实用主义:一些旧思想方法的新名称(外研社双语读库)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)


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作者:[美] 威廉·詹姆斯(William James)

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实用主义:一些旧思想方法的新名称(外研社双语读库)

实用主义:一些旧思想方法的新名称(外研社双语读库)试读:

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外研社自创立之日起就一贯秉承“记载人类文明,沟通世界文化”的宗旨。上世纪90年代以来,我们陆续出版了“九十年代英语系列丛书”、“大师经典文库”、“英美文学文库”等系列经典图书,在最大限度满足国内英语学习者阅读需求的同时,也为中华民族引进和吸收海外优秀文化发挥了重要的桥梁纽带作用。

在多年出版实践中我们发现,对原版图书简单地以外语形式呈现,会使一些初级和中级外语学习者望而却步;而纯粹的译著,在翻译过程中又容易失掉原著中的某些精妙之笔,甚至丢失信息,因为每种语言都蕴含着其他语言无法精确对应的情致、智慧和对真善美的洞见。文化交流本身是一个双向互动的过程,因此在大量引入外文作品的同时,我们也不能忽略本民族文化在世界范围内的推广和传播,即把中国文化传递给世界。

基于上述考虑,我们应时推出“外研社双语读库”,立足经典,涵盖中外名家名作,涉及社会科学各个领域,以书系划分,采用双语编排,对文化背景附有注释。旨在积累世界各民族精粹文化的同时,向世界传递中国文化,为国内广大英语学习者提供题材广泛、质量过硬的双语经典读物,也为社科各领域学者了解西方学术经典提供优质的研究素材。

2010年1月,双语读库“文·书系”出版问世,该书系收录了20部西方经典著作,多出自19和20世纪著名作家、学者、思想家和哲学家笔下,作品的题材丰富,包括传记、小说、游记、杂文、回忆录等。该书系自问世以来,受到了广大英语爱好者的欢迎和好评。

2010年3月,外研社和中国外语教育研究中心联合设立“外汉翻译教学研究基金”项目,选取百余部国外经典学术著作,面向全国高校公开招募翻译项目组,参与投标者遍及全国近百所高校,在国内具有较大影响力。中标的译者多为全国重点高校的翻译专家、学者及中青年翻译人才,经过层层选拔脱颖而出;每个中标项目组还聘请相关领域的专家顾问,为其提供专业领域方面的支持和帮助,以确保译文的准确性和权威性。

此次推出的双语读库“学·书系”拟收录该基金项目中的优秀译作分批次进行出版,并细分为哲学辑、经济学辑、历史学辑、地理学辑、语言学辑、社会学辑、教育学辑等。“学·书系”依旧采用英汉对照编排,可作为社科各领域的学术研究读物以及中、高端英汉双语读物使用。“学·书系”所选原作虽为经典名著,却也无法避免时间和空间上的局限性,希望读者朋友们能“取其精华,去其糟粕”。各篇译作均为译者倾尽全力、呕心沥血之作,不足之处,还请各位读者批评、指正。译者序

威廉·詹姆斯(William James,1842—1910)是美国著名哲学家与心理学家,弟弟亨利·詹姆斯(Henry James,1843—1914)是美国著名小说家。威廉·詹姆斯1842年1月11日出生于美国纽约一个崇尚多元教育的神学家庭。他家境良好,自小就接触到世界大同的思想,在欧美两地受到正规教育,其后一直在哈佛大学教书,1876年为心理学助理教授,1881年为哲学助理教授,1885年为正教授,1889年为心理学终身讲座教授,1897年回归哲学系,1907年成为哲学系荣誉教授。他于1904年当选为美国心理学会主席,1906年当选为国家科学院院士。1910年8月26日威廉·詹姆斯在新罕布什尔州逝世。

詹姆斯在法国受过一段时间的教育,专业是心理学。当时心理学和哲学之间的分别还不很大。尽管他不相信利用实验可以研究人的心理,但还是在这方面作了不少尝试,是美国最早的实验心理学家之一。他也曾在德国学习,对德国哲学有浓厚兴趣。他于1869年在哈佛大学获医学博士学位,1876年到哈佛哲学系任教。期间,他参加“形而上学俱乐部”,认识了查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯(Charles Sanders Peirce,1839—1914),接受其影响,并与其一起创立了实用主义哲学流派。1898年8月26日,詹姆斯在贝克莱发表题为“哲学概念和实际结果”的演讲,宣布实用主义作为一个哲学运动的开始。他创造了他称之为“彻底经验论”的学说;他是“实用主义”或“工具主义”的这种理论的三大倡导者之一。

詹姆斯著述丰富,主题包括心理学和哲学两大领域。其代表作包括:《心理学原理》(The Principles of Psychology,1878)、《信仰意志和通俗哲学论文集》(The Will to Believe,1897)、《人的不朽》(Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine,1898)、《宗教经验的类型》(The Varieties of Religious Experience,1902)、 《实用主义:一些旧思想方式的新名称》(Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,1907)等。其中尤其值得一提的是《心理学原理》。该书几乎概括了整个19世纪的心理学,被翻译为法文、德文、意大利文以及俄文,既是当时实验心理学研究成果的基本总结,又是詹姆斯实用主义心理学思想的集中体现。

另外一本影响深远的就是在这里呈现的其代表作《实用主义:一些旧思想方法的新名称》(以下简称《实用主义》),于1907年由朗文公司出版。下面对《实用主义》的思想内容作简略介绍。

威廉·詹姆斯是美国实用主义的创始人之一。他认为,世间绝无真理,真理取决于实际效用;此外,真理会因为环境变化而发生相应的变化。所以,适应时代要求、具有实际效用的就等于真理。人总按自己的需求与愿望塑造现实的特点,因为思维的主要功能就是帮助人们与环境之间建立和谐的关系。

他还认为真理是人们在经验过程中形成的。他的观点是:如果有一概念,我们能用它很顺利地从一部分经验转移到另一部分经验,将事物美满地联系起来,从而很稳妥地工作起来,而且能够简化劳动,节省劳动,那么这个概念就是真的。他进而认为真理就是任何证明自己在实现信仰中有效的东西的名称。

他不仅把实际结果作为判断真理的经验的工具,认为有用就是真理,而且把它推广到说明善的道德领域中,用有利于道德行为的实际结果多元性给善下定义。他甚至用这种实用主义观点来为宗教信仰辩护。他的观点是:根据实用主义原则,只要关于“上帝”的假设在最广泛的意义上能令人满意地起作用,那么这个假设便是真的。

詹姆斯还把实用主义看作一种方法论,并把它归结为一句格言:不讲原则,只讲效果。他的观点是:实用主义的方法不是什么特别的结果,而不过是一种确定方向的态度。这个态度不是去看最先的东西——原则、范畴和必需的假定,而是去看最后的东西——收获、效果和事实。因此他认为:许多原则的争论,都不是效果争论,因而是多余的和没有意义的,并试图以此来消除唯物主义和唯心主义的原则争论。

总而言之,这本书是实用主义哲学的经典之作,清晰透彻地说明了实用主义,堪称实用主义运动的纲领性文献。实用主义甫一出现,就对美国思想界产生了深刻的影响,在很大程度上塑造了美国国民性。可以说,美国社会、经济与政治发展都受到了实用主义的极大影响。美国于20世纪的领先地位无疑与实用主义的作用密不可分。

一百多年后,对于今天的人们去认识实用主义哲学流派,该书仍具有非常高的学术价值和应用价值。

自《实用主义》出版以来,国内有多次引介,现有多个译本,在比较阅读中,可以发现这些译本对原文的有些内容掌握不够精准,语言表达不够流畅,对原文的评价或注解带有译文产生时的时代色彩,需要有进一步的修订,以提高准确度和可读性,适应当今的阅读需要。

除译者前言之外,本译本内容包括:原版序、原文八讲、术语及专有名词表等,涵盖了原文所有内容。

在翻译过程中,译者在独立完成的前提下,结合并借鉴前人的译本,力求准确完整地展现原文风貌,尽力贴近当今读者的阅读习惯,面向更多的读者群,不主张使用特别艰深的术语和冗长的句子,而代之以符合当今阅读习惯的表达方式,采用意义分明的词语和简单易懂的句子。其中,夏历负责第四、五、六章的翻译及其他各章的校对,钱多秀负责前言,第一、二、三、七、八章的翻译和第四、五、六章的校对以及术语表、专有名词表的整理,也负责整个译本的统筹规划。

译者希望,通过上述努力,译文将以浅显、明晰的语言,将原文表达的哲学思想展现出来;以双语对照形式,面向21世纪的读者,并辅以中英文对照的术语表和专名表,既能满足一般读者的需要,又能提供翻译教学素材。

但由于译者学识有限,书中不足,在所难免,还敬请读者批评指正。

译者

2011年春Preface

The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called—I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it—seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. A number of tendencies that have always existed in philosophy have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their combined mission; and this has occurred in so many countries, and from so many different points of view, that much unconcerted statement has resulted. I have sought to unify the picture as it presents itself to my own eyes, dealing in broad strokes, and avoiding minute controversy. Much futile controversy might have been avoided, I believe, if our critics had been willing to wait until we got our message fairly out.

If my lectures interest any reader in the general subject, he will doubtless wish to read farther. I therefore give him a few references.

In America, John Dewey's1"Studies in Logical Theory" are the foundation. Read also by Dewey the articles in thePhilosophical Review, vol. xv, pp. 113 and 465, inMind, vol. xv, p. 293, and in theJournal of Philosophy, vol. iv, p. 197.

Probably the best statements to begin with however, are F. C. S. Schiller's2in his "Studies in Humanism," especially the essays numbered i, v, vi, vii, xviii and xix. His previous essays and in general the polemic literature of the subject are fully referred to in his footnotes.

1杜威(Dewey,1859—1952),美国哲学家和教育家,美国实用主义哲学的重要代表人物。

2席勒(Schiller,1864—1937),英国实用主义哲学家、人本主义哲学家、逻辑学家、元哲学家。

Furthermore, see G. Milhaud:1le Rationnel, 1898, and the fine articles by Le Roy2in theRevue de Metaphysique, vols. 7, 8 and 9. Also articles by Blondel3and de Sailly4in theAnnales de Philosophie Chretienne, 4me Serie, vols. 2 and 3. Papini5announces a book on Pragmatism, in the French language, to be published very soon.

1G.米尔豪德(G. Milhaud,1858—1918),法国哲学家,用数学的方法讨论哲学问题。

2勒瑞(Le Roy,1870—1954),法国哲学家、数学家。

3布朗戴尔(Blondel,1863—1938),法国哲学家。

4德塞利(De Sailly,1861—1949),法国哲学家、理学与唯灵术的代表人物。

5帕皮尼(Papini,1881—1956),意大利记者、文学家、文学评论家。

To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as "radical empiricism." The latter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.

Harvard University, April, 1907Lecture I The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

CHESTERTON1QUOTED. EVERYONE HAS A PHILOSOPHY. TEMPERAMENT IS A FACTOR IN ALL PHILOSOPHIZING. RATIONALISTS AND EMPIRICISTS. THE TENDER-MINDED AND THE TOUGH-MINDED. MOST MEN WISH BOTH FACTS AND RELIGION. EMPIRICISM GIVES FACTS WITHOUT RELIGION. RATIONALISM GIVES RELIGION WITHOUT FACTS. THE LAYMAN'S DILEMMA. THE UNREALITY IN RATIONALISTIC SYSTEMS. LEIBNITZ2ON THE DAMNED, AS AN EXAMPLE. M. I. SWIFT3ON THE OPTIMISM OF IDEALISTS. PRAGMATISM AS A MEDIATING SYSTEM. AN OBJECTION. REPLY: PHILOSOPHIES HAVE CHARACTERS LIKE MEN, AND ARE LIABLE TO AS SUMMARY JUDGMENTS. SPENCER4AS AN EXAMPLE.

1切斯特顿(Chesterton,1874—1936),英国作家。

2莱布尼茨(Leibnitz,1646—1716),德国哲学家、数学家。

3M.I.斯威夫特(M. I.Swift,1667—1745),美国哲学家,无政府主义者,记者,小说家。

4斯宾塞(Spencer,1820—1903),英国哲学家,生物学家,社会学家。

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his calledHeretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words:

"There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them."

I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the class-room sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism1himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title—aflashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood ALL that he said—yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.

1皮尔斯(Pierce,1839—1914),美国科学家、美国实用主义创始人。

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of DREW—they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity.

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled,per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It "bakes no bread," as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and "not in it," in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.

Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato1, Locke2, Hegel, Spencer3, are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.

1柏拉图(Plato,公元前428—前347),古希腊哲学家、数学家、苏格拉底的学生。

2洛克(Locke,1632—1704),英国哲学家、物理学家、自由主义创始人。

3黑格尔(Hegel,1770—1831),德国哲学家、德国唯心主义的创始人之一。

Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms "rationalist" and "empiricist," "empiricist" meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, "rationalist" meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their universe, by talking of the "empiricist" and of the "rationalist" temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.

More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms "intellectualism" and "sensationalism" used as synonyms of "rationalism" and "empiricism." Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection—is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.

I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively.

THE TENDER-MINDED THE TOUGH-MINDED

Rationalistic (going by "principles"), Empiricist (going by "facts"),

Intellectualistic, Sensationalistic,

Idealistic, Materialistic,

Optimistic, Pessimistic,

Religious, Irreligious,

Free-willist, Fatalistic,

Monistic, Pluralistic,

Dogmatical. Sceptical.

Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not—I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course—give us lots of facts. Principles are good—give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many—let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth—your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours.

But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line.

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort.

Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the "conflict between science and religion" in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a "gaseous vertebrate"; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door:—she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple. For a hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no law-giver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of "nothing but"—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.

If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find?

Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds1, Bosanquet2, and Royce3. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large.

1凯尔德兄弟(the Cairds),英国神学家、人道主义者、圣经学家。

2博攒克特(Bos-anquet,1848—1923),英国哲学家、政治神学家、社会改革家。

3洛伊斯(Royce,1855—1916),美国客观唯心主义哲学家。

That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the "Absolute," on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau1, Professor Bowne2, Professor Ladd3and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks amodus vivendiabove all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

1詹姆斯·马蒂诺(James Martineau,1805—1900),英国宗教哲学家、唯一神教派代表人物。

2鲍恩教授(Professor Bowne,1847—1910),美国基督教哲学家、神学家。

3拉德教授(Professor Ladd,1842—1921),美国哲学家、教育家、心理学家。

These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed you to be, you find the trail of the serpent of rationalism, of intellectualism, over everything that lies on that side of the line. You escape indeed the materialism that goes with the reigning empiricism; but you pay for your escape by losing contact with the concrete parts of life. The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below. And the theistic God is almost as sterile a principle. You have to go to the world which he has created to get any inkling of his actual character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.

You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of yourquaesitumhopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows.

I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this last reproach, so I will dwell a little longer on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled.

I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-room you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.

In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no EXPLANATION of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. REFINEMENT is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether 'refined' is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.

Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly writtenTheodiceeof his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean.

Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibnitz to consider the number of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely greater, in our human case, than that of those saved he assumes as a premise from the theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even then, he says:

"The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God. Coelius Secundus Curio has written a little book,De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis, which was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to compass the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God.... It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave them pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres. But to-day, whatever be the limits that we may grant or refuse to the Universe we must recognize in it a countless number of globes, as big as ours or bigger, which have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants, tho it does not follow that these need all be men. Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun. As all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our earth takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns MAY be inhabited by none but happy creatures; and nothing obliges us to believe that the number of damned persons is very great; for a VERY FEW INSTANCES AND SAMPLES SUFFICE FOR THE UTILITY WHICH GOOD DRAWS FROM EVIL. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are stars everywhere, may there not be a great space beyond the region of the stars? And this immense space, surrounding all this region, ... may be replete with happiness and glory.... What now becomes of the consideration of our Earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical point, since our Earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars. Thus the part of the Universe which we know, being almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit; and all the evils that we know lying in this almost-nothing; it follows that the evils may be almost-nothing in comparison with the goods that the Universe contains."

Leibnitz continues elsewhere: "There is a kind of justice which aims neither at the amendment of the criminal, nor at furnishing an example to others, nor at the reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness, which finds a certain satisfaction in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Socinians1and Hobbes2objected to this punitive justice, which is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures.... It is always founded in the fitness of things, and satisfies not only the offended party, but all wise lookers-on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well-constituted mind. It is thus that the torments of the damned continue, even tho they serve no longer to turn anyone away from sin, and that the rewards of the blest continue, even tho they confirm no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves ever new penalties by their continuing sins, and the blest attract ever fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are founded on the principle of fitness, ... for God has made all things harmonious in perfection as I have already said."

1苏西尼派(The Socinians),16世纪意大利唯一神派教徒,否认耶稣的神性。

2霍布斯(Hobbes,1588—1679),英国政治哲学家。

Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of "samples" of the genus "lost-soul" whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.

And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete.

I find a fine example of revolt against the airy and shallow optimism of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I. Swift. Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue. He begins his pamphlet onHuman Submissionwith a series of city reporter's items from newspapers (suicides, deaths from starvation and the like) as specimens of our civilized regime. For instance:

“‘After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east side tenement house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three weeks ago through illness, and during the period of idleness his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with the shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Corcoran returned to his home late last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the door.' On the following morning he drank the poison.

"The records of many more such cases lie before me (Mr. Swift goes on); an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. 'We are aware of the presence of God in His world,' says a writer in a recentEnglish Review. (The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce (The World and the Individual, II, 385).) 'The Absolute is the richer for every discord, and for all diversity which it embraces,' says F. H. Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience IS Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our circle of knowledge to HAVE experience, to tell us WHAT is. Now, what does THINKING ABOUT the experience of these persons come to compared with directly, personally feeling it, as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind of mankind—not yet the mind of philosophers and of the proprietary class—but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling men, is coming to this view. They are judging the universe as they have heretofore permitted the hierophants of religion and learning to judge THEM....

"This Cleveland workingman, killing his children and himself (another of the cited cases), is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is the...imposture of all philosophy which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human time; its time is up, its probation is ended. Its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited systems...." (Morrison I. Swift,Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4-10.)

Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare. It is an absolute "No, I thank you." "Religion," says Mr. Swift, "is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things are blank." And such, tho possibly less tensely charged with feeling, is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy to-day who turns to the philosophy-professors for the wherewithal to satisfy the fulness of his nature's needs. Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are blank." He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically perfect mind, the mind the sum of whose demands is greatest, the mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run.

It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present moment to return a little on what I have said.

If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been crude in an unpardonable, nay, in an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunction! And, in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather than as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and a nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality, which the intellect divines? How can principles and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines? Was Cologne Cathedral built without an architect's plan on paper? Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?

Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the forest for the single tree. But when the labor is

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