, our secondary qualities hardly outlasted the year of our

Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then, and Galileo and Descartes with his new philosophy

gave them only a little later their coupe the grass. But now, if the new kinds of scientific

thing, the corpuscular and atheric world were essentially more true, why should they have excited

so much criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians are saying on every hand

that these entities and their determinations, however definitely conceived, should not be held

for literally real. It is as if they existed, but in reality they are like coordinates or

logarithms, only artificial shortcuts for taking us from one part to another of experiences flux.

We can siphon fruitfully with them. They service wonderfully, but we must not be their dupes.

There is no ring and conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking,

with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their naturalness, their intellectual

economy, their fruitfulness for practice all start up as distinct tests of their veracity,

and as a result we get confused. Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another.

Philosophic criticism for a third. But whether either be true or absolutely, heaven only knows.

Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the

common sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men

as Marsh Oswald and Juham. According to these teachers, no hypothesis is true than any other

in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part,

to be compared solely from the point of view of their use. The only literally true thing

is reality, and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality.

The flux of our sensations and emotions as they pause. Energy is the collective name, according

to Oswald, for the sensations just as they present themselves. The movement, heat, magnetic pull,

or light, or whatever it may be, when they are measured in certain ways.

So measuring them, we are enabled to describe the correlated changes, which they show us,

in formulas, matchless for their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are sovereign

triumphs of economy and thought. No one can fail to admire the energetic philosophy,

but the hypersensible entities, the corpuscules and vibrations hold their own with most

physicists and chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too economical to be all-sufficient.

Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's keynote.

I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for popular lecturing,

and in which my own competence is small. All the better for my conclusion, however,

which at this point is this. The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflection,

we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of our ready-made and given reality,

proves hard to understand clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating off-hand

between the diverse types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science,

or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical or idealistic

philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave some dissatisfaction.

It is evident that the conflict of these so widely differing systems obliges us to

overhaul the very idea of truth. For at present we have no definite notion of what the word may

mean. I shall face that task in my next lecture, and we'll add but a few words in finishing the

present one. There are only two points that I wish to retain from the present lecture.

The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to suspect it, to suspect that

in spite of their being so venerable of their being so universally used and built into the very

structure of language, its categories may, after all, be only a collection of extraordinarily

successful hypotheses. Historically discovered or invented by single men, by gradually

communicated and used by everybody, by which our forefathers have from time immemorial,

unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put themselves

into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes

that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for the excessive intellectual

vivacity of democracies, Archimedes Galileo, Berkeley, and other eccentric geniuses,

whom the example of such men inflamed. Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.

The other point is this, what not the existence of the various types of thinking which we have

reviewed each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them

able to support a claim of absolute veracity, to wake in a presumption favourable to the pragmatic

view that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality,

rather than revelations or agnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma.

I express this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures. Certainly,

the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some purposes of each thought level,

and the inability of either to expel the others decisively suggests this pragmatistic view,

which I hope that the next lectures may soon make entirely convincing.

May their not off-roll be a possible ambiguity in truth.

End of Lecture 5