The present article, second in a series, will be followed by an analysis of the contributions of John Dewey to American pragmatic thought. The first article, on Charles Sanders Peirce, appeared in our August issue.

In the opening chapter of his Pragmatism, William James characterizes his own version of the gospel of pragmatism as a “mediating” philosophy whose principal aim is to reconcile the two temperamental extremes of “tough-mindedness” and “tender-mindedness,” the clash of which he regards as the fundamental theme of the whole contrapuntal history of philosophy. So far as aspirations go the characterization is correct. In fact, the more one reads James, pondering the strange inconsistencies and apparent reversals in his thought, the more one realizes that this aspiration answers to the profoundest need in James’s own soul. For in no modern philosopher is the oscillation between the tough-and tender-minded syndromes more pronounced and more unbearable. And in none was there a more urgent demand to overcome the temperamental limitations which God, or nature, had imposed upon him. Carlyle says somewhere that manhood begins when one makes a truce with necessity. If this means, among other things, taking one’s own nature or temperament to be something unalterable, James would have regarded any such truce, not as a kind of stoic victory, but as a sign of defeat, an abandonment of the whole enterprise of self-determination and self-transcendence which alone justifies the arduous act of philosophical reflection. “Know thyself!” said the Oracle. But why? Unless one is a masochist, what is the point of self-knowledge if one can do nothing about the self one seeks to know? Knowledge of the self, for the pragmatist, matters only in so far as it enables one to know what one is up against in one’s struggle to become what one ought to be; in a sense, it is simply to know the resources of the enemy. But if the enemy—one’s nature or temperament—is unbeatable, or if one really believed there were no chance of beating it, the effort toward self-knowledge would hardly be worth the candle.

However, aspirations are one thing, their fulfillment another. In James’s case, despite his best efforts to check it, the permanent temperamental undertow is always in the direction of tough-mindedness, just as in the case of his life-long friend and quotidian ally, Charles Peirce, it was always in the direction of tender-mindedness. And it is this fact which is responsible in my opinion for the different stresses in their respective versions of the pragmatic gospel.

Initially, I realize, such a conception of the differences between Peirce and James seems paradoxical. For Peirce of course is pragmatism’s great exponent of the hard-headed gospel of experimental science, for whom indeed philosophy itself is either a science or it is nothing; whereas James is notoriously pragmatism’s great exponent of the (from Peirce’s point of view) softheaded doctrine of the will to believe, its sentimental lover of lost souls over whose sacrifice to the general welfare any sensible utilitarian would shed, at most, a single tear, and its perverse defender of outlandish unscientific over-beliefs, the toleration of which hard-headed exponents of scientific pragmatism must regard as an intolerable abuse of the pragmatic ethics of belief.

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Nonetheless, it is well to remind ourselves that the hardest heads do not always contain the toughest minds. And when we review the list of attitudes James himself associated with tender-mindedness, it can scarcely be denied that they fit Peirce almost to a t; for temperamentally Peirce was unquestionably “rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic and dogmatical.” Nor can it be doubted that, despite himself, James remained overwhelmingly “empiricist (going by ‘facts’), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and sceptical.” Peirce’s great problem as a pragmatist was to face facts without excuses and without inventing more and more ingenious theories simply to save appearances; James’s problem, on the contrary, was to bring himself to the point of acknowledging that anything but particular facts—principles, for example,—are fully real. For Peirce, whose mind ran to “general runs,” the task was always to keep his undoubted speculative genius from running riot; in fact Peirce is the Plato and Hegel of pragmatism rolled into one. For James the task was to convince himself of the point of any speculations that run an inch beyond “the blooming, buzzing confusion” of immediate experience; and he, correspondingly, is pragmatism’s Hume, even, at times, its Sextus Empiricus. Peirce’s respect for practice and his interest in “practical bearings,” as he was at pains to point out in self-defense against critics who mistook him for James, was always theoretical: what he craved to know were not the actual, possibly accidental, effects of holding a certain belief, but rather the hypothetical consequences which would follow if certain standard operations were performed under certain standard conditions. What a belief or an ideal does to or for me is no concern of Peirce’s pragmatism.

Although James somewhat grudgingly respected the virtues of what he called the “theoretic” sentiment of rationality, they were virtues in his book only to the extent that they serve to simplify and hence to “ease” those processes of action of which our deliberations and calculations are but the preliminary, leading parts. As he wrote in reply to a letter of Peirce’s criticizing his book, The Pluralistic Universe—“. . . though I was conceived and born in philosophic sin. . . I expressly do believe with you that in the universe of possibles, of merely mental truth, as Locke calls it, relations are exact. Time that equabiliter fluit is a conceptual entity, against which your time felt as tedious and mine felt as flashing by, can be artificially plotted out and equated, to the great convenience of human practice; and all their exact relations form a splendid artificial scheme of tabulation, on which to catch whatever elements of the existential flux can be made to stick there.” (Italics in text.)

Despite such statements it is evident that for James conceptual entities are, at best, conveniences, to be acknowledged as real only for the work they do. His heart, if not his mind, was preoccupied with the “existential flux” itself. Accordingly, what he wanted to know about any idea is not what it would come to if certain ideal conditions prevailed, but what it does come to, here and now, in the raw. And it is precisely for this reason that, unlike Peirce, James draws no very fine line between the usage and our uses of words, or between the objective, public, common meanings of expressions and the subjective and private images, feelings, and actions that are associated with them in particular contexts by particular individuals. Unlike Peirce, whose recipes for making our ideas clear were intended as definitive principles of translation for restating the exact scientific meaning of expressions, the informalist James contented himself with improvised suggestions which cannot possibly be taken as formulas for extracting the meanings of expressions. In this sense, James was profoundly uninterested, if indeed he believed at all, in meanings. What concerned him was the significance of an utterance for the likes of William James. In a language which merely apes his own, we may say that what James cared for temperamentally was not an intellectual credit on which he could draw when, as, and if the situation required it, but cash in hand for buying the perishable goods that are presently available and immediately required. For William James, in short, it was hard not to believe that every moment is the end of the world.

Of all the attitudes that compose the syndrome of James’s tough-mindedness only that of fatalism seems at first sight quite foreign to him. Yet for all his passionate advocacy of indeterminism and his moral conviction that a man can—since he ought to—reform his character by self-determined acts of will, there remains everywhere in his underlying view both of human personality and of the human predicament itself a strongly fatalistic element. Consider for example his anti-intellectualistic view, which reminds one so strangely of the German idealist Fichte, that all philosophies, even the most sober-sided, are at bottom expressions of temperamental affinities and dis-affinites. Consider also his almost cynical view, so curious in a pragmatist who stresses the utility of reason, that the whole function of reason in philosophy is that of post-factum rationalization:

I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticisms of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretensions to be “objectively” convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions, or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our convictions, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and signifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.

But this is not all. The reader will doubtless recall that other distinction between temperaments which he made famous in The Varieties of Religious Experience, between the “healthy-minded” and the sick-souled.” If so he will probably remember that, according to James, the healthy-minded possess “a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe.” The description is a giveaway. To be sure, James believed in the possibility of ameliorating the human condition by dedicated work, sacrifice, and the arts of civilization. But his sense of the irremovable absurdity of existence and his almost pathological preoccupation with the de facto diversities embodied in “the existential flux” represent attitudes that radically constrict the area within which his own healthy-minded, self-determining meliorism and voluntarism could operate. “We are all,” he said, “potentially . . . sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.”

James’s great biographer, Ralph Barton Perry, hit the nail precisely on the head when he said that James “was not credulous, but suffered from incredulity. He was deeply concerned with the need of belief and the right to believe, but made no considerable use of that right.” (Italics in text.) Incredulity is operative in every nook and cranny of James’s thought. It lies at the root of his nominalism and sensationalism. It is responsible for his insistence that our basic knowledge does not consist in scientific descriptions of “general runs,” but in direct “acquaintance.” It is what makes him suspicious of all philosophies which like Spinoza’s treat the confusion of actual experience as modes of a rationally cognized unitary substance or which like Hegel’s represent it as a series of “moments” in the Absolute’s unseen dialectical march through history. It is what makes him skeptical both of the reality of all institutions and the absoluteness of all so-called objective methods and practices. It makes him leery of all ideologies and ideologues. Probably it is also partly responsible for the fact that, for all his protestant non-conformism, there is little trace in the corpus of his writings of the revolutionary social thought—or faith—which has swept the world with ever-increasing fury since the end of the 18th century.

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II

What distinguishes James, however, is not so much his tough-mindedness, which, as he well knew, must lead in its extreme form to the silence beyond nihilism, but the fact that it was never for him the primary philosophical virtue. There are philosophers such as Bertrand Russell for whom disbelief is a great spiritual achievement, the primary evidence of intellectual maturity and freedom of mind. But Russell is perhaps the last of the great Victorian liberals and hence, for all his empiricism, fundamentally tender-minded. Not so William James. To him, skepticism and the attitudes attendant thereto came as easily as boredom, and James, whose temperament was also promethean and moralistic, was suspicious of things that came too easily.

There is, in fact, something distinctly Kantian about James’s principled distrust of inclination, of “doing what comes naturally.” And it is precisely this Kantian belief that what is right or obligatory always cuts against the grain of inclination which, together with his equally Kantian sense of loyalty to the right as he conceived it, provide the unifying clues to so many otherwise paradoxical aspects of James’s thought and character. For example, he became a doctor and a scientist almost in spite of himself. He was repelled by academicians, their institutions, and their works; yet he became a Harvard professor and did his professorial chores punctually and well. An artist by instinct, he was instantly infatuated by Italy; ergo he was suspicious both of Italy and his infatuation; either he or Italy or both must be slightly unwholesome. Switzerland on the contrary might be “insipid” but it was wholesomeness incarnate; hence “Switzerland is good! Good people!” More than one critic, including his brother Henry, has remarked upon the strange fact that the cultivated, cosmopolitan, artistic James could be so tendentiously moralistic in his judgments of the arts; at times indeed it is as though James, who really knew how to look at a picture or to read a page, believed in philistinism as a way of life. But the paradox disappears when we realize that he associated the aesthetic, in its pure or classical sense, with the sensuous, and the love of the sensuous, to which he was himself prone, with decadence and frivolity.

The same pervasive moralism underlies his attitudes toward religion. James was naturally prone to irreligion, and for all his brave talk about the will to believe, he could never bring himself to assent to any traditional religious creed. But just because of this he made it his business, almost his life work, to study religion, especially in its abnormal or pathological forms, to defend it—as some think—well beyond the bounds of reason. Despite all the attendant ills that have accrued to mankind from institutional religion, there remained for James one overwhelmingly important positive fact about religion, namely, its power to give unity and purpose to human life and energy to the moral will. And, of course, it is precisely unity and steadiness of purpose which the ambivalent, restless James so conspicuously lacked and so deeply craved. He thus believed in religion on moral grounds.

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In fact what distinguishes James as a philosopher is his tendency to view all questions of belief in essentially ethical terms. And this, I am convinced, is the primary reason why he came to identify truth as a species of good, as the good, or best, within the domain of belief. To love the truth—and for all his anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism, James did profoundly love the truth—was thus for him simply to commit oneself with all one’s mind and heart to whatever ought to be believed. But one cannot sincerely love the truth (that which ought to be believed) if one will make no effort in its behalf. The true skeptic does not love the truth; what he loves, on the contrary, is the spotlessness of his own incredulity. Or, since his basic motivation is fear rather than love, his paralyzing fear is of going wrong. This did not mean for James that one should believe indiscriminately any more than it means that one should act indiscriminately (for the pragmatist, we should bear in mind, all sincere belief is incipient action and reveals itself only in action). It meant only that if one is really afraid that nothing finally is worth believing, one is bound also to question whether the love of truth itself may not be illusory and whether those who seek it are not tender-minded dupes. Such an attitude, when it becomes pervasive, subverts science as well as religion and philosophy. More important, from James’s point of view, it undermines the conviction underlying all three that something matters and hence that there is some good in behalf of which an effort is worth taking, however unsure may be its outcome.

James once wrote a piece addressed to the question “What Makes a Life Significant?”—a question I may add which most analytical philosophers in our time would probably regard as improper if not meaningless. And his answer, characteristically, was not peace of mind, happiness, or the realization of one’s whole nature either as an individual or as a man; rather was it courageous, usually sacrificial action, the acceptance of risk in a great cause, going against the tide of mood or feeling or temperament for the sake of an admittedly uncertain good. But here most of James’s commentators seem to me to have missed the point. James’s activism, if that is the right term, is not merely an expression of the gambler’s mania or the passion of the auto-racer or mountain-climber who takes delight in risking his life against heavy odds. There is that element in James’s nature, no doubt. More deeply, however, his activism represents a point of view characteristic neither of the tough-minded nor of the tender-minded but rather of the pragmatic moralist who, regardless of the thrills involved in taking risks, judges that he ought to make a choice against the slow death of the tough-minded in behalf of an uncertain but conceivably more abundant life.

This choice, I contend, remained the continuing moral problem of James’s life. Perhaps he did not fully understand or appreciate the reflective choice of one who deliberately turns to the wall of unbelief. But just because it is a deliberate choice, it is wholly to be distinguished from the temperamental drift toward pessimism, fatalism, skepticism, and irreligion that afflicted James. In this latter sense, tough-minded-ness is in fact hardly a philosophy at all, but only a kind of fate or destiny. As such, it does not represent an action or movement of the mind but only one of the myriad ways of letting one’s mind go. And since this was his fate, James was obliged to resist it, and hence to move in the direction of tender-mindedness. He had to will, or choose, to believe, but this meant that he had first to assert the right to believe.

It is useful in this connection to compare James with Kierkegaard. In his interesting book, The Romantic Enlightenment, Professor Geoffrey Clive tells us how “this lucid empiricist [James] (steeped in Hume) came to embrace an idea akin to the Kierkegaard-ian ‘leap.’” James’s lucidity may be questioned, but there is no doubt of the aptness of the comparison. There is, nonetheless, a radical difference: for Kierkegaard the leap of religious faith involves a suspension of the ethical and hence also a suspension of the terms or conditions which the ethical places upon our beliefs and actions; for James, on the other hand, the primary leap—the assertion of the right to believe—is, in effect, a leap from the plane of inclination and fate to that of morality and freedom. But the freedom of the moralist is no more unconditioned in the domain of belief than in that of action. Once the right to believe is asserted, there immediately arises the corresponding question whether one’s exercise of that right is ethical, i.e., whether what one wants to believe is really worthy of belief. In effect, morality gives us a title to believe in advance of experience, but only on the supposition that experience will bear us out. This holds no less in the sphere of religion than in that of science. But it is precisely this which the tender-minded philosophers and divines who claim James as an ally always forget. As for Socrates, so for James, the possession of truth is a rare spiritual achievement, not an assured point of departure. We must hope for knowledge, else the will to believe is senseless and the ethics of belief is a fraud. But to claim that a proposition is true is always to render oneself liable to the chance that a presumed achievement, when further scrutinized, may turn out to be a monstrous failure.

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III

For the pragmatic and hence moralistic James, all problems are then, in one way or another, problems of conduct or right action. And this holds also for problems of belief. But James was essentially a philosopher rather than a scientist. Thus he could not, without begging his own philosophical questions, settle his problems of belief by automatic appeal to or application of received methods of verification that are appropriate to the determination of right belief within the limited domain of positive science. Among other things, he was obliged to ask limiting questions about the range of scientific principles of verification. He was obliged also to raise questions about the procedures, if any, for determining what ought to be believed in spheres which may lie beyond that range, particularly those such as morality, religion, and philosophy itself. But because he was a deep philosopher, he realized that he could not settle these questions until he had a satisfactory conception of the nature of truth itself.

What is truth? Plainly this question was for James the most exigent of all philosophical questions, upon the answer to which turns the whole fate of pragmatism as a mediating philosophy. At first glance, James’s own answers seem forthright enough, perhaps too forthright. He does not mince or hedge; he tells us in so many words that “the ‘true’ is only the expedient in the way of our thinking . . . in the long run and on the whole of course”—as though the qualifying “in the long run and on the whole” could take the curse off that dreadful “expedient”; or again, “. . . ideas . . . become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience”; or, worst of all, “an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.” In short, true beliefs are those that work, that aid us in the conduct of our affairs.

Virtually all of James’s critics take this to be the substance of his pragmatic answer to the question “What do the adjectives ‘true’ and ‘false’ mean?”¹ If they are correct, and certainly James gives us plenty of encouragement to think that they are so, then it must be said once for all that although the pragmatic theory of truth may be a very original theory, it is also a very great howler. Many arguments have been offered in criticism, most of them irrelevant. For present purposes two will suffice. For example, granted that the fond belief that a recession will not occur during Mr. Kennedy’s administration is useful, at least to Mr. Kennedy and his fellow neo-pragmatists, it is nonetheless plain that such a belief may prove false. And if it may prove false then clearly “true” and “useful” must have different meanings. Or again, consider the hypothesis that it is useful in the long run and on the whole to believe that a recession will not occur during Mr. Kennedy’s administration. Is this hypothesis true? Suppose it to be true. According to the theory in question, this is merely to say that the hypothesis that it is useful to believe that a recession will not occur during Mr. Kennedy’s administration is itself useful. But plainly that is not what we wanted to say when we supposed the hypothesis to be true. In short, as we say, the truth of a belief, its correspondence to fact, means one thing; the utility of the belief means something else altogether. Were this not so we could never seriously raise the sensible question whether it is true that acceptance of a certain statement really is useful.

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Now the odd thing about all this is that James himself seems perfectly aware of this criticism. He admits ungrudgingly and unequivocally that a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts. For him only one nagging question remains: What is it to assert that a proposition corresponds to the facts? Once this question is raised we see immediately that if the utility theory of truth is plainly false, the correspondence theory is plainly vacuous. To tell us that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts is to tell us virtually nothing; it is like telling us that an action is right if its performance is on the whole desirable. The correspondence theory is unexceptionable, but it tells us nothing that we did not already know. What is the “correspondence” relation that holds between a true statement and the facts of which it is true? And what, pray, is a “fact”? At this point, the irresistible impulse is to reply resoundingly that a fact is simply anything a true statement (or belief) is true of, and that a statement corresponds to the facts in question when and only when it is in fact true. In short, the correspondence theory is either obviously circular or else it involves us in the fallacy, or difficulty, which the medievals called obscurum per obscurius.

This diversion is, unfortunately, of no immediate help to James. For if the correspondence theory is vacuous or hopelessly obscure, the utility theory, as we have just seen, is plainly absurd. But stay a bit. Consider how closely analogous is our argument against the utility theory of truth to the so-called “open-question” argument against the utility theory of right action. That is to say, just as we can always properly and significantly ask of any action whose effects are useful, “But, after all, is it really right?” so we can always significantly ask of any proposition which we find it convenient to believe, “But, after all, is it really true?” Consider also that the very point of this analogy seems to be established in advance, when we recall James’s claim that truth itself is a species of good, that species, namely, which has to do with matters of belief. Finally, we may observe that Pragmatism, whose subtitle is “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” is itself dedicated “to the memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today.”

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Now in his Logic, Mill explicitly states that the principle of utility is only a rule of conduct which tells us, not what “right action” means, but rather by what standards or on what grounds, in his judgment, we should judge actions to be right. Is it not plausible that James, who dedicated Pragmatism to Mill, had read his master, and that he understood as well as Mill that the principle of utility, far from being intended as an explication of the meaning of the phrase “right action” was intended only as a definition of the principle or standard by which right actions are to be judged? If so, then I think we are entitled to suppose that when James proposes that beliefs should be judged as true or false in terms of their consequences he, like Mill, intends only to propose a general standard for the verification of beliefs, not an explication of what “true” means. On the contrary, if I am right, James’s real theory of the meaning of “true” and of “false” is to be found precisely in the contention that “true” is a species of “good,” that a true belief is one which it is right to believe, and that the truth is nothing but what we ought to believe.

In other words, “true” and “false,” like “good” and “right,” are normative terms, and statements containing them are, accordingly, normative or prescriptive. This thesis I shall henceforth call the pragmatic theory concerning the meaning or use of the concept of truth in order to distinguish it from James’s own utilitarian or consequentialist approach to the problem of standards or methods of verification, which I shall discuss shortly. To my mind, the pragmatic theory of the meaning of “truth,” so far from being a howler, is a deep source of philosophical understanding, including in particular an understanding of philosophy’s own role in our cultural life. It explains, as “realist” interpretations of the correspondence theory do not, how questions about the truth of propositions necessarily give rise in practice to questions about the Tightness or justifiability of our belief in them. In a word, it explains, with admirable succinctness and clarity, why truth matters ethically and why the concern for truth is not just a matter of taste, like the passion for artichokes or well-trimmed lawns. It also helps us to see for the first time why the correspondence theory has proved at once so misleading and frustrating. The correspondence theory, as traditionally understood, disposes us to think of truth as a “real quality,” analogous to yellow, or as a “real relation,” like spatial contiguity, whose presence we will discern if only we look sharply and in just the right place. But where, pray, is that? Somewhere, no doubt, “between” the proposition and its “object.” But this, as it turns out, covers a vast amount of territory in which philosophers as acute as Bertrand Russell have wandered despairingly. Proponents of the correspondence theory have never been able to agree among themselves as to the location of truth. Nor, if James is right, are they ever likely to, since the term “true,” which is normally used only in prescribing what we ought to believe, is not the name, or sign, of any quality or relation at all. For this very reason, however, the correspondence theory, like the Cartesian doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, has been a primary breeder of that factitious skepticism against which Charles Peirce inveighed.

Still more important is the light which the pragmatic theory sheds upon the nature and significance of philosophical disputes about tests of truth or methods of verification, including James’s own test of utility. Problems of truth, according to the pragmatic theory, are at bottom problems of conduct, problems, in this instance, about what is to be believed and on what grounds. If so, then philosophical disputes about methods of verification must be understood at bottom as normative disputes about the controlling principles by which individuals or groups are to conduct themselves in settling questions of belief. Consider, for example, the positivistic thesis that there are two and only two basic forms of truth: logical or “analytic” truths, which are determinable exclusively by an appeal to “rules” of logic and of language; and empirical or “synthetic” truths whose verification requires, in addition, the test of observation. What is the status of this thesis? It is not certainly an hypothesis which can be tested, directly or indirectly, by observation; it is not, in short, a scientific theory like the law of gravitation. Nor is it one of the “analytic” truths of logic and language. It is, in short, a normative principle whose whole importance is owing to the fact that it implies that there can be no sensible questions about what ought to be believed where purely logical and scientific methods of verification are inapplicable. In effect, positivism leaves us without a basis for distinguishing between right and wrong beliefs anywhere outside of logic, mathematics, and positive science, and in so doing leaves us, when we move beyond these disciplines, completely at the mercy of our inclinations or temperaments.

From a pragmatic point of view, it is not hard to understand why positivism should be anathema to the Catholic Church. For positivism not merely denies the authority of the church as an arbiter of truth in the spheres of faith and morals; it denies that any questions of truth can even arise in these domains and hence that expressions of religious or moral “belief” have any cognitive meaning whatever. By the same token, however, it is also understandable why non-Catholics, including also most non-positivists, cannot, in conscience, remain silent “for the sake of peace” in the face of the Church’s pretensions as the ultimate arbiter of truth in matters of faith and morals. For to do so is, in practice, not just to extend to individual Catholics an equal right to believe in these spheres, but also in effect to condone the right of any institution to claim absolute, indefeasible authority over any range of human thought and action.

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IV

As a follower of John Stuart Mill, James is as much opposed to the dogmatism of positivism in the domain of “theoretic” truth as he is to the dogmatism of Catholicism in the more obviously practical domains of religious and moral truth. Both are equally inconsistent with that openness toward experience which, for James, is perhaps the cardinal spiritual virtue. And like all hard-headed forms of tender-mindedness, both are unable to do justice to the irreducible diversities of intellectual aspiration and moral concern. As Mill regarded the principle of utility as a charter of liberality in the judgment of actions, so James regarded its analogue as a charter of liberality in the judgment of beliefs. But in neither form is liberality—which Aristotle significantly called “greatness of mind”—to be construed as a covering rule for the justification of those who confuse liberty with license in any sphere of conduct. On the contrary, the gospel of utility, for those who follow it conscientiously, is a hard taskmaster indeed. It requires that we consider all the tougher facts which tender-minded dogmatists, whether in the domain of science or in that of religion, prefer not to acknowledge. Above all, it demands that we not settle into the familiar grooves of our dogmatic methods of verification in any sphere of inquiry until we have examined carefully all the relevant consequences of doing so.

Of course the operative term in the preceding sentence is “relevant.” Granted that we are to consider consequences in deciding what we ought to believe, the question remains, “what consequences, and for whom?” Sometimes James exposed himself to the charge that in every domain of inquiry all consequences are of equal relevance, which is manifestly absurd. In judging what we ought to believe in the domain of experimental science, it is irrelevant to consider the bearings of our beliefs upon our creature comforts or upon the prosperity of our political alliances. Sometimes also, in an anarchical mood, James was disposed to the view that each individual is free to judge the truth of any belief in terms of consequences that are satisfactory to himself alone. “What,” said Peirce, in a letter of rebuke, “is utility, if it is confined to a single person? Truth is public.” Now I think that James always remained, in some sense, an individualist who was prepared to think that there are some truths, especially truths about matters of ultimate religious and moral concern, which cannot be adequately assessed by public methods of verification. I think also that he believed that each person is finally beholden only to his own conscience in his philosophical judgment about the methods of verification binding upon him in any sphere of activity. Yet I am also convinced, after trying to piece together James’s various and often inconsistent remarks, that he did not seriously mean to suggest that the principle of utility can be directly applied as a test of truth to such statements as “Boston is the largest town in New England” or “Two plus two equals four.” On the contrary, the principle of utility is nothing more than a general principle of orientation which bids us, within any domain of inquiry, to consider all of the relevant practical bearings of our ideas. What is relevant, however, the principle of utility itself cannot decide. That will depend entirely upon the kind of belief that we are considering.

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Nor, as I read him, did James intend to discount the fact that although each individual is finally responsible, intellectually and morally, only to himself, he is also, in practice, a social being, invested with commitments to impersonal codes of conduct which he cannot conscientiously reject. As a logician, and every man whether he likes it or not is one, each individual is beholden to the “theoretic” demand to be consistent in his thinking in any sphere. No doubt the laws of logic have their roots only in “the sentiment of rationality.” Yet this sentiment, which imposes upon us all a stem principle of coherence and simplicity in deciding in any domain what is worthy to be believed, is not peculiar to mathematical logicians or rationalistic philosophers. In some measure it provides the consequential test of logical truth for every man. Similarly, all men are subject in practice to the correlative principle which demands that we acknowledge the irreducible diversities, discontinuities, and pluralities which our experience finally discloses. This is the principle which requires that we reject the Parmenidean philosophy which holds that everything, finally, is the same or a mode of the same. The consequential test of predictability in empirical science is an acknowledgement of this principle within the domain of perception. For if everything were the same, prediction would be pointless and observation an act of supererogation. But, as James perceived, there are also other applications of the principle in morals, in metaphysics, and in religion.

Questions of relevance, and hence questions of relevant consequences, depend ultimately upon our intentions in making any assertion. Where our intentions are concerned with matters of logic, our test of truth should be simplicity and consistency. Where they are concerned with the prediction of phenomena, our test should be consequent perception. But what if our intention, however blurred or confused by rationalistic philosophers and theologians, is not primarily concerned with questions of simplicity or predictability? What, in short, if our concern is with the beautiful or with the divine? Here, to be sure, the tests of simplicity and predictability should prevail to the extent that we cannot decide what is beautiful or divine without knowing what is “theoretically” true. But if, as James believes, divinity. and beauty are something more than the simple and the predictable, something more also will be required to test the truth of aesthetic and religious beliefs.

Despite the positivists we have no more right to believe what we will—in fact we have far less right—in the religious domain than we have to believe what we will in the domains of logic or positive science. For the tough-minded James, religion imposes a far heavier burden of verification than these other more limited forms of inquiry. For science and logic have to answer only to our demands for simplicity, consistency, and predictability. Religious faith must answer to and for our total sense of existence, including our awareness of incoherence, of diversity, of change, of frustration and loss, in short, to our whole sense of the absurd and the evil in our lives. One “lost soul,” one lost fact, one final incoherence anywhere can be the death of God.

It is quite literally true, as James contended, that “faith creates its own verification.” It is quite literally true, as he says; “Believe and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself.” William James tenderly believed in the belief in God. He could not, in conscience, believe in God. That was his tragedy. Perhaps it was also his fate. But if James could not believe in God, how then can you or I?

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¹ A partial exception is my colleague Morton White, to whose studies of the pragmatists this essay, in particular, owes much.