Pragmatism eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 183 pages of information about Pragmatism.

Pragmatism eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 183 pages of information about Pragmatism.
In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicating of the single instance what is true of all its kind.  With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones.  The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say ‘the world is One.’  Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed.  ‘Beings,’ ‘thinkables,’ ‘experiences,’ would be candidates for this position.  Whether the alternatives expressed by such words have any pragmatic significance or not, is another question which I prefer to leave unsettled just now.

6.  Another specification of what the phrase ‘the world is One’ may mean is unity of purpose.  An enormous number of things in the world subserve a common purpose.  All the man-made systems, administrative, industrial, military, or what not, exist each for its controlling purpose.  Every living being pursues its own peculiar purposes.  They co-operate, according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached.  It is needless to say that the appearances conflict with such a view.  Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture, may have been purposed in advance, but none of the results we actually know in is world have in point of fact been purposed in advance in all their details.  Men and nations start with a vague notion of being rich, or great, or good.  Each step they make brings unforeseen chances into sight, and shuts out older vistas, and the specifications of the general purpose have to be daily changed.  What is reached in the end may be better or worse than what was proposed, but it is always more complex and different.

Our different purposes also are at war with each other.  Where one can’t crush the other out, they compromise; and the result is again different from what anyone distinctly proposed beforehand.  Vaguely and generally, much of what was purposed may be gained; but everything makes strongly for the view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying to get its unification better organized.

Whoever claims absolute teleological unity, saying that there is one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves, dogmatizes at his own risk.  Theologians who dogmalize thus find it more and more impossible, as our acquaintance with the warring interests of the world’s parts grows more concrete, to imagine what the one climacteric purpose may possibly be like.  We see indeed that certain evils minister to ulterior goods, that the bitter makes the cocktail better, and that a bit of danger or hardship puts us

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Pragmatism from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.