Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/459

PRAGMATISM. 1|:> and valuable and ought certainly to be part of a true philo- sophy of life and reality. Again and again, however, we have found that it seems to repose upon a certain view of the " real " that cannot be even described without examining many of the assumptions of Pragmatism. III. That Pragmatism is impossible as a working philo- sophy without certain important assumptions may be apparent from some of the following reflexions. (1) To argue from our actions or " reactions " to the existence of what we think to be their necessary conditions or " objects " presupposes at least, as Mr. Balfour 1 puts it, " a harmony of some kind between our inner selves and the universe of which we form a part ". It involves what Scottish meta- physicians of the common-sense school would term an argument " from thought to being," or Cartesians an infer- ence from the ordo idearum to the ordo rerum. (2) It also involves a thorough-going criticism of our needs and desires and imagined satisfactions. The ideas of God and Im- mortality may be on a certain and by no means uncommon interpretation of things merely some of the many fictions that have no validity on their own account, but merely a utility or service in view of "the life that now is" the tendency, e.g., to foster prudence or altruism. Of these and similar considerations Mr. James makes no explicit recogni- tion. (3) The Argument from Consequences presupposes that we know all, or nearly all, the effects that the truth of a given theory about the universe might conceivably have upon ourselves, and also a criterion of desirable and un- desirable, good and evil, consequences. Of what kind of con- sequences would Prof. James have us think in estimating the value of theories ? Immortality as the mere continuation, in an infinite straight line, of our individuality or personal identity, means very little to many good and wise people. Nietzsche and others of his ilk write of the utility of wicked- ness by way of trampling under foot certain anaemic forms of goodness, and Zola has recently praised to the skies the infinite value of mere Fecondite. A Renaissance pope used to speak of the good (" definite " and " particular," doubtless) that " this Jewish legend " has done to " us popes ". On the other hand it was probably owing to the apparent absence of "definite" and "particular" results, that the scientific friends of J. S. Mill deplored his being drawn for a time to Wordsworth. Is there with Prof. James no criterion of consequences other than their particularity and definiteness 1 Foundationn of Btliff, p. 247.