We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else but three human witnesses and their critic. One witness names the stars “Great Bear”; one calls them “Charles’s Wain”; one calls them the “Dipper.” Which human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material? If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in “turning-down” the American witness.
Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume, he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe’s total value. “Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins” is a phrase used by Professor Eucken somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotze.
It is identically our pragmatistic conception. In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it.
No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers. To some of us it proves a most inspiring notion. Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man’s divinely-creative functions.
The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.
We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it. It is accused of being a doctrine of caprice. Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he understood his own doctrine, would have to “hold any end however perverted to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea however mad to be the truth if only someone is resolved that he will have it so.” The humanist view of “reality,” as something resisting, yet malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy that must be taken “account” of incessantly (though not necessarily merely copied) is evidently a difficult one to introduce to novices. The situation reminds me of one that I have personally gone through. I once wrote an essay on our right to believe, which I unluckily called “The Will to Believe.” All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The “will to deceive,” the “will to make-believe,” were wittily proposed as substitutes for it.
The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism, in the shape in which we now have it before us, is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself.
On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work.
On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or edition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way.
So the rival metaphysical hypotheses of pluralism and monism here come back upon us. I will develop their differences during the remainder of our hour.
And first let me say that it is impossible not to see a temperamental difference at work in the choice of sides. The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative complexion: the phrase “must be” is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn’t mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.
Now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalists in much the same way as “freedom of the press” might affect a veteran official in the Russian bureau of censorship; or as “simplified spelling” might affect an elderly schoolmistress. It affects him as the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker. It appears as backboneless and devoid of principle as “opportunism” in politics appears to an old-fashioned french legitimist, or to a fanatical believer in the divine right of the people.
For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All “homes” are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies.
To rationalists this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in
