Truth and reality; an introduction to the theory of knowledge

Front matter

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Preface

It is my hope that this volume may serve a purpose as an introduction to the theory of knowledge. While we have pretentious works covering the field of logic and epistemology, we are not so well supplied with books giving a general survey of the main problems involved in the investigation of truth. The time seems peculiarly ripe for such an effort. In the bewildering amount of discussion and misunderstanding to which the pragmatic movement has led, there is need for fresh emphasis of the main issues. There is also need for building out the pragmatic theory in neglected directions. In a small way, this book tries to serve both purposes.

This book is intended to be used in connection with a course in elementary logic or as an introduction or sequel to it. It is hoped that its human interest will also make it available for the general philosophic reader and as an introduction to philosophy. To the cultured public, not technically trained in philosophy, the first and the last chapters may be of special interest.

My relation to the pragmatic movement will be clear enough in the course of the text. It may be of interest that the larger part of Chapter XVII, " The Reality of Religious Ideals," was given as a lecture at Harvard in 1899, practically before the movement had started. This direction of my thought was in part due to the influence of Fichte and Herrmann's Religionsphilosophie, in part to

vii viii Preface

my personal relations to William James. My going on with the work in the last few years is altogether due to the clarifying influence of the pragmatic movement.

I may say here that this volume will be followed shortly by another on metaphysics entitled A Realistic Universe, where some problems suggested in this book will be dealt with more fully.

I am under obligation to the following journals for permission to use in whole or part material which has appeared during the last few years. Chapters I, IX, and XIV have been revised from the Monist ; Chapters II, XI (Truth and Meaning), and XII from the Psychological Review ; Chapters VII and VIII (printed as the Nature of Truth and Discussion) from the Philosophical Review ; Chapters X and XV (published as Truth and its Object) in t\\Q Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods ; and Chapter XVII from the Harvard Theological Review.

To my friends and colleagues. Professor S. L. Whitcomb and Professor E. C. Wilm, I am indebted for reading the proof, and for many valuable suggestions.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY Philosophic Tolerance

To-day as I sit before the warm grate fire with the snowflakes falling outside, I feel in a peculiarly dreamy and charitable mood towards all mankind, especially philosophers. Perhaps I have what Dooley calls the Carnegie feeling. At any rate there jar upon me more than usually the petty nagging and jostling and rushing to the patent office in the philosophic camp, as though one small head could carry all of truth, or as though one expression of truth, however comprehensive, could be more than a passing phase of experience as a whole. Considering the variety of human nature as a result of evolution, why should it not require an indefinite number of systems to express human nature in the various stages of its development and in its various moods .' And why are they not all true, in so far as they are really genuine and really express human nature then and there ? Philosophers, above all people, need open-mindedness and a sense of humor. Dogmatism has erected the stakes and the gibbet for those who have ventured on any new path, while philosophy must always breathe the air of freedom, and has always proved wiser in its hero-worship than in its persecution.

This brings to my mind an occasion in one of the temples of Boston, made more venerable in its associations since then. It was a discussion of educational ideals at a meeting of a brilliant group of educators. It was a Babel of many tongues, one saying : It is this way ; another : It is this; one saying: Come to us, we have the latest; another : Come to us, we have the most venerable ; another one: Come to us, we have the best equipped bazaar of learning. I remember President Eliot rising at the close of the discussion, and in his dignified simplicity gleaning in unadorned eloquence the wisdom of the day, I do not remember his exact words, but the import of them was something like this : " Education is at present in its experimental stage ; and in the meantime it is best that each experiment should be carried out with the greatest possible consistency under the best conditions. Harvard has stood for a system of free election in its college course. It is well that a system of required work, under the best conditions, should be tried somewhere, at Princeton perhaps. Thus future generations shall be wiser for our experiments." It struck us all as so eminently sane.

Why is this not true, to an even greater extent, of philosophy, the science of the meaning of it all.' Why should we not welcome and encourage different experiments ? Is not philosophy, and must it not always be, in the experimental stage.' One of the few fragments which have survived from the brilliant author of the homo mensura tenet is : " In respect to the gods, I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, above all the obscurity of the matter and the life of man in that it is so short." Why should not this brevity of life and the complex and

Philosophic Tolerance 5

changing character of our world teach us modesty in the ultimate matters, where our little lifetimes and limited points of view must be supplemented by other lifetimes and other points of view, and where the checkered mosaic of truth never can be completed? Truth is at best experimental, and nothing can be more fatal than stopping the experiment. The most that will be said of any of us in the ages to come is : Yes, he saw a phase of the problem ; or he proved suggestive in the infancy of the science.

I, for one, though I have elsewhere urged a Weltanschauung of absolute time and realistic pluralism, want to see the experiment of absolute idealism carried out with the best psychological and methodological advantages, and I confess, rabid realist that I am, that in some moods, in which my passion for permanence and unity asserts itself, I take comfort in absolute idealism, or at least like to play with it. There is a certain intellectual coziness about absolute idealism for which I sometimes long. I want to close the accounts and find how things stand, or at least feel sure that somebody knows and that no evil can befall my ideals. But again, in other and with me more prevailing moods, this esthetic craving gives way to the respect for facts as they seem, to the longing for action and risk; and I sometimes revel, in imagination at least, in the daring and courage of helping to make an unknown future, in which my plans and I myself may prove unfit. A fair field, I say, and no favors, not even for my own pet theories. There are other moods, too ; and only God/ knows which is the truest in the end. Ideals may prove truer_than facts.

We are told of the Chinese that he has several religions, a different religion for different functions of his life. As a public official and statesman he is a Confucian, this being a religion of ideals for public life. Again, Buddhism supplies the need for ritual, and furnishes a larger religious setting ; while Taoism, with its forms of magic, satisfies the more primitive folklore side of Chinese nature. Besides these there are various local cults. The st£ te recognizes the place these various religions have in Chinese life by supporting them. This condition of things causes no end of trouble to the Western census taker, and is very difficult for us sectarian Occidentals to understand. But why should we insist so persistently on fitting human nature into one arbitrary mold for the sake of conventional consistency ? Why should we not have recourse to different- forrns of religion and different systems of philosophy, different universes of appreciation, according to the varying moods and needs of the soul ? Why should not institutions, which after all are our creations, be made to serve us, instead of our being enslaved by them ?

Here I see the poetic sanity of Plato, which has troubled his stupid and stereotyped commentators so much. The secret of the difficulty of unifying Plato, over which so many have stumbled, is that Plato's philosophy varies with his poetic moods. He, as no other philosopher, coins his own soul ; and therefore he has continued to speak to the soul of man as no other philosopher. Each dialogue is a Weltanschauung by itself. Most moods seem to fit the overshadowing, large-hearted, and sane personality of Socrates; but in other, more abstract moods, the cold personality of Parmenides or Zeno seems more fitting. We have not Plato, but a mosaic of the rich life of Plato. Why should not every sincere man express his life in a philosophy that seems reasonable to him at the time, fits

Philosophic Tolerance 7

experience now ? It is easy enough for the man who deals in mere verbiage to manipulate continually the same identical counters, but not so with the man who expresses himself. Thus not only man, but the different moments of man, become the measure of all things ; and the Sophists, had they been shrewd, might have pointed to the plastic nature of Plato as the best illustration of their theory. Agreement and sameness are practical necessities for the sake of common action, but outside the elementary qualifications for social life they are the bane of progress.^

In art and poetry conventional limitations have been less effective and made it less difficult for men to be sincere with themselves. We do not demand rigid consistency here. We are disappointed at mere repetition. We look for a different mood of the soul in every new work of the artist Here human nature has been able to find a more varied and genuine expression for its complex and varying tendencies, and we who enjoy the art find, here a varied supplement for our varying inner attitudes. Here it is not a question of either or; there is no need here of finding a common denominator of different types, though silly would-be art lovers will insist on nauseating one with such questions as : What is yo urjayoiita-Paintinpr ? ynur favorite pogni?_ Poor on e-horse soul s. In the realm of poetry and art we have a right to have our whole nature ministered unto, to live in an infinite number of universes. In one mood we want lyric sweetness, dreamy romance, Shelley and Keats ; in other moods we crave for the searching of tragedy, for something that wiU appeal to the deeper self within us, and so we ask for the Antigone and Hamlet and Othello. Again we want something that appeals to the heroic, that satisfies the boy within us, — and he is always there, even in the oldest of us, — so we take up Homer. What is the use of taking a vote on the world's greatest poem? The greatest for me is that which expresses my soul most perfectly at the time. Why should I not enthrone each one to an exclusive place in my soul according to my needs, as the ancient Hindu enthroned Indra and Agni and Varuna in turn ? There is no poetic Absolute unless it be the freedom of enjoying the varying expressions according to the varying moods.

What is true in poetry is equally true of art in the narrower sense. Why should my admiration for the Sistine Madonna prevent me from enjoying other Madonnas of Raphael, different moods of his soul? And why should my love for Raphael prevent me from loving Millet and Corot ? Why should I try to find a common denominator for a Madonna and a Sunset ? My soul needs them both; and my love for one does not fill the place of the other, any more than liny love for Beethoven's symphonies fills the place of Schubert's songs and Bizet's Carmen. To be sectarian here is to have no music in one's soul and to be fit for all the villainous things of which Shakespeare speaks.

And why should a man's soul be crowded into one system of philosophy ? The ultimate realities with which metaphysics deals are no less plastic in the hands of the potter than the realities of art. In either case the soul is endeavoring to create an objective counterpart to its tendencies or needs, to mirror itself, become conscious of itself, and so to create anew its meaning through the expression of itself. Philosophy, like poetry and art, when it is genuine, is only the expression of a mood of the soul, and it is not always for the artist to tell what mood

Philosophic Tolerance g

is most significant. Let each one, then, in the moment when he feels the impulse to create, "from his separate star draw the thing as he sees it," not only once, but again and again, as he feels the impulse to express himself. Let the soul create its belief-worlds as its own needs demand, wrapping its belief-mantle around itself to make itself cozy in the world, whether to lie down to pleasant dreams or to face a sea of trouble. In the realm of truth, as well as art, man must be the measure, however finite and passing the measure may be. All sincere expression, therefore, is worth while. History will see to it that the fittest survives. At least, he who has expressed himself genuinely has become repaid by the insight gained in his own expressive act. If human nature in his case is rich and deep, as well as sincere, the expression becomes significant not only for hira, but for others as well, a creation of new social values. The expression of human nature, whether it is a measure of the universe or not, is always a measure of the individual soul that expresses itself. The reason that philosophy has exercised so small an influence upon the world, compared to poetry, art and religion, is that it has often been a matter of verbiage, with no real soul back of it Philosophic meaning, then, like artistic and poetic, is a mosaic of points of view, of belief-worlds, rather than cut out of whole cloth or according to one pattern. Whether we will so or no, our moods and our lives are phases merely of the whole process of reality, and our belief-worlds are phases of the total meaning. At best the objective counterpart of our inner attitudes is a very fragmentary expression of what we feel and mean. Hence it is right that philosophy should have its Plato as poetry has its Shakespeare; and philosophy needs its Walt WhitlO Truth and Reality

man, too, to reduce it to what is elemental and make it sure of its sincerity. "Make thyself new mansions, oh, my soul," must be the motto of philosophy. Let the architecture be Greek or Gothic, or both, as the soul may require. The history of philosophy is a picture gallery in which we can study not only the history of thought, but the history of ourselves, and through sympathy with the past become conscious of our own meaning in our various moods.

To-day, therefore, I feel that I want to be Chinese in my homage to philosophy as I already am in poetry and art. I like to visit sometimes, in the company of my friend Royce, a beautiful Greek temple built according to Plato's Idea of the Good. It is wonderfully complete and satisfying, carried out after the plan of one master artist according to perfect mathematical models, frescoed in an infinitely varied pattern, in which the past, present and future are set in wonderful mosaic through the immortal artist's cunning. And withal the soul is filled with such sweet harmony as to forget for the time being its limitations and its longings. You can only gaze in rapture and wonder at the beauty of it all. So impressed was I that I turned to my friend and asked : What can I do .' He replied with a smile at my impatience : Only enjoy the eternal beauty of that which is. And it was wonderful for a time to dream there, while I could keep quiet and until my old restlessness returned. But I fancy I shall sometime steal in again for another quiet hour, to see Hegel gazing at his chart of logical categories, Augustine in mystic devotion, and the transfigured countenance of Plato.

But sometimes I like to worship in another temple, very unlike the one just mentioned, bare and simple in the extreme. It is the temple of Democritus and Priestley and

Philosophic Tolerance ii

other stern and heroic souls. A temple did I say ? Yes, for its devotees were filled with a tremendous reverence and enthusiasm. Yet no ornaments were there, nor roof nor walls. Only a pile of rough-hewn rocks in the wilds of the desert, exposed to the storms and snow and sleet in a climate of perpetual winter. For moments the sunshine would break through the gray clouds and make the landscape sparkle into diamonds and crystals of icy grandeur. But those that worshiped there counted it as naught. They watched the wreaths of sand as they rose in many a whirl, or the fall of the snowflakes, and made records of it all. On the altar were two idols, cut out of granite, — Simplicity and Necessity, grim to look at. To them they offered, to my horror, human sacrifices, their own children. But so the idols craved ; and many fond hopes, many warm desires, many tender sentiments went up in smoke on the rock-bound altar. As I stayed I became impressed with the absolute democracy of the religion — the democracy of absolute poverty and absolute law — and their willingness to sacrifice all to what seemed to me mere idols.

So impressed was I with the simplicity and sternness and cold awfulness of it that my inner self seemed to shrink within me to a mere ghost of its former puffed-up state. I felt so impressed with the uncompromising, relentlessly democratic character of the forces of the universe and my own insignificance as a finite individual, that when their priests told me that to please their gods I must sacrifice all that I loved, I threw into the fire many of my conceits, many subjective broodings and many a petty desire — but not all that I loved, and so I could not become a member of the fraternity. But sometime, I dare say, I shall go out again into the wilds, where I can feel the tonic of the ti Truth and Reality

But I could not stay there always. I need to get back to the society of Kant and Fichte and Browning and the rest who have felt that circumstance is to some extent plastic in the service of ideals and that we shall not utterly perish, at least not without having our say. The temple where I spend most of my time is an unfinished Gothic sort of structure, where many artists are at work, each in his own way. I was introduced to the group by a friend of mine, the brilliant and human William James, who spent a lifetime trying to provide a framework, and who is now at work on some plans for the interior. It is a place where everybody has something to do. Each one is allowed to choose his own task, make his own plan and fix his own salary. There is no supervision as yet ; in fact the plan is that there shall be no supervision of the work as a whole. This is looked at askance by outsiders, and mutiny is prophesied. What can be the worth of the work thus pursued ? And how can a man be allowed to draw on the universe according to his own estimate .? A system of grading has been suggested to ascertain the fitness of plan and work. But so far no available tribunal has been found except the succession of workers themselves and what appeals to them. Each artist is thus his own judge of fitness, and when he is superseded, there seems to be no guarantee that his work will be carried on. But as the workers are conscious of each other's plans, and as new artists serve apprenticeships under old masters, it is expected that there will be a degree of continuity and unity.

But after all, the center of interest in this religion is not the temple, but the artists. The temple may never be

Philosophic Tolerance 13

finished, as each artist and each generation of artists modify the plans to suit their own ideals. But the artists get practice, and the temple is first of all a school for artists. And each artist is paid at least through the joy of the working and the appreciation he feels for such momentary beauty as he can produce.

Here at least the artist has the sense of doing something, for in the other temples there is nothing to do but contemplate that which is, whether beauty or desert. Here worship is work and work is worship. Perhaps somehow, somewhere and sometime his work may mean more than he knows. Perhaps an unseen Artist may be piecing together from moment to moment the scattered fragments of our insight. If the artist gets disheartened, and if his work and fellow-workers do not offer sufficient encouragement, with the strenuous Kant working away at the fresco of his dark corner, and young Fichte with untamed enthusiasm trying to boss the job, and the lovable James preaching his favorite principle of pragmatism, and other heroic souls, "each in his own tongue" — if all of these sometimes fail to please, and work becomes irksome, let him go into the temple of beauty, in the fairy land of summer, and rest awhile. And if he gets too absorbed in his own plans to be tolerant of other workers, I should advise him to go out to that lonely rock-bound altar in the wilds, and there learn to sacrifice his subjective conceits and to -respect law and order.

In the absorption of my meditation, the glowing coals of the grate fire have turned to ashes. The snowflakes have ceased to fall ; and the brisk zero temperature beckons me into God's out-of-doors. The spell of revery is over; and instead of dreamy sympathy, I feel the call to stern activity — to conquer the world in my own Norse way. I realize now that whatever our moods and sympathies, they do not make our ideas come true. This must be tested by their ability to lead us in the direction of the intended facts — to guide conduct. But I hope that I shall not forget after to-day that I, too, am a being of moods and temperamental limitations ; and that in the gentle school of friendship and appreciation I may be the better able to discriminate sanely and create truly.

We should be tolerant, not because there is no such thing as truth, but because, under the limitations of human nature, it is important that

Each from his separate star Shall draw the thing as he sees it For the God of things as they are,

so he does it conscientiously, using all the cautions that the technique of truth provides. The race, in its historic experience, will eventually pass upon the individual insight, and reject or incorporate into its institutional network, according as it explains or simplifies life. Even now we like to think that somehow, somewhere, there is a personality, whose insight is as wide as the facts; whose sympathy can embrace the variety of nature and human nature ; and whose sanity can give each tendency and mood its proper place, in the infinite perspective of history. To this ideal Socius, however incomprehensible his existence, we must finally entrust our fragmentary insight. But we half -men, while we struggle and see through a glass, darkly, should at least make our tolerance as large as our ignorance.

Chapter II

The thesis I wish to maintain in this chapter, for purposes of simplification, is that all of our fundamental adjustments or categories, viewed from the point of view of individual development, are instinctive or organic adjustments; that the stimuli, which constitute the environment, are simply the occasion for calling into play the structural tendencies of the organic growth series, and that such categories as recapitulation, imitation, and accommodation are pseudocategories, stating certain results from the point of view of another consciousness, but not explanatory of the real process of consciousness. This I believe to apply to the whole history of individual consciousness, and not simply to its initial stages. If this thesis is true, progress must take place through spontaneous variations and natural selection, though tendencies must be made definite and effective through external stimuli and the process of experience. The possibility of education is determined by our evolutionary heritage. Whether natural selection alone or other agencies must be called in to account for this heritage, we must leave open here. Natural selection, at any rate, is evident enough both in society and nature ; and it must act upon such grist as spontaneous variations. Some of these variations, the mutations, in the process of heredity evidently stick.

The old idea of the evolution of consciousness as a con-

'5 tinuous series, statable in terms of simpler processes from which the more complex were supposed to be compounded, has gradually become a thing of the past. Sensationalism, simple and plausible as it seemed, has been proven inadequate, and psychology is now looking not to chemistry, but to evolutionary biology, for its cue. The reason for the discontinuity of the psychic series or its leaps and starts is that psychological process waits upon biological structure ; and only when the biological conditions are complete do the new forms of consciousness leap forth as mysteriously as the wonders in rubbing Aladdin's lamp. The lamp is the thing, and just that kind of lamp, though of course the magic result would not follow unless the lamp were rubbed. With the perfection of the mechanism of the eye, and the complicated structural conditions for sight, light leaps into being. So with the mechanism of the ear and the wondrous world of sound.

The stages of consciousness are abrupt, however graded may be the development of the structural conditions. First of all, whether there is prenatal consciousness or not, consciousness waits upon certain antecedent structural conditions before it appears at all. Before the appearance of consciousness the foetus, in response to certain stimuli of temperature and blood supply, has already unfolded a structural series embodying the revolutionary results of variations and survival of untold ages. But the unfolding of structural characteristics does not stop with the appearance of the iirst vague consciousness. In obedience to stimuli, intra- and extra-organic, the organism continues to grow and to develop new structural characteristics, and as the structural conditions reach certain stages of complexity there appear new forms of conscious response. Let us for our purpose state the dramatic stages as three : First, sensitiveness or immediate consciousness; secondly, associative memory and expectancy ; thirdly, reflection, the analyzing out or making focal, to use Lloyd Morgan's term, certain relations and abstracting them for the better manipulation of the concrete situation. Now the thesis here maintained is that the successive appearance of each of these stages of development, with all their intermediaries, is equally organic and abrupt, the unfolding or growth of a structural series in obedience to certain stimuli, which do not make the series any more than the heat of the incubator makes the chicken, but which are simply the conditions calling forth the series ; the stages of development from first to last, as well as what stimuli are effective, being determined by the nature of the organism, which again is what it is as a result of spontaneous variation and natural selection.

It is wrong to suppose with many recent psychologists and biologists that the human brain is essentially unorganized and that the environment organizes it. The environment, whether physical or social, can only furnish stimuli. The human brain has far more complex structural tendencies than that of any other being. But while the brain of the animals below man has a comparatively short dynamic span and the few instincts appear practically together and mature shortly after birth, the human organism has a long dynamic span, with an organic series of instincts maturing in a certain order. Natural selection has here provided for an hierarchy of instincts. But the law of development is the same : a certain congenital structural order unfolds itself in response to certain stimuli. That this structural development is in response largely to post-natal and extra-organic stimuli in the human being does not alter the instinctive character of the process. If we define instinct as a response to stimulus determined by congenital structure, then we may reduce all the stages of mental process to the category of instinct. The only question is as between earlier and later or simpler and more complex stages of instincts. What must not be forgotten is that the growth order of our instincts, as well as the number of our instincts, is congenital.