Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/393

PRAGMATISM AND PSEUDO-PEAGMATISM. 379 ' axioms ' to inform him that in lecturing on this subject I find it necessary to distinguish under eight heads the elements in them which rest on postulation, and under five those which depend on sheer empirical fact ! For the most purely rational of sciences that is not a bad showing ! Even apart from such debatable matters I am surprised that Prof. Taylor should be content to accept the situation as he con- ceives it, to accept, that is, the postulatory procedure of nearly all the sciences as sheer fact, deserving of no special comment and possessing no significance for his theory of knowledge. If mine had got itself analogously entangled with an alien principle, I should have felt very uncomfortable, especially if I were also aware that the whole of the evidence to which I had pinned my faith was disputed by my opponents. (4) Prof. Taylor assures me that he meant nothing pragmatic in speaking of thought as an instrument and of the intellect as an " intermediary between a lower and a higher level of immediate apprehension," and thinks that the context should have made this plain to me. Contexts notoriously are difficult things to allow for. However, in the first case I am quite willing to accept the interpretation of his context which Prof. Taylor now gives. The whole argument, he says, was an " objection to the attempt to study the knowing faculty apart from the actual con- tents of knowledge ". This is excellent, and even more to my liking than his original statement. For it exactly expresses our objection to the in- tellectualist severing of logic from psychology. But it seems inconsistent with Prof. Taylor's attitude on page 84, where he would admit no connexion between logical consequences and actual inferences. 1 And it seems to square ill with Prof. Taylor's con- ception of metaphysics as an ' independent ' inquiry into the general nature of reality, which is unaffected by the results of the sciences.'^ For do not those who thus conceive it attempt to enunciate general truths " apart from the actual contents of knowledge " ? I cannot therefore but adhere to my previous conviction that, even though psychologically Prof. Taylor did not realise the scope of what he said, his remark remains connected with the instrumentalism of Prof. Dewey, and the humanist doctrine of the teleological nature of concepts, which was enunci- ated by Prof. James so long ago as 1879. With regard to the intermediary function of thought on the other hand I appear to have in a manner misunderstood Prof. Taylor. I took him to refer to the fact (which well illustrates the pur- posiveness of thought and has an important bearing on the relation of intellection to perception), that judgment enriches perception and that mediate processes of cognition are ever return- ing to the immediate form, to which I had myself referred in 1 Cp. a similar argument in Phil. Rev., xiv., 265-288, and below, p. 389. 2 Cp. Ele. of Met., first and last chapters.