ISBN: 9780217740487

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not … Plus…

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ...to act upon certainty or upon adequate certainty, and because we feel that we must be determined by what appeals to our own convictions and motives, by what has become part of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact because we will it, and because we want it, that the ideal exists--the ideal of anything, more certain knowledge about something, for example, or gratified curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire something or some state of things that does not yet exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful) we can think of the actual merely as such, does not engender the notion of the ideal, although there is possibly a suggestion of the ideal in the meaning that we cannot, even in sense perception,1 attach to the actual. if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the splendid immoralism of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an abstraction and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust. Even science, as we call it, is very far from being a mere description of the actual, it is an ideal construction or interpretation of the same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and aesthetical... William Caldwell, Books, Fiction and Literature, Fiction, Pragmatism And Idealism Books>Fiction and Literature>Fiction Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V CRITICAL Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to. As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality. We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life. Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter,for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the "nominalism" and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the " voluntarism" and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the " anti-intellectualism" already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the " sensualized sphere " of our duty, the " experience " philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a "romantic" element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called " romantic utilitarianism."1 We can understand this if we ...<