08 Part 2 - Pragmatism and Religion - Pragmatism - William James

Does our act then create the world's salvation so far as it makes room for itself, so

far as it leaps into the gap?

Does it create not the whole world's salvation, of course, but just so much of this as itself

covers of the world's extent?

Here I take the bull by the horns and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and

monists of whatever brand they be, I ask why not?

Our acts, our turning places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow,

are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the

most intimate and complete.

Why should we not take them at their face value?

Why may they not be the actual turning places and growing places which they seem to be,

how the world, why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making so that

nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?

Irrational, we are told, how can you be in come in local spots and patches which add

themselves or stay away at random independently of the rest?

There must be a reason for our acts and where in the last resort can in a reason be looked

for saving the material pressure or the logical compulsion of the total nature of the world.

There can be but one real agent of growth or seeming growth anywhere, and that agent

is the integral world itself.

It may grow all over if growth there be, but that single parts should grow per se is irrational.

But if one talks of rationality and of reasons for things and insists that they can't just

come in spots, what kind of a reason can there ultimately be why anything should come at

all?

Talk of the logic and necessity and categories and the absolute and the contents of the whole

philosophical machine, shop as you will, the only real reason I can think of why anything

should ever come is that someone wishes it to be here.

It is demanded, demanded it may be, to give relief to no matter how small a fraction

of the world's mass.

This is living reason, and compared with it, material courses and logical necessities

are spectral things.

In short, the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing caps, the world of

telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled in stanter, without having to consider or

placate surrounding or intermediate powers.

This is the absolute's own world.

He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it is exactly as he calls for it no other

condition being required.

In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition.

Other individuals are there with other wishes, and they must be propitiated first.

So being, gross under all sorts of resistances in this world are the many, and from compromise

to compromise only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational

shape.

We approach the wishing cap type of organization only in a few departments of life.

We want water, and we turn to a faucet.

We want a codec picture, and we press a button.

We want information, and we telephone.

We want to travel, and we buy a ticket.

In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing.

The world is rationally organized to do the rest.

But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression.

What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally, but piecemeal

by the contributions of its several parts.

Take the hypothesis seriously, and as a live one.

Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying, I am going

to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional

merely, the condition being that each several agent does its

own level best.

I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world.

At safety, you see, is unwarranted.

It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet may win through.

It is a social scheme of cooperative work genuinely to be done.

Will you join the procession?

Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?

Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel

bound to reject it as not safe enough?

Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and

irrational a universe, you prefer to relapse into the slumber of non-intentity from which

you had been momentarily arose from the tempter's voice?

Of course, if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sword.

There is a healthy, minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly

fit.

We would therefore accept the offer, top, hunchlag afschlag.

It would be just like the world we practically living, and loyalty to our old nurse nature

would forbid us to say no.

The world proposed would seem rational to us in the most living way.

Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fight to the

fight of the Creator.

Yet perhaps some would not.

For there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe

with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal.

There are moments of discouragement in us all.

When we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving, our own life breaks down, and

we fall into the attitude of the projectile sun.

We mistrust the chances of things.

We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck and be absorbed

into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea.

The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments, is security against the bewildering

accidents of so much finite experience.

Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense

consists.

The Hindu and the Buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of

more experience, afraid of life.

And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words.

All is needed and essential, even you with your sick soul and heart.

All are one with God and with God all is well.

The everlasting arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem

to fail or to succeed.

There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity, absolutism

is the only saving scheme.

Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter.

It refrigerates the very heart within their beast.

So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast.

Using our old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to

the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.

Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all.

They would call it moralistic and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme

alone.

Religion in the sense of self-surrender and moralism in the sense of self-sufficientness

have been pitted against each other as incompatible frequently enough in the history of human

thought.

We stand here before the final question of philosophy.

I said in my fourth lecture that I believe the monistic pluralistic alternative to be the

deepest and most pregnant question that our minds can frame.

Can it be that the disjunction is a final one that only one side can be true?

Or a pluralism and monism genuine incompatibles?

So that if the world were really pluralistically constituted, if it really existed distributably

and were made up of a lot of itches, it could only be saved piecemeal and de facto as

the result of their behavior.

And its epic history in no wise short-circuited by some essential oneness in which the several

oneness were already taken up beforehand and eternally overcome.

If this were so, we should have to choose one philosophy or the other.

We could not say yes, yes, to both alternatives.

There would have to be a no in our relations with the possible.

We should confess an ultimate disappointment.

We could not remain healthy-minded and sick-minded in one indivisible act.

Of course, as human beings, we can be healthy minds on one day and six souls on the next.

And as amateur doublers in philosophy, we may perhaps be allowed to call our results

monistic pluralists, or free will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us as a reconciling

kind.

But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency and feeling the pragmatistic

need of squaring truth with truth, the questions forced upon us are frankly adopting either the

tender or the robustious type of thought.

In particular, this query has always come home to me.

May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far.

May not the notion of a world already saved in total anyhow be too saccharine to stand.

May not religious optimism be too idyllic.

Must all be saved.

Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation.

Is the last word sweet?

Is all, yes, yes, in the universe.

Doesn't the fact of no stand at the very core of life doesn't the very seriousness that

we attribute to life mean that ineluctible knows and losses form a part of it, that

there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter

always remains at the bottom of its cup.

I cannot speak officially as a pragmatist here, all I can say is that my own pragmatism

offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view, and giving up

the claim of a total reconciliation.

The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatist willingness to treat pluralism as a serious

hypothesis.

In the end it is our faith, and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the

right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith.

I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without

therefore backing out and crying no play.

I am willing to think that the prodigal sun attitude opened to us as it is in many

vicissitudes is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life.

I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers and no total preservation

of all that is.

I can believe in their ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not

the whole.

When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of

what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

As a matter of fact, countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a

universe, and find its disseminated and strong-long successes sufficient for their rational needs.

There is a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology, which admirably expresses

this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even though the lost element

might be once self.

A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast bids you set sail.

All many a gallant bark when we were lost weathered the gale.

Those Puritans who answered yes to the question, are you willing to be damned for God's glory,

were in this objective and magnanimous condition of mind.

The way of escape from evil on this system is not by getting it out gehobern, or preserved

in the whole as an element essential, but overcome.

It is by dropping it out all together, throwing it overboard and getting beyond it, helping

to make a universe that shall forget its very place and name.

It is then perfectly possible to accept sincerely a drastic kind of a universe from which the

element of seriousness is not to be expelled.

Who so does so is, it seems to me, a genuine pragmatist.

He is willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts, willing to pay

with his own person if need be for the realization of the ideals which he frames.

What now actually are the other forces which he trusts to cooperate with him in a universe

of such a type?

They are at least his fellow men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached.

But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type

we have been considering had always believed in?

Their words may have sounded monistic when they said, there is no God but God.

But the original polytheism or mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated

self into monotheism.

And monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of classroom instruction

for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus interparis, in

the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate.

I fear that my previous lectures confined as they have been to human and humanistic aspects

may have left the impression on many of you that pragmatism means methodically to leave

the superhuman out.

I have shown small respect indeed for the absolute, and I have until this moment spoken

of no other superhuman hypothesis but that.

But I trust that you see sufficiently that the absolute has nothing but its superhumanness

in common with the Theistic God.

On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the wider

sense of the word, it is true.

Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does

work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it would combine

satisfactorily with all the other working truths.

I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture, but when I tell

you that I have written a book on men's religious experience which only whole has been regarded

as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps accept my own pragmatism from the

charge of being an atheistic system.

I firmly disbelieve myself that our human experience is the highest form of experience

extent in the universe.

I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe

as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life.

They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries, they take part in scenes of whose significance

they have no inkling.

They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which

pause wholly beyond their can.

So we are tangents to the wider, lifeful things, but just as many of the dogs and cats ideals

coincide with our ideals and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so

we may well believe on the proofs that religious experience affords that higher powers exist

and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic

or merely maleuristic in type.

But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that

only you yourself can decide.

Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answers, for we do not yet know certainly which type

of religion is going to work best in the long run.

The various over-beliefs of men, their several faith ventures, are in fact what are needed

to bring the evidence in.

You will probably make your own ventures severally.

If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you,

and you will need no religion at all.

If radically tender, you will take up with a more monistic form of religion.

The pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will

not seem to afford you security enough.

But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radically sense, but mixed as

most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion

that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find.

Between the two extreme of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism

on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or

militaristic type of theism is exactly what you require.

The end of pragmatism, end of lecture 8, end of pragmatism by William James.