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Types of philosophy, by William Ernest Hocking, with th
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June 29, 2017
Part 5
The Newer Teleology
Causality and Purpose
In the case of a machine, no one doubts that it operates by mechanical causes. It is not the driver of a car who makes the car go. On the other hand, the assembling of the machine in the first place, and its guidance seem deetermined by the end in view, the purpose, Aristotle's 'final cause.' But the driver himself is in part a mechanism; and naturalism says altogether so. In any case his purpose is a fact which cannot be abolished. He pictures himself, at a future moment, in some particular place. ]. It may be a good maxim for the scientific mind not to fall back on final causes when it is studying nature: but it is a mistake to suppose that all purpose must be excluded. There it is--a fact of experience. And it has found some way of living together with the causes.
Causal action cannot be observed. We observe only the sequence of events. The axe falls and the wood falls apart: we do not see the force of the wedge splitting the wood. Causation cannot be directly perceived.
Why are we so sure about causal laws? We believe that all events have a cause; and this belief leads us to try to fit evens together. Hume thought this belief a result of mental habit. The real force of the belief lies in the strength of our expectation. If Hume is right, it is only probably, not certain, that every event has a cause. There is no way to prove it.
The perception of purposes is in very much the same case. We do not see purposes: we impute them. Here is a train at the station, and here a man running toward it. We seem to have seen the man running for the train; but we have seen only the sequence of events.
The imputing of motives is notoriously liable to error.
The naturalistic believer in emergence relies on causality alone; and in doing so he makes use of an unavowed assumption, namely, that changes of form being implied in the constant motion of the ingredients of the world, given sufficient time all possible forms must be arrived at, all possible arrangements of the ultimate units of the world, so that eventually organism we bound to happen. Let us examine this common and plausible assumption.
Create an imaginary universe. Let comprise four particles set at the four corners of an exact square; and endowed with gravitative attraction for each other, and with perfect elasticity. The historicity of this universe can be precisely foretold through all eternity. The four particles will first move toward each otheer along the diagonals of the square. They will click together at the same instant, and beeing elastic will return to the exact point of departure (supposing we gave them no initial velocity); they will then repeat the cycle and continue without variation forever.
Now create another universe like the former, with a single difference. Let one particle be slightly off the corner of the square. Can you now predict the history? They will move toward one another as before; but they will not click at the same instant. The rebound will be irregular, and none of them will arrive precisely at the point of departure. The subsequent journeys will show an increase of irregularity for a time depending on the degree of the original malformation. But one thing we may say with entire certainty: at no time will the four particles of this second universe form a perfect square.
And since the particles of our first universe are never in any other relation than that of a perfect square, we may say with equal certainty that throughout eternity the particles of the two universes never fall into thee same figure. In general, an original symmetry will always give symmetrical configurations; and an original asymmetry will always beget asymmetry.
It is false then to assume that any given universe must run through all the possible configurations of its particles if we give it time enough.
And if this is true of the petty universes we have been experimenting with; how much more is it the case of the actual universe, that its entire history is a unique series of configurations, from which an infinitude of possible configurations of those same particles are forever excluded as unrealized.
Emergent evolution is as if it were the result of intention.
Distrust of Reason--Scepticism
Naive Rationalism
Men naturally trust their reasoning power. Rather, they do not naturally distrust it. We reason, as we breathe, without being aware that we are doing it. It hardly occurs to us that we are using a special tool which may fail or mislead us.
Furthermorre, some men appear better qualified for solving the deeper riddles than others.
Though we cannot say that in mentality all men are created equal, still, there is one sign of approximate equality, that each is content with his share.
The word "rationlist" was once equivalent to the "free-thinker" who had renounced his faith in the supernatural. Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" is an American echo of the spirit of the French "Enlightenment" which, in giving birth to the Revolution, found it fitting to crown Reason as its goddess. Probably no subsequent age has been so confident of the sufficiency of reason to solve the riddles of the universe.
some of them have led thoughtful men to scepticism ever since serious philosophic effort began.
Misology: Sophistry. One of these considerations is the simple fact of philosophical disagreement. If the results of independent reasoning are out of accord with tradition, they are also very quickly out of accord with each other. The history of philosophy may well appear as a gallery of ambitious failures.
The more anemic minds have been inclined to counsel retreat, to give up the effort of possessing beliefs and take one's mental and moral ease in superficial living. They become the "misologists" of reason described by Socrates in the Phaedo. Socrates speaks as one who has gone through this trouble himself, and simply admonishes his friends not to indulge in a peevish blaming of 'reason,' when the proper object of blame is the reasoner.
The Greek sceptics had before them a peculiarly interesting case of the opposition of philosophical results. Their predecessors had agreed that the senses are deceitful, and that reason is given us to correct their false reports.
...and concluded that it is not the part of wisdom to hold any conviction firmly, but rather to maintain an easy reserve toward every belief, and keep the mind serenely free.
This counsel, if one could carry it out, would lead to an ideal poise, indifference, and practical uselessness such as no living man has ever attained. But if one could be skeptical enough to be moderate also about his skepticism this attitude might lend an easy urbanity to the manners, and a supple opportunism to the character, which would allow a man to float genially with a noble superiority in a society whose hard work was done by others. How kind and healthful a cushion are ignorance and incuriousness for a well-conducted head.
To know that one knows nothing is a highly important kind of knowledge.
Part 7
Types of Philosophy part 7
PRAGMATISM
Thus if one adopts a belief in God, not because there is conclusive evidence for it, but because it appears to him to add to the meaning of life, or to encourage morality, he is so far a pragmatist. He has not reasoned his belief out, he has chosen it.; and choice is an act of will.
Nietzsche goes so far as to say that a false-hood, if life-preserving, is preferable to the truth. "The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it. The question is , how far an opinion is life-furthering, species-preserving."
This is merely Nietzsche's way of saying that belief in the form of prejudice, imagination, ideal, is a necessary condition of successful living. Men live best under the influence of a myth of some sort, a vision of the future, making sacrifice appear not only reasonable but exalting.
Pragmatism is often regarded as the American philosophy.
Since the idea of "ought" has arrived in the mind, it is impossible to escape her except by using her. For if conscience is invalid, we ought not to be governed by it: we appeal to the "ought" to overcome the "ought."
To Kant, conscience is a token of something in man above nature, for it calls upon him to rule his own natural impulses.
To reach perfection, Kant argues, will require infinite time....certainly more than one lifetime. Hence, either the moral law require the impossible (and is invalid), or else we must have the necessary time to fulfill its demands. Immortality is thus a second "postulate of practical reason."
While the individual is called upon to do his duty without regard to his own inclination, so that the material rewards of existence go frequently to the corrupt or the compromising rather than to the dutiful, nevertheless, if this were final, no one could quite regard the universe as just. If conscience is rooted in reality, and not in illusion, then reality must be a moral order.
The good must be good for something (and must not attempt to shine by its own light. Here the pragmatist is inclined to join hands with the utilitarian and the naturalist in morals.
What ideas mean:
American pragmatism begins in an attempt to go behind the question, Is a belief true? to the prior question, What does it mean?
Many of the ideas or terms with which our beliefs are concerned, such as force, free will, God, have no pictorial meaning. They are simply "inconceivable." We can therefore save ourselves the trouble of asking whether God exists, by noting that the alleged idea of God is a meaningless word.
But Herbert Spencer had already said that the unpicturable idea may notwithstanding have a very definite meaning if it leads us to make predictions which can be verified. Electricity is what electricity does.
The meaning of every idea which has no direct sense-imagery in it may be discovered--if it has any meaning--in the sense-effects it leads to.
Let us seek a clear idea of Weight. To say that a body is heavy means simply that, in the absence of opposing force, it will fall. This is evidently the whole conception of weight.
Such a method relieves us of many puzzles in our fruitless efforts to guess what Weight may be in itself, or force in general, or free will, or God. Consider simply what effects these entities have in experience. If they have no effects, they have no meaning.
If two such entities have the same effects, they have the same meaning, though they have different names. ...
...to say that the wine and bread are the body and blood of Christ, and to say that they are mere symbols thereof, must mean precisely the same thing, so long as (and if) the bread and wine have precisely the same qualities in each case and if the rite has the same emotional import.
It is evident that the theory of evolution would lend a certain support to this theory of truth. For evolution makes the intellect an organ in the struggle for existence: the mind must be an aid in survival, otherwise it would not exist. ]
The value of a thought would lie solely in its leading to the fittest possible response to the environment.
In themselves aport from the eye, physical things have no color. ]
Pragmatism Examined:
Mussolini makes a a pragmatic judgment that democracy is a failure, that is, a false belief. It was not working in Italy. Is he right? Has democracy been tried? Has monarchy been tried? Has any form of government been tried enough? When the late war broke out, it was said on many sides, Christianity has failed. The judgment was pragmatic.
Or take a simpler belief, that in immortality. Kant saw but one aspect of this belief: it allows room for moral perfection. May it also allow room for eternal degradation?
Take the following test-cases to determine whether pragmatism meets our idea of the way to determine truth:
(1) The lost trace. Which of the two propositions is true: There was a man named Homer, There was not a man named Homer? Ordinary logic and common sense require that one or the other must be true. But suppose that no evidence can be found for or against either proposition, all traces being lost. Then, by the pragmatic method, neither is true and neither is false; but having no consequences and "making no difference" both arre devoid of meaning,
(2) The perfect imitation. There are in practice few perfect imitations. But one coin is very nearly a duplicate of another. Suppose that two men at the bank receive in exactly similar bags the same number of new coins; and suppose that each takes the other's bag. Pragmatically, there is nothing to shake the belief that each has the bag that was given him. Are these beliefs then true?
The perfect copy of a Rembrandt successfully marketed would lose almost all of its value if it were known to be merely a perfect imitation. The collector, whose enemy, instead of stealing his priceless old painting, drove him to a deeper madness by making so exact a duplicate of it that the collector was unable to tell which was the original. When the interest is in individual identity, a pragmatic equivalence fails to satisfy.
(3) The multiconsistent universe. It is conceivable that there are several hypotheses about the nature of things which work equally well, all of them being consistent with all the facts. Your choice between Spinoza's rigid determinism and the idealistic system of freedom would depend on what kind of person you are.
The truth about the color of the chameleon is not any one of its colors, but that quality which enables it to vary.
The central trouble with pragmatism seems to be that when we choose our belief, it ceases to be our belief.
The logical error of pragmatism may be stated as a "false conversion" of "All true propositions work" into "All propositions that work are true." This is not permissible. From All crows are black birds, it does not follow that All black birds are crows. It only follows that No bird which is not black is a crow.
Or in the present case, No proposition which does not work is true. Thus a negative pragmatism is of use in detecting the presence of error.
There is one situation in which it would be permissible to convert the proposition. All equilateral triangles are equiangular and also All equiangular triangles are equilateral. This is because the classes named in the subject and the predicate coincide in extent.
Now if we could assume that the universe is entirely benevolent, as we understand benevolence, or entirely fit for our existence, the true beliefs would be at the same time life-promoting, comforting, etc., and the pragmatic test would be approximately valid.
The original belief in the fitness of the world could not be pragmatically established; for it must be used to establish pragmatism.
Ultimately pragmatism requires a nonpragmatic truth. It fails by its own test.
In science, a hypothesis is verified by finding out what facts would follow from it, and then looking to the facts to see whether they are as the hypothesis demands. The procedure is one of strict logical deduction and observation, from which the human equation is excluded as rigorously as possible.
Of course, our interest motivates the questions; but it does not determine the answers.
It is the part of science to tell us the worst as well as the best about the world.
It is probable that our interest in natural laws and the regular order of nature is due to the practical advantage of operating in a reliable environment. The assumption that there are laws and elements may have a practical motive. But this assumption does not control what we find: it does not exclude the irregularity which we may be obliged to admit. The significance of knowing the laws of nature lies in their indifference to our wishes.
The pragmatic element in Instrumentalism is its substitution of a plastic set of ideas to be verified for the stable truths of rationalism; its recognition that transition, change, invades the most permanent of our intellectual properties. We all all believe in the pervasiveness of change; and we all believe in experimentation. But the question is, How much? Is all that I believe true today to be false tomorrow; and shall I hold nothing as certain?
The idea of an experiment itself requires that something does not move, namely the conditions which make the experiment significant. The x which the mathematician uses in his equation must keep the same value throughout the problem--otherwise the operations become meaningless. The mind must remain the same and its question must mean the same when it ends as when it began; otherwise the experiment is irresponsible.
In religion generally pragmatism may seem to have its strongest claim, because of the difficulty of finding any other ground of belief. Here most of all a chosen belief ceases to be a belief.
Truth requires active effort, not passive waiting to be convinced. The surgeon, not knowing whether an operation will save a life, will never find out by "suspending judgment":he must adopt a working hypothesis and act on it.
Only, our decision does not make the truth true.
There is a great region of the world which is unfinished and plastic, where our action changes the facts. Treating a man as if he were an enemy may make him an enemy; treating him as a friend may make him a friend. Your will to believe it a success may decide the issue. Here pragmatism has its rightful field.
But for the rest, where the character of the universe is in question, we must always distinguish between our working hypotheses and our beliefs. Action cannot wait, and must seize on the best hypotheses available: the will to believe is a precept for the life of action, but not for thought. For thought has all of time in which to reach its results.
INTUITIONISM
Feeling as an organ of knowledge.
The agnostic, the pragmatist, and the intuitionist agree on one point: they distrust the capacity of the intellect to reach metaphysical truth.
Feeling is an ambiguous term. This ambiguity arises from the fact that intellect and will are developed from a more primitive type of mentality in which these two functions are not clearly separated. Feeling is a fit name for this mentality.
Both fear and anger may be based on fictitious or imaginary grounds....a man may be too wise to be angry, he may also be too stupid.
The same is true of melancholy, laughter, sympathy.
Laughter is highly cognitive: it is impossible unless there is a rapid concentration of knowledge, as in "seeing the point." Laughter engages one's entire view of the world; but to excite laughter this view must work instantaneously and unlaboriously.
Sympathy contains the true knowledge of the other's state of mind. The unsympathetic person is blind to some of the facts of the world. If intellect is "cold" it is not because it lacks emotional color: it is because it lacks truth. The cold or unfeeling individual is somewhere ignorant.
Why turn back to that primitive type of knowledge contained in feeling which man has in common with lower animals?
Intellect, as the capacity for analysis and invention, no doubt represents an advance. But feeling, as the total response to the total situation, may have its advantages which ought not to be lost in this advance.
We know that the instincts of animals--without indulging in any superstitious wonder about them--often show an extraordinary keenness in sensing the environment: their perceptions frequently surpass our own and leave us puzzled as to "how they know." Animals presumably have no theories; but in the feeling-knowledge which accompanies instinct there must be a prevailingly true sense of situations--otherwise the instinctive life would be unsuccessful.
Now each instinct, as food-getting, nest-building, migrating, is occupied not with the whole environment, but with some fraction of it.
May it be possible that this feeling, presumably very vague in the animal world, and
The Newer Teleology
Causality and Purpose
In the case of a machine, no one doubts that it operates by mechanical causes. It is not the driver of a car who makes the car go. On the other hand, the assembling of the machine in the first place, and its guidance seem deetermined by the end in view, the purpose, Aristotle's 'final cause.' But the driver himself is in part a mechanism; and naturalism says altogether so. In any case his purpose is a fact which cannot be abolished. He pictures himself, at a future moment, in some particular place. ]. It may be a good maxim for the scientific mind not to fall back on final causes when it is studying nature: but it is a mistake to suppose that all purpose must be excluded. There it is--a fact of experience. And it has found some way of living together with the causes.
Causal action cannot be observed. We observe only the sequence of events. The axe falls and the wood falls apart: we do not see the force of the wedge splitting the wood. Causation cannot be directly perceived.
Why are we so sure about causal laws? We believe that all events have a cause; and this belief leads us to try to fit evens together. Hume thought this belief a result of mental habit. The real force of the belief lies in the strength of our expectation. If Hume is right, it is only probably, not certain, that every event has a cause. There is no way to prove it.
The perception of purposes is in very much the same case. We do not see purposes: we impute them. Here is a train at the station, and here a man running toward it. We seem to have seen the man running for the train; but we have seen only the sequence of events.
The imputing of motives is notoriously liable to error.
The naturalistic believer in emergence relies on causality alone; and in doing so he makes use of an unavowed assumption, namely, that changes of form being implied in the constant motion of the ingredients of the world, given sufficient time all possible forms must be arrived at, all possible arrangements of the ultimate units of the world, so that eventually organism we bound to happen. Let us examine this common and plausible assumption.
Create an imaginary universe. Let comprise four particles set at the four corners of an exact square; and endowed with gravitative attraction for each other, and with perfect elasticity. The historicity of this universe can be precisely foretold through all eternity. The four particles will first move toward each otheer along the diagonals of the square. They will click together at the same instant, and beeing elastic will return to the exact point of departure (supposing we gave them no initial velocity); they will then repeat the cycle and continue without variation forever.
Now create another universe like the former, with a single difference. Let one particle be slightly off the corner of the square. Can you now predict the history? They will move toward one another as before; but they will not click at the same instant. The rebound will be irregular, and none of them will arrive precisely at the point of departure. The subsequent journeys will show an increase of irregularity for a time depending on the degree of the original malformation. But one thing we may say with entire certainty: at no time will the four particles of this second universe form a perfect square.
And since the particles of our first universe are never in any other relation than that of a perfect square, we may say with equal certainty that throughout eternity the particles of the two universes never fall into thee same figure. In general, an original symmetry will always give symmetrical configurations; and an original asymmetry will always beget asymmetry.
It is false then to assume that any given universe must run through all the possible configurations of its particles if we give it time enough.
And if this is true of the petty universes we have been experimenting with; how much more is it the case of the actual universe, that its entire history is a unique series of configurations, from which an infinitude of possible configurations of those same particles are forever excluded as unrealized.
Emergent evolution is as if it were the result of intention.
Distrust of Reason--Scepticism
Naive Rationalism
Men naturally trust their reasoning power. Rather, they do not naturally distrust it. We reason, as we breathe, without being aware that we are doing it. It hardly occurs to us that we are using a special tool which may fail or mislead us.
Furthermorre, some men appear better qualified for solving the deeper riddles than others.
Though we cannot say that in mentality all men are created equal, still, there is one sign of approximate equality, that each is content with his share.
The word "rationlist" was once equivalent to the "free-thinker" who had renounced his faith in the supernatural. Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" is an American echo of the spirit of the French "Enlightenment" which, in giving birth to the Revolution, found it fitting to crown Reason as its goddess. Probably no subsequent age has been so confident of the sufficiency of reason to solve the riddles of the universe.
some of them have led thoughtful men to scepticism ever since serious philosophic effort began.
Misology: Sophistry. One of these considerations is the simple fact of philosophical disagreement. If the results of independent reasoning are out of accord with tradition, they are also very quickly out of accord with each other. The history of philosophy may well appear as a gallery of ambitious failures.
The more anemic minds have been inclined to counsel retreat, to give up the effort of possessing beliefs and take one's mental and moral ease in superficial living. They become the "misologists" of reason described by Socrates in the Phaedo. Socrates speaks as one who has gone through this trouble himself, and simply admonishes his friends not to indulge in a peevish blaming of 'reason,' when the proper object of blame is the reasoner.
The Greek sceptics had before them a peculiarly interesting case of the opposition of philosophical results. Their predecessors had agreed that the senses are deceitful, and that reason is given us to correct their false reports.
...and concluded that it is not the part of wisdom to hold any conviction firmly, but rather to maintain an easy reserve toward every belief, and keep the mind serenely free.
This counsel, if one could carry it out, would lead to an ideal poise, indifference, and practical uselessness such as no living man has ever attained. But if one could be skeptical enough to be moderate also about his skepticism this attitude might lend an easy urbanity to the manners, and a supple opportunism to the character, which would allow a man to float genially with a noble superiority in a society whose hard work was done by others. How kind and healthful a cushion are ignorance and incuriousness for a well-conducted head.
To know that one knows nothing is a highly important kind of knowledge.
Part 7
Types of Philosophy part 7
PRAGMATISM
Thus if one adopts a belief in God, not because there is conclusive evidence for it, but because it appears to him to add to the meaning of life, or to encourage morality, he is so far a pragmatist. He has not reasoned his belief out, he has chosen it.; and choice is an act of will.
Nietzsche goes so far as to say that a false-hood, if life-preserving, is preferable to the truth. "The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it. The question is , how far an opinion is life-furthering, species-preserving."
This is merely Nietzsche's way of saying that belief in the form of prejudice, imagination, ideal, is a necessary condition of successful living. Men live best under the influence of a myth of some sort, a vision of the future, making sacrifice appear not only reasonable but exalting.
Pragmatism is often regarded as the American philosophy.
Since the idea of "ought" has arrived in the mind, it is impossible to escape her except by using her. For if conscience is invalid, we ought not to be governed by it: we appeal to the "ought" to overcome the "ought."
To Kant, conscience is a token of something in man above nature, for it calls upon him to rule his own natural impulses.
To reach perfection, Kant argues, will require infinite time....certainly more than one lifetime. Hence, either the moral law require the impossible (and is invalid), or else we must have the necessary time to fulfill its demands. Immortality is thus a second "postulate of practical reason."
While the individual is called upon to do his duty without regard to his own inclination, so that the material rewards of existence go frequently to the corrupt or the compromising rather than to the dutiful, nevertheless, if this were final, no one could quite regard the universe as just. If conscience is rooted in reality, and not in illusion, then reality must be a moral order.
The good must be good for something (and must not attempt to shine by its own light. Here the pragmatist is inclined to join hands with the utilitarian and the naturalist in morals.
What ideas mean:
American pragmatism begins in an attempt to go behind the question, Is a belief true? to the prior question, What does it mean?
Many of the ideas or terms with which our beliefs are concerned, such as force, free will, God, have no pictorial meaning. They are simply "inconceivable." We can therefore save ourselves the trouble of asking whether God exists, by noting that the alleged idea of God is a meaningless word.
But Herbert Spencer had already said that the unpicturable idea may notwithstanding have a very definite meaning if it leads us to make predictions which can be verified. Electricity is what electricity does.
The meaning of every idea which has no direct sense-imagery in it may be discovered--if it has any meaning--in the sense-effects it leads to.
Let us seek a clear idea of Weight. To say that a body is heavy means simply that, in the absence of opposing force, it will fall. This is evidently the whole conception of weight.
Such a method relieves us of many puzzles in our fruitless efforts to guess what Weight may be in itself, or force in general, or free will, or God. Consider simply what effects these entities have in experience. If they have no effects, they have no meaning.
If two such entities have the same effects, they have the same meaning, though they have different names. ...
...to say that the wine and bread are the body and blood of Christ, and to say that they are mere symbols thereof, must mean precisely the same thing, so long as (and if) the bread and wine have precisely the same qualities in each case and if the rite has the same emotional import.
It is evident that the theory of evolution would lend a certain support to this theory of truth. For evolution makes the intellect an organ in the struggle for existence: the mind must be an aid in survival, otherwise it would not exist. ]
The value of a thought would lie solely in its leading to the fittest possible response to the environment.
In themselves aport from the eye, physical things have no color. ]
Pragmatism Examined:
Mussolini makes a a pragmatic judgment that democracy is a failure, that is, a false belief. It was not working in Italy. Is he right? Has democracy been tried? Has monarchy been tried? Has any form of government been tried enough? When the late war broke out, it was said on many sides, Christianity has failed. The judgment was pragmatic.
Or take a simpler belief, that in immortality. Kant saw but one aspect of this belief: it allows room for moral perfection. May it also allow room for eternal degradation?
Take the following test-cases to determine whether pragmatism meets our idea of the way to determine truth:
(1) The lost trace. Which of the two propositions is true: There was a man named Homer, There was not a man named Homer? Ordinary logic and common sense require that one or the other must be true. But suppose that no evidence can be found for or against either proposition, all traces being lost. Then, by the pragmatic method, neither is true and neither is false; but having no consequences and "making no difference" both arre devoid of meaning,
(2) The perfect imitation. There are in practice few perfect imitations. But one coin is very nearly a duplicate of another. Suppose that two men at the bank receive in exactly similar bags the same number of new coins; and suppose that each takes the other's bag. Pragmatically, there is nothing to shake the belief that each has the bag that was given him. Are these beliefs then true?
The perfect copy of a Rembrandt successfully marketed would lose almost all of its value if it were known to be merely a perfect imitation. The collector, whose enemy, instead of stealing his priceless old painting, drove him to a deeper madness by making so exact a duplicate of it that the collector was unable to tell which was the original. When the interest is in individual identity, a pragmatic equivalence fails to satisfy.
(3) The multiconsistent universe. It is conceivable that there are several hypotheses about the nature of things which work equally well, all of them being consistent with all the facts. Your choice between Spinoza's rigid determinism and the idealistic system of freedom would depend on what kind of person you are.
The truth about the color of the chameleon is not any one of its colors, but that quality which enables it to vary.
The central trouble with pragmatism seems to be that when we choose our belief, it ceases to be our belief.
The logical error of pragmatism may be stated as a "false conversion" of "All true propositions work" into "All propositions that work are true." This is not permissible. From All crows are black birds, it does not follow that All black birds are crows. It only follows that No bird which is not black is a crow.
Or in the present case, No proposition which does not work is true. Thus a negative pragmatism is of use in detecting the presence of error.
There is one situation in which it would be permissible to convert the proposition. All equilateral triangles are equiangular and also All equiangular triangles are equilateral. This is because the classes named in the subject and the predicate coincide in extent.
Now if we could assume that the universe is entirely benevolent, as we understand benevolence, or entirely fit for our existence, the true beliefs would be at the same time life-promoting, comforting, etc., and the pragmatic test would be approximately valid.
The original belief in the fitness of the world could not be pragmatically established; for it must be used to establish pragmatism.
Ultimately pragmatism requires a nonpragmatic truth. It fails by its own test.
In science, a hypothesis is verified by finding out what facts would follow from it, and then looking to the facts to see whether they are as the hypothesis demands. The procedure is one of strict logical deduction and observation, from which the human equation is excluded as rigorously as possible.
Of course, our interest motivates the questions; but it does not determine the answers.
It is the part of science to tell us the worst as well as the best about the world.
It is probable that our interest in natural laws and the regular order of nature is due to the practical advantage of operating in a reliable environment. The assumption that there are laws and elements may have a practical motive. But this assumption does not control what we find: it does not exclude the irregularity which we may be obliged to admit. The significance of knowing the laws of nature lies in their indifference to our wishes.
The pragmatic element in Instrumentalism is its substitution of a plastic set of ideas to be verified for the stable truths of rationalism; its recognition that transition, change, invades the most permanent of our intellectual properties. We all all believe in the pervasiveness of change; and we all believe in experimentation. But the question is, How much? Is all that I believe true today to be false tomorrow; and shall I hold nothing as certain?
The idea of an experiment itself requires that something does not move, namely the conditions which make the experiment significant. The x which the mathematician uses in his equation must keep the same value throughout the problem--otherwise the operations become meaningless. The mind must remain the same and its question must mean the same when it ends as when it began; otherwise the experiment is irresponsible.
In religion generally pragmatism may seem to have its strongest claim, because of the difficulty of finding any other ground of belief. Here most of all a chosen belief ceases to be a belief.
Truth requires active effort, not passive waiting to be convinced. The surgeon, not knowing whether an operation will save a life, will never find out by "suspending judgment":he must adopt a working hypothesis and act on it.
Only, our decision does not make the truth true.
There is a great region of the world which is unfinished and plastic, where our action changes the facts. Treating a man as if he were an enemy may make him an enemy; treating him as a friend may make him a friend. Your will to believe it a success may decide the issue. Here pragmatism has its rightful field.
But for the rest, where the character of the universe is in question, we must always distinguish between our working hypotheses and our beliefs. Action cannot wait, and must seize on the best hypotheses available: the will to believe is a precept for the life of action, but not for thought. For thought has all of time in which to reach its results.
INTUITIONISM
Feeling as an organ of knowledge.
The agnostic, the pragmatist, and the intuitionist agree on one point: they distrust the capacity of the intellect to reach metaphysical truth.
Feeling is an ambiguous term. This ambiguity arises from the fact that intellect and will are developed from a more primitive type of mentality in which these two functions are not clearly separated. Feeling is a fit name for this mentality.
Both fear and anger may be based on fictitious or imaginary grounds....a man may be too wise to be angry, he may also be too stupid.
The same is true of melancholy, laughter, sympathy.
Laughter is highly cognitive: it is impossible unless there is a rapid concentration of knowledge, as in "seeing the point." Laughter engages one's entire view of the world; but to excite laughter this view must work instantaneously and unlaboriously.
Sympathy contains the true knowledge of the other's state of mind. The unsympathetic person is blind to some of the facts of the world. If intellect is "cold" it is not because it lacks emotional color: it is because it lacks truth. The cold or unfeeling individual is somewhere ignorant.
Why turn back to that primitive type of knowledge contained in feeling which man has in common with lower animals?
Intellect, as the capacity for analysis and invention, no doubt represents an advance. But feeling, as the total response to the total situation, may have its advantages which ought not to be lost in this advance.
We know that the instincts of animals--without indulging in any superstitious wonder about them--often show an extraordinary keenness in sensing the environment: their perceptions frequently surpass our own and leave us puzzled as to "how they know." Animals presumably have no theories; but in the feeling-knowledge which accompanies instinct there must be a prevailingly true sense of situations--otherwise the instinctive life would be unsuccessful.
Now each instinct, as food-getting, nest-building, migrating, is occupied not with the whole environment, but with some fraction of it.
May it be possible that this feeling, presumably very vague in the animal world, and
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