Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/461

PRAGMATISM. 447 spective, as ours now is, and whose world is partly yet to come, would be absolutely senseless [!] and irrational in a purely retrospective consciousness summing up a world already past ". Now on what theory of things is it that the future of the world and our future may be affected by ideal elements and factors (God, Freedom, Recompense, Justice) without having been so affected or determined in the past. One of the supreme difficulties of Pragmatism as presented in this pamphlet is that Prof. James often writes as if the world that is round about us were sufficiently explained by the entities and laws of physical science, and as if our moral life were sufficiently explained as a part of the "scientific" order of the world. 1 Then, strange to say, he asks us to turn around and think out the consequences of introducing into this palpably godless and purely mechanical world certain entities and points of view whose bare existence is unnecessary to the world as we know it to be and to have been. Does he not see that from the very nature of the case nous n'avons pas besoin de ces hypotheses la to adapt the words of Laplace to Napoleon. It is true that Prof. James mentions the fact of certain great men like Dante and Wordsworth having throughout their lives lived in the actual consciousness of the reality of a spiritual order, and it is also true that he elsewhere' 2 hints at the necessity of including our spiritual and moral reactions in the sum total of real things, i.e., in our very conception of reality. It is also true that he is sometimes simply stating the case for Materialism and consequently describing the world in terms of mechanical and biological categories and at another time stating the case for Idealism and consequently throwing out vivid pictures of the world in terms of the glories of God's providence and of our dearest affections. But (6) this vacillation apart, it is never altogether clear what his own conception of the real nature of the world would be were he called upon to state it frankly and freely. His writings, taken as a whole, may have the incidental effect of making us think of our theories of the nature of the world in terms of our theories about the purpose or outcome of the world, but he never himself gives a statement of what the world now is in the light of what it is becoming to be. To do so would obviously imply a philosophy enabling him to establish the "ideal order" as a part of the "real order" 1 1 am aware, of course, that this is an error into which even such a profound philosopher as Kant sometimes fell. 2 In " Reflex Action and Theism " in the Will tn }']',.