SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
This suppressed context of thought is of course largely personal, and with it is suppressed the human interest of philosophy. Hence the endeavor to drag it to light was very properly called Humanism. Schiller conceives every thought as some one's experiment for which he is responsible.
"Every thought", he says, "is an act and even the most 'theoretical' assertions are made to gratify an interest." He finds in the present war a most unpleasant confirmation of his theory that thought is subordinate to action and never free from human volitional influence:[1]
If only philosophers could be got to face the facts of actual life, could any of them fail to observe the enormous object-lesson in the truth of pragmatism which the world has been exhibiting in the present crisis? Everywhere the "truths" believed in are relative to the nationality and sympathies of their believers. It is, indeed, lamentable that such an orgy of the will to believe should have been needed to illustrate the pragmatic nature of truth, but who will dispute that for months say 999 persons out of 1000 have been believing what they please, and consciously or unconsciously making it "true" with a fervor rarely bestowed even by the most ardent philosophers on the most self-evident truths? No improbability, no absurdity, no atrocity has been too great to win credence, and the uniformity of human nature has been signally attested by the way in
- ↑ "Realism, Pragmatism and William James." Mind, 1915.
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