Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/463

PRAGMATISM. .| |'.l reality and the supreme force of the world, or to avoid the pitfalls that beset the attempt to insist upon any one thing as more real than any other thing to be simply the most intelligible, 1 the most fairly and squarely perceived aspect or phase or tendency of reality ; and, consequently, that any philosophy which cannot rise to the perception of the absolute and eternal character (even in this world, Denn alle Schuld rdcht sich auf Erden) of goodness and of that which makes goodness possible is demonstrably no philosophy. No one, he might say, surely thinks that he perceives or that he could perceive such things as atoms or primal unicellular organisms or pure undifferentiated energy. Consequently it would be absurd to explain the world by these fictions, not to mention the immeasurable difficulty of the step from gravitation and cohesion and the war of organisms to moral and social evolu- tion and to the effort to transform the physical basis of life into something intrinsically higher. But contrary to all this, as we read Prof. James's Pragmatism we are never free from the uncanny suspicion that Nature may conceivably, nay, very conceivably overturn all our ideal dreams and ideal polities and systems for the plain reason that so far as the present is concerned she is at least as real as these things, and so far as the past is concerned, ex hypothesi a good deal more real, and that, so far as the future is concerned, we have as yet no rational theory of the possibility of its being essentially different from present or past. In other words what we have in Prof. James is a psychological philosophy of action, a statement of some of the ideas that constitute the most potent stimuli to action with, however, the under- lying presumption that human volition is so far from being different from physical action and reaction that it is by the progress of science being every day more and more closely 1 1 mean that the reality of the active intelligent self is after all much more intelligible than the reality of any so-called external thing, for "things" somehow "go to pieces" in our hands as we study them either from the common-sense or the scientific standpoint. Or, as we say, so many "contradictions" (Herbart is quite right in making philosophy start at this point) arise in regard to their reality and function (utility) and " independence " that we are soon driven into interpreting (and this " interpreting " is not the mere analogical argument His sometimes taken to be) them in terms of the reality of the active self that ^ we know in ourselves. And as to the most real tiling about this " self" of ours, we soon come to the conclusion or philosophical commonplace expressed by a recent writer on metaphysic thus : " The highest and worthiest self- hood with which man has acquaintance is the Self that is self-active in pursuit of the ideals of knowledge, of conduct, of art, and of religion "- Prof. Ladd, Theory of Reality, p. 3tA 29