Pragmatism — Lecture 5: Pragmatism and Common Sense, part 1

Lecture V Pragmatism and Common Sense In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds.

We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real.

"How far am I verified?"

is the question which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here, so as good pragmatists we have to turn our face towards experience, towards 'facts.'

Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis is reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without exception as forming one single systematic fact.

But the knower in question may still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate; and over against the hypothesis of him in either form the counter-hypothesis that the widest field of knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some ignorance, may be legitimately held.

Some bits of information always may escape.

This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so absurd.

Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism, until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism, tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view.

It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula AND.

They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change.

This pluralistic view, of a world of ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration.

But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss.

It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so.

The very fact that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete at present and subject to addition.

In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does genuinely change and grow.

Some general remarks on the way in which our knowledge completes itself--when it does complete itself--will lead us very conveniently into our subject for this lecture, which is 'Common Sense.'

To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS.

The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always remains what it was.

Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is growing now.

Later, its growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously held to be true.

But such modifications are apt to be gradual.

To take the nearest possible example, consider these lectures of mine.

What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view.

But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass.

You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I suddenly to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing 'We won't go home till morning' in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently, and that might alter your opinion of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general bring about a rearrangement of a number of your ideas.

Your mind in such processes is strained, and sometimes painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience brings along.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread.

But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.

We patch and tinker more than we renew.

The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

Our past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW.

More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.

New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another.

And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times.

It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men's opinions.

The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged.

Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history.

Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found.

But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues.

When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end.

You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists--you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple.

You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.

My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS ARE DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN ABLE TO PRESERVE THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT TIME.

They form one great stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense.

Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded in displacing it.

Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if it might be final.

In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word.

In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought.

Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences.

It MIGHT be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.

If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical geometry.

The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined by Descartes by the relations of their points to adventitious co-ordinates, the result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling curves.

All our conceptions are what the Germans call denkmittel, means by which we handle facts by thinking them.

Experience merely as such doesn't come ticketed and labeled, we have first to discover what it is.

Kant speaks of it as being in its first intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits.

What we usually do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by which we 'keep tab' on the impressions that present themselves.

When each is referred to some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.'

This notion of parallel 'manifolds' with their elements standing reciprocally in 'one-to-one relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and logic as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions.

There are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense manifold is also such a system.

Find a one-to-one relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions.

But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.

The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of which the most important are these: Thing;

The same or different;

Kinds;

Minds;

Bodies;

One Time;

One Space;

Subjects and attributes;

Causal influences;

The fancied;

The real.

We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by themselves.

The word weather is a good one to use here.

In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third.

Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic.

In point of temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it MAY change three times a day.

But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC.

It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.

Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather.

They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones.

A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it.

It has 'gone out' for him, as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand, as the flame comes back when relit.

The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him.

It is the same with dogs.

Out of sight, out of mind, with them.

It is pretty evident that they have no GENERAL tendency to interpolate 'things.'

Let me quote here a passage from my colleague G. Santayana's book.

"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master arriving after long absence...

the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase--all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered.

Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm;

its story might be told in dithyrambic verse.

It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated.

Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life.

...

[But] the figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events.

...

In proportion as such understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest.

The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with resource.

No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond.

Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole."

[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59. ] Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line.

Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably.

The categories of 'thought' and 'things' are indispensable here--instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only 'thoughts.'

There is not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread.

That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men!

Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes.

But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are large.

It is the same with spaces.

On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am;

in reality I utterly fail to FEEL the facts which the map symbolizes.

The directions and distances are vague, confused and mixed.

Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show.

The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER.

Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances' and 'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used finally as a 'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject'--what a straightening of the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and sensible variety does this list of terms suggest!

And it is only the smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments.

Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.'

But even then if you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured throughout the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in that light.