of the world from which it arises and to which it addresses itself. But when, on the other hand, the factors of knowledge, and in particular its environment, are regarded as the precipitate of knowledge itself - then knowledge is left suspended in mid-air. It must be conceived as somehow spinning out of itself the very auspices and surroundings which condition it and give it meaning. There arises the same contradiction that vitiates the Fichtean idealism. Activity must itself contrive the very foil and medium without which it cannot act. And if the arguments for the subjectivistic view are accepted as valid, there is no defence against the vicious paradoxes of relativism. Individual judgments conflict, your judgment and mine, my judgment of today and my judgment of to-morrow, the belief of one epoch, and the belief of another; and the objects of these judgments, now regarded as their creations, are implicated in this conflict. There is no court of appeal to arbitrate their destructive inconsistency. It is not that there is no fixed truth; there is no fixed fact or being, not even past events. For the subjectivistic pragmatist has destroyed the distinction on which pragmatism itself has repeatedly insisted, the distinction between truth and reality. There are, then, only two courses open to the subjectivistic pragmatist. If he is to retain his subjectivism he must imitate the example of idealism, and accept a cosmic or absolute knower. For if reality is to repose in knowledge, there must be a knowledge which gives shape and outline to the world. The voluntaristic idealist is on subjectivistic grounds correct in charging pragmatism with relativism; and his offer of "absolute pragmatism"1 as a harbor of refuge is both pertinent and opportune. Thus if pragmatism is to avoid absolutism, and remain within empirical and naturalistic limits, it must adopt the realistic alternative, as James has so successfully done. 1 Royce: William James, and other Essays, p. 254; cf. also "The Eternal and the Practical," Phil. Review, Vol. XIII, 1904. And the pragmatist theory of knowledge cannot be less illuminating and important for being merely a theory of knowledge. To it will still belong the credit for an original and sound analysis of the process of reflective thought — for a scrupulously empirical account of 'ideas,' of 'meaning,' and of 'truth' as a specific and characteristic form of human success. the Issue CHAPTER X IMMEDIATISM VERSUS INTELLECTUALISM 1 § 1. THE pragmatist theory of knowledge, in the limited sense, is an analysis and description of the concrete process Definition of of intellection or reflective thought. It is an account of mediate knowledge, or knowledge about of that knowledge in which ideas of things are entertained, believed, or verified. Pragmatism finds intellection to be essentially a practical process, or operation. But in the course of his exposition, the pragmatist is perpetually attacking what he calls 'intellectualism;' by which he means the uncritical use of the intellect. The pragmatist describes the intellect, and because he understands it, he can discount it; the "intellectualist," on the other hand, reposes a blind confidence in it. The pragmatist sees around the intellect, and construes reality in terms of its process and circumstances; while the horizon of the intellectualist is bounded by the intellect, and he can only use it and construe reality in terms of the results. Whereas the pragmatist vitalizes the intellect, his opponent intellectualizes life. It is the old issue between the intellectualistic and voluntaristic views of the soul, revived in a new form; and it appears at first as though it were merely a question as to which of two parties shall have the last word. The intellectualist asserts that the will is a case of knowledge; it is what you know it to be; it must be identified with your idea or definition of it. The voluntarist or pragmatist, on the other hand, protests that knowing the having of ideas or the framing of definitions, is a case of willing. And we seem to be launched upon an infinite series of rejoinders. 1 Portions of this and the following chapter are reprinted from "Notes on the Philosophy of Bergson," Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Scientific Methods, Vol. VIII, 1911, Nos. 26, 27. But such is not necessarily the case. For it is entirely possible to regard both parties as correct. Suppose it to be admitted that knowing is a kind of willing. What, then, is willing? Is there any contradiction in supposing that one can know; in supposing that one can will to know what willing is? Bergson evidently believes that there is. He argues that the intellect, because it is a special form of life, cannot know the whole of life. "Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself?" But why not? Unless we are to assume that to know and to be known are the same thing, there is not the slightest difficulty in supposing that a part can know the whole. Assuming intellection to be a special act, there is no difficulty in supposing that it addresses itself in turn to the collateral parts of life; and in supposing that the act itself is known through the mutual knowledge of several intellects. Furthermore, it is absurd to describe knowing as willing unless one does know what willing is. The purely dialectical question turns out, like most such questions, to be a quibble. The real question is this: is there a special variety of knowledge, namely mediate or reflective knowledge, the nature of which as a process can be apprehended only by another more general variety of knowledge, namely immediate knowledge? In these terms it is possible to distinguish two theoretical opponents and adjudicate their quarrel. The pragmatist, on the one hand, finds that reflective thought needs to be supplemented by some variety of non-reflective experience. Reflective thought, for example, implies sensible facts, which are simply sensed, and no more. Or, reflective thought itself is a process, which as such is directly felt. Again, certain things, such as time, cannot in their native character be 1 Bergson: Creative Evolution, trans. by A. Mitchell, p. x; cf. p. 49. Cf. below, pp. 255, 295-296. grasped by thought at all, but must be apprehended by instinct. The intellectualist, on the other hand, insists that all things must be identified with what we know of them, and that there is but one way to know, namely, by reflective thought. In short, the real support of the pragmatist polemic against intellectualism is insistence on a non-intellectual variety of knowledge, which is more fundamental and more comprehensive than intellection; which affords, as James expresses it, real "insight" as distinguished from the superficiality and abstraction of intellection.1 Non-intellec represen § 2. Pragmatists offer different versions of this non-intellectual or non-reflective experience. With Bergson it is "the fringe of vague intuition that surrounds tual Experience, our distinct - that is, intellectual or Immediacy tation." If he hesitates to call it knowledge, it is only because it has more rather than less of cognitive value than knowledge in the usual sense. "The feeling we have of our evolution and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is there, forming around the intellectual concept properly so-called an indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness." And intellectualism forgets "that this nucleus has been formed out of the rest by condensation, and that the whole must be used, the fluid as well as and more than the condensed, in order to grasp the inner movement of life. Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds. For it is its presence that enables us to affirm that the nucleus is a nucleus, that pure intellect is a contraction, by condensation, of a more extensive power."2 In short, intellectual knowledge is surrounded and corrected by intuitive or immediate knowledge. The former is defined and assigned limits by the evidence of the latter. James alone of pragmatist writers is always willing to refer to the non-intellectual experience as a species of knowledge. As he expresses it in his exposition of Bergson, there is 1 Pluralistic Universe, p. 246. 1 Op. cit., pp. 49, 46 (italics mine). |