The Significance of William James

AT first sight the proportions of this work seem somewhat excessive—it runs to more than 1,600 large pages. But on

closer acquaintance no one interested in the development of modern thought (" philosophy " is too inadequate a word) would wish it shorter. Professor Perry has given us what is in effect a brilliant survey of that revolution in modes of thinking and acting which has taken place during the last fifty years, and of which William James was the pivotal point.

It is possible that James's actual name has become a little

remote during the post-War years, so that it is surprising to be reminded that his Pragmatism was first published as recently as 1907, and that he did not die until 1910. William James was born into the dim and distant world of New England

transcendentalism, but his best work belongs tothe first decade of this century. And if his name tends to be forgotten, it is perhaps for the best of reasons—for what he himself would have regarded as the best of possible reasons—namely, that his philosophy has become a part of life, an active and pro- gressive force in the politics and culture of our time.

In an interview which he gave to the Press in 1926 Mussolini named James, along with Nietzsche and Sorel, as his philo- sophical masters. "The pragmatism of William James," he said, "was of great use to me in my political career. James taught me that an action should be judged rather by its results than by its doctrinary basis. I learnt of James that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight, to Which Fascism owes a great part of its success." Improbable as this may seem, it has a basis in historical facts. Among the many friends and correspondents which James found in all parts of

the world we find Giovanni Papini, who, as early as 1906, had become the exponent and apostle of pragmatism in Italy, and among the contributors to Papini's review Leonardo we find Benito Mussolini. As it has developed, Fascism has certainly relied more on Sorel than on William James, and it is possible that whatever Mussolini derived from pragmatism was based

on a complete misunderstanding of its meaning ; for, as Bergson once pointed out, pragmatism is one of the most

subtle and nuance doctrines that have ever appeared in

philosophy. It is even possible that Lenin's very emphatic rejection of pragmatism was based on a similar misunder- standing, for in sonic of its essential features pragmatism has affinities with Marxism.

Pragmatism consists of two main principles, and the perver- sions of it generally emphasise one to the neglect of the other. The first, to adopt Professor Perry's very clear summary, is the pragmatic method, and "proposes to interpret concepts in terms of their consequences for experience or practice "- which is very near to Marx's thesis that a belief is proved to be true or false if it works in practice. The second principle of pragmatism is a theory of truth. Truth is an attribute of ideas rather than of reality, and attaches to ideas in propor- tion as these prove useful focir• the purpose for whieh they were invoked. Or, to quote James's own Words:

"The truth of a thing or idea is its meaning, or its destiny, that which grows out of it. This would be a. doctrine reversing the opinion of the empiricists that the meaning of an idea is that which it has grown from. . . Unless- we find a way of conciliating the notions of truth and change, we must admit that there is no truth anywhere. But the conciliation, is made by _everyone who reads history and admits that an earlier set of ideas • were in the line of development of- the ideas in the light of which we now reject them. . . . In so far in they induced these they were true ; just as these will induce others and themselves be shelved. Their truth lay in their function of continuing thought in a certain direction."

In short, James's disposition was all the time to regard truth as prospective rather than retrospective. As Bergson was later to emphasise, the origin and inspiration of pragmatism

is to be found in the notion of a reality in which man participates, and participates above all by means of his intuitive faculties. It was perhaps this _reliance of intuition, backed as it was by the scientific equipment of a man who had written the Principles of Psychology, which more than anything

else scandalised his academic colleagues, and which now makes the Marxists so suspicious of his philosophy. For once you admit evidence of that kind, you have to take seriously, as James did, the evidence of mystics and even of madmen.

James was temperamentally too curious, too vital, to be satisfied with logical or abstract categories. He was, above all, an anti-intellectualist. He claimed, with good reason, that he had destroyed the basis of rationalism and reduced philosophy to a dependency on—even to an identity with—. psychology.

It is precisely this tendency which, at the present stage of cultural development, makes him of such interest outside academic circles. All his life James lived and worked in such circles, but he scoffed at them, often in no uncertain terms. "I am a-logical, if not illogical," he wrote to one of his corre-

spondents, "and glad to be so when I find Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. Ass ! " He persisted in addressing himself to the general public, and his books are, as a result, more readable than almost any philosophy ever written, and models of simple expository style. "Active tension" was his ideal, and uncertainty, unpredictability, extemporised adaptation, risk, change, anarchy, unpretentiousness, naturalness, the qualities which, according to Professor Perry, he found most palatable. In a word, he was a romantic, and my own interest in his philosophy, for example, is due to the fact that I find in it a premonition of our present romantic revival (sometimes called surrealism) and a justification of what might be called the poetic attitude. James himself was not a poet, but his temperament might be described by the much abused word " artistic " (his brother Henry obviously found him too bohemian for his taste) and his interest in abnormal states of mind, hallucination, &c., has, with pragmatic justice, developed into the theories which justify modern movements in art and literature. "All neat schematisms with permanent and absolute distinctions, classifications with absolute pre- tensions, systems with pigeon-holes, &c., have this character (of artificiality). All " classic," clean, cut and dried, "noble," fixed, "eternal," Weltanschauungen seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely conies and the expression which it bears of being, or at least of involving, a muddle and a struggle, with an "ever not quite" to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility forever leaking in."

James has perhaps been unduly overshadowed by Bergson, but he remains, at least for the Anglo-Saxon world whose deep-seated empirical and practical sense of reality he so completely embodies, the typical transition figure of mit epoch. He represents the dethroning of absolutism and idealism as well as the decay of scientific dogmatism ; he belongs, as an initiating force, to the movement which has produced relativity in science, the analytical method in psychology, the empirical study of religion, and, finally, surrealism in art. It is a movement which has its dangers and even its disasters—and everything leads us to suppose that James would have regarded Fascism as one of the disasters ; but essential to this .movement i9 the doctrine of heroism. "The great use of a life," he once said, " is to spend it for something that outlasts it." We lack a