and unsympathetic. "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder
(_Bookman_, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing
his sketches, a sketch by Henry Murray, with sixteen portraits
from childhood up, in the London Bookman, May, 1910. Wells, in his
"Social Forces in England and America" (p. 205), discusses Chesterton
and Belloc. "A Visit to G. K. C." by B. Russell Herts in _The
Independent_, November 7, 1912, contains some of Chesterton's sketches;
reprinted with other interviews in Herts's "Depreciations" (1915,
Boni). Chesterton wrote on "Shall the United States Fight?" in _The
Independent_, January 12, 1916.

[1] "The Crimes of England", p. 98.

[2] For specimens of his sketches see "Chesterton as an Artist" by
Joseph B. Gilder in _The Bookman_.

[3] See also "The Divine Detective" in "A Miscellany of Men."

[4] Published, 1911, by John Lane Co., New York.

[5] Republished, 1913, in "Poems" (John Lane Co., New York).

[6] Published, 1916, by John Lane Co., New York.

[7] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[8] "The Wild Knight" (Dutton & Co., New York).

[9] "In Tremendous Trifles ", 1909 (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York).

[10] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[11] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[12] It has always been a puzzle to me why congregations have to be
warned against singing the third stanza of any hymn. I never could see
that it was any worse than the rest, but I assume the clergy know best
about it.

[13] I quote from _The New Witness_. The version in "The Flying Inn" is
a trifle different.

[14] "Tremendous Trifles", p. 317.

[15] In Chesterton's book on Shaw.

[16] "Miscellany of Men."

[17] "What's Wrong with the World."

CHAPTER IV

F. C. S. SCHILLER

A BRITISH PRAGMATIST

    The world knows nothing of its greatest men, because by the
    time it knows something about them they have ceased to be
    the greatest. F. C. S. Schiller.

A dozen years ago I happened upon the word "pragmatism", as it was
printed, rather inappropriately,[1] upon the slip cover of Santayana's
"Life of Reason." Being a queer looking word and unknown to me, I
started to find out what it meant and that led me on a long chase. The
farther I went the more interested I became, for I soon discovered
that I had been a pragmatist all my life without knowing it. I
was as delighted as M. Jourdain when he was told that he had been
unconsciously talking prose all his life. I felt as relieved as
Huxley when he invented "agnostic" as a tag for himself.

I had come by my pragmatism honestly enough, for I had got my training
as a journalist through the study of chemistry, and in science the
pragmatic mode of thinking is universal and unquestioned. So when I
went to writing about other things,--politics, law, ethics, history,
religion, and the like,--I naturally used my brains in the same way
as in science, that is, I persisted in the valuation of all acts by
their consequences instead of their causes and in the validation of
all truths by practicality instead of precedent. But when I found
how this way of thinking shocked, annoyed, or amused people I began
to fear that I should have to drop it as I had other evidences of my
buried past, such as the habit of using words like "catalysis" and
"parachlorbenzamidine" in casual conversation.

But when I heard of the pragmatists I knew that I was no longer alone
in the world. There were others, it seemed, even men of standing in
philosophical circles, whose minds ran in this way and who were not
ashamed to own it. I got their names and started to find them wherever
they might be. I ran down Dewey in the Adirondacks and Bergson in
the Alps. Poincaré I unearthed in a Paris flat, James I heard in a
Columbia lecture room; Ostwald I found in a Saxon village; Schiller
I caught in an Oxford quad. I was thinking of going to China to see
Wang Yang-ming, but fortunately before I had bought my steamer ticket
or learned Chinese I discovered that he had been dead for three
centuries.[2]

Some who have read or tried to read what I said about Bergson and
Poincaré[3] have complained that I used too many big words, and one
man wrote me to say that if I would define pragmatism in words of one
syllable perhaps he might understand what I was talking about. I could
not guarantee that, of course, but I had no hesitation about complying
with his request. Confucius wrote his immortal works in words of one
syllable, and I would not be beaten by a Chinaman. Even Herbert Spencer
once condescended to translate his famous definition of evolution into
Anglo-Saxon. Since I am obliged to use the word "pragmatism" more than
once in this book I may forestall criticism by putting here my

    Monosyllabic Definition of Pragmatism

    The one way to find out if a thing is true is to try it
    and see how it works. If it works well for a long time and
    for all folks, it must have some truth in it. If it works
    wrong it is false, at least in part. If there is no way to
    test it, then it has no sense. It means naught to us when
    we cannot tell what odds it makes if we hold to it or not.
    A creed is just a guide to life. We must live to learn. If
    a man would know what is right he must try to do what is
    right. Then he can find out. Prove all things and hold fast
    to that which is good. The will to have faith in a thing oft
    makes the faith come true. So it can be said in a way that
    we make truth for our own use. What we think must be of use
    to us in some way, else why should we think it? The truth is
    what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and
    strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to
    fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things
    clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that
    turn out wrong in the end. Thought is a tool, a means to an
    end. Man has to act, and so he must think. In this way he
    asks the world what it means to him. The need for thought
    first comes when man asks "Why?" or "Which?" so that he may
    know what to do to gain his end. The mind as it thinks makes
    such facts as it can to best serve its use. Out of the facts
    so come by is made a law, and this law in turn serves as a
    rule to guide one's acts.

But the reader should be warned that no two pragmatists can be got to
agree upon any definition of pragmatism, and that the opponents of
pragmatism differ still more widely in their conception of it. Schiller
says that the most serious drawback in the name is that "it condemns
every exponent of pragmatism to consume at least half an hour of his
limited time in explaining the word." Schiller himself employs the term
"humanism" instead which being less novel is less disturbing to the
conventional mind but on the other hand has the serious disadvantage of
having been applied to a very different thing, namely, the spirit of
the Renaissance. Since C. S. Peirce who invented the term "pragmatism"
and William James who popularized it are both dead, the word finds
few defenders, although the mode of reasoning it tried to stand for
is obviously permeating all fields of thought. Like many other things
pragmatism seems likely to conquer the world incognito.[4]

A man in the act of dismounting from a bicycle is temporarily
incapacitated from the effective use of either mode of locomotion, and
it was at this psychological moment that I caught Doctor Schiller at
the gate of Corpus Christi College. Otherwise I might have missed him,
for he is as alert and agile physically as he is mentally. He usually
spends his summers mountain climbing in the Alps, though I suppose
he has suspended this pastime during the last three years while the
Tyrolean Alps are being used for other purposes than tourism.

Mr. Schiller wears the pointed beard that was the distinguishing mark
of the radical of the nineties. He has a Shakespearean-shaped forehead,
but wears un-Shakespearean glasses. He is as interesting to converse
with as he is to read, which is more than you can say of many authors.
He talks best while in motion, a real peripatetic philosopher. I
wondered why he did not take his students out of the old gloomy lecture
room and walk with them as he did with me, up and down the lawn between
the trees and the ivy-clad walls of the college garden. Curious turf it
was, close-cut and springy; I never felt anything like it under my feet
except an asphalt pavement on a hot summer day.

But I suppose it would be against the Oxford customs to adopt the Greek
method in teaching Greek philosophy. At any rate when I went to Mr.
Schiller's lecture on logic I found it as conventional in form as it
was revolutionary in spirit. One would have thought that printing
had never been invented, nor even the mimeograph. The lecture was
delivered slowly, and necessarily without feeling, clause by clause,
with frequent repetitions, so every word could be taken down. It was
really a brilliant lecture as I discovered afterwards when I read over
my notes, but at the time it sounded as dull as proof-reading, for
the lecturer dictated even the punctuation marks, as he went along:
"colon", "Italics", "inverted commas", etc. The English leave out the
punctuation marks in legal documents where they are needed and put them
into lectures where they do not belong.

The students, in short black gowns, were seated uncomfortably on
benches carved with the names of many generations, and were writing
awkwardly on long boards. These were furnished with ink-wells and quill
pens, although the students sensibly used fountain pens. I suppose it
is somebody's perquisite to supply such things as quills and snuff to
the college even if nobody uses them. An American college president
told me that he thought there was more graft at Oxford than anywhere
else in the world.

[Illustration: F. C. S. Schiller.]

If Mr. Schiller had remained in America he would now be lecturing to
one or two hundred at a time, largely teachers who had come from
all parts of the country expressly to hear his ideas and who would in
turn transmit them to their students. But in that room there were only
these fifteen boys, many of whom doubtless had no special interest in
logic or in Schiller's views of logic and who took his lectures simply
because they were required for examination, after which they could be
forgotten. I could not help contrasting this scene with the big lecture
room at Jena, modern yet satisfying to the esthetic and historic taste,
where Eucken's fiery eloquence held men and women gathered from five
continents, or with the Collège de France, where Bergson had attracted
an even larger and equally cosmopolitan audience. A man in Schiller's
position must gain his disciples chiefly through his books, and for a
man of Schiller's attractive personality this is a great disadvantage.
Print can never take the place of "the spoken word", but to have its
effect the spoken word must be widely heard.

The American visitor to Oxford meets a double mystery: how it is
that Oxford accomplishes so much with a poor and antiquated plant
and how it is that American universities do not accomplish more
with their modern and convenient plants. One hates to conclude that
plumbing and ventilation are incompatible with high thinking. But
if Spencer is right in defining life as the power of adaptation to
environment, the Oxford dons are most alive of any human beings. They
have shown the adaptability of hermit crabs in fitting themselves into
their awkward environment. They somehow manage to make themselves
comfortable in buildings that a New York tenement house inspector--who
is never regarded as unduly particular--would order torn down. They
work contentedly under conditions that would cause a strike in any
well-regulated union.

Oxford is the favorite resort of American tourists because it is
the most satisfactory of all the sights of Great Britain. The Tower
of London and Stratford-on-Avon do not compare with it. They are as
disappointing as an extinct volcano. But Oxford is an antiquity in
action. Our common feeling in regard to it was best expressed by a lady
tourist who was being personally conducted through one of the college
quadrangles when a student stuck his head out of a dormer window. "Oh,
my! Are these ruins inhabited?" was her delighted exclamation.

That is a characteristic trait of the English, the economical
utilization of antiquated buildings and institutions. The House
of Lords actually does something, even though what it does is wrong.
Westminster Abbey is not a mere mausoleum, like the Paris Panthéon.
It is a church where one may worship and hear sermons of decidedly
modernistic tone. The French, when they made up their minds that they
did not need a King any longer, cut his head off, which was a waste.
The English keep their King and make use of him for spectacular and
advertising purposes. Oxford is Cluny and Sorbonne in one, a curious
combination of old and new, useful and superfluous, progress and
reaction, that puzzles and fascinates every American visitor.

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, M. A., D. Sc., Fellow and Senior
Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford--to give for once his full
name and titles--was born in 1864. While at Rugby he showed decided
symptoms of intelligence, so he was picked as a probable winner in the
scholastic race and put in training for the classical scholarships.
The British turn all things into sport, even war and education, and
since public opinion does not allow headmasters to keep racehorses they
indulge their sporting instincts by backing their boys for the Blue
Ribbon, the Balliol Scholarships. These boys are then given daily doses
of classical verse competition; I infer for the same reason that
jockeys are fed on gin.

It is curious to see how widely educators differ as to the fundamental
principles of their business. The British system is built upon
competitions, prizes, and examinations. The American state universities
in the days of their pristine purity--I mean by that of course,
when I was a student--regarded competition as vicious, prizes as
demoralizing, and examinations as an evil to be eliminated if possible.
But it ill becomes a pragmatist to condemn a system that works so well
as the British, whatever theoretical objections may occur.

Much as Schiller detested making verses in a dead language, he did it
so well that he got a Major Exhibition. This gave him three hundred and
fifty dollars for five years as well as four hundred and fifty dollars
in Exhibitions from Rugby. But it also meant that he had sold himself
to run in harness for another four years at Balliol and was obliged to
master a philosophy which he already felt to be a fraud. T. H. Green
had died just before Schiller came up and had been sainted for the
greater glory of Balliol, and it seemed to the tutors good pedagogy
to set their pupils to begin the study of philosophy with Green's
"Prolegomena to Ethics." Most of the boys confronted with this
abstruse introduction came to the conclusion that it was wonderful, but
that they had no head for metaphysics because they could not see any
sense in it. Schiller very curiously came to the opposite conclusion
from the same premise.

Orthodox Oxford was at that time under the sway of the great
philosophic Trinity of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, which was supposed
somehow to be concordant with or at least allied to the theological
Trinity, and therefore fit food for the souls of innocent young men.
The third person of the philosophic Trinity was kept much in the dark,
because the tutors generally were not fond of reading German. They knew
still less of science and apparently did not suspect that Darwin and
his evolution might prove to have some bearing upon philosophy.

Schiller took his First Classes at Oxford, although he was given to
asking awkward questions and was known to be reading "out of bounds."
One of his examiners complained that he used such queer terms in his
papers, "solipsism" and "epistemology" for instance.

The years 1893-1897 Schiller spent as instructor at Cornell University,
and at the end of that period an amusing incident occurred, though
what it was and how it came about I don't know; possibly because I
never thought it best to inquire of any of the few who were in the
room at the time. The bare fact is interesting enough, that a young
man who had written one of the most brilliant volumes of the times on
metaphysics, "Riddles of the Sphinx", and who carried in his pocket a
call to teach philosophy at a leading college of Oxford, was flunked
in Cornell on his oral examination for Ph.D. in philosophy! Anybody
who is curious can pick up half a dozen inconsistent versions of this
famous episode on almost any campus. One is, that being fortified by
the crinkle of the above mentioned letter over his heart and knowing
that an American degree would have no value in England, Schiller
did not take the examination seriously and neglected the necessary
cramming. Another version of the story is that he turned tables upon
his examiners by bringing into action for the first time the pragmatic
arguments so much to their discomfiture and bewilderment that he was
penalized for these foul blows. But probably the details, if one knew
them, would prove to be quite commonplace compared with either of these
versions or the more picturesque legends that are in circulation, so it
is better to remain in ignorance and file it in the envelope with
such cases as John Henry Newman, who got only a Third Class; F. H.
Bradley, who got a Second; Gustave Doré, who failed in drawing; Darwin
who was called a stupid student, Grant who was graduated in the lower
half of his class, Mendel who was never allowed to graduate at Vienna,
and the like, good material all for some one who wants to investigate
the psychology of students--and examiners.

The chief benefit that Schiller got out of his American sojourn was an
acquaintance with William James. It was a case of love at first sight
and of lifelong devotion. Schiller dedicated his "Humanism" "To my dear
friend, the humanest of philosophers, William James, without whose
example and unfailing encouragement this book would never have been
written."

In 1897 Schiller was called back to England to become tutor in Corpus
Christi College. The president of that college, the late Thomas
Fowler, belonged rather to the pre-Hegelian Oxford generation of the
Mill-British-empiricism school of thought: He liked things to be made
intelligible, and he was so much struck by the lucidity of Schiller's
"Riddles of the Sphinx" that he called him from Cornell to Oxford.

Here then he has for twenty years lived the quiet, sheltered,
contemplative life of the Oxford don, varied only by such daring
adventures as his hunt for the hidden fallacies of formal logic, his
single combats with Mr. Bradley, and his ascent of the bleak heights
of speculative philosophy, where the Absolute is supposed to dwell
in solitude. Our American universities are putting up some very fair
imitations of Oxford architecture now. Some have transplanted ivy and
it is growing. Some have transplanted tutors and they are growing. But
one Oxford custom has not yet been introduced into our universities,
the custom of giving the professors time to think. In Oxford all the
men have time to think and some of them do. In America if a man shows a
tendency to become absorbed in thought he is made a dean or put on the
committee of accredited high schools, which cures him.

In the British "Who's Who" Mr. Schiller's recreations are ordinarily
put down as "mountaineering, golf, etc." But in one edition of that
handy volume of contemporary autobiography it is stated that his chief
recreation is "editing _Mind!_" Thus was revealed the secret of the
mysterious appearance at Christmas, 1901, of a periodical which in
looks resembled one of the regular numbers of that staid blue-covered
review of philosophy, _Mind_, but with most startling contents.
The frontispiece is a "Portrait of Its Immanence, the Absolute." This
is followed by an article on "The Place of Humour in the Absolute, by
F. H. Badley"; "The Critique of Pure Rot, by I. Cant"; "A Commentary
on the Snark"; "More Riddles from Worse Sphinxes", and the like.
The advertisements were likewise unusual--"A Dictionary of Oxford
Mythology, in six volumes, containing a complete account of the stories
told in the Common Rooms and the men to whom they have from time to
time been attached"; "A fine consignment of assorted Weltanschauungen
just received from Germany"; phonograms of all the lectures, jokes
extra, with colored cinematographs of the most famous professors in
action, for armchair study, etc. The history of philosophy in fifty-one
limericks, covering all systems from Thales to Nietzsche, would be
useful on examination time by students of "Philosophy Four."

    We hedonists, said Aristippus,
    Discomforts detest when they grip us,
        So wealth we adore,
        The moment live for
    And take what the rich 'Arries tip us.

    The infinite self-absorbed Brahma
    Was dreaming the World-Panorama:
        He groaned and he snored,
        Till at length he grew bored,
    And woke up, and broke up the Drama.

    "To multiply beings", said Occam,
    "Is needless, 'tis better to dock 'em."
        So he seized on his razor,
        This pestilent phraser,
    And ran out to bloodily block 'em.

    A pessimist, great Schopenhauer,
    Found living exceedingly sour,
        At Hegel he cursed,
        His grievances nursed,
    And poured forth his wrath by the hour.

As will be seen from the above, _Mind!_ reads much like the Junior
Annual of an American college, but at Oxford the students are deficient
in journalistic enterprise, so the duty of keeping things cheerful
devolves upon their betters. According to its cover _Mind!_ was "edited
by a Troglodyte" but as there was only one philosopher in England who
would have the cheek to do it and who could parody the style and expose
the weak points of the regular contributors to _Mind_, the troglodyte
was soon tracked to his cave. The author of a similar _jeu d'esprit_,
"The Joysome History of Education", which surreptitiously circulates
about Columbia University, has so far as I know never been disclosed to
the public.

But Schiller has not been able to confine his humor to that
uniquity, _Mind!_ He allows it to creep into his contributions to
_Mind_-without-the-exclamation-point and other serious journals. He is
a keen debater and does not follow the ordinary rules of fencing, but
frequently disconcerts his antagonists by parrying their thrusts with a
pun or a personality. He is, so far as I know, the first philosopher to
find room for jokes in his formal philosophy, as the following passage
shows:

    When we map out the whole region of Truth-claim or Formal
    Truth, we find that it contains (1) lies, (2) errors, (3)
    methodological fictions, (4) methodological assumptions, (5)
    postulates, (6) validated truths, (7) axioms, and (8) jokes.

Most philosophers in fact would not only ignore his eighth category,
but would neglect his first and second, accepting any statement that
claimed to be true and devoting themselves to the study of its logical
implications. But the pragmatist is more interested in finding out how
and in what way an assertion comes to be called true and how it _makes
good_ its claim after it has been asserted. As Schiller puts it:[5]

    What then is common to all sorts of Truth and Error, and
    renders them species of a common genus? Nothing but their
    psychological side; "truth" is the proper term for what
    satisfies, "error" for what thwarts, a human purpose in
    cognitive activity.

    The difference between Truth and Error, therefore, is
    ultimately one in value. The "true" way of conceiving
    an object or judging a situation is simply the way most
    valuable for our purpose; the "false" way is one which is,
    at least relatively, worthless. "Truth" is a eulogistic,
    "error" a dyslogistic, way of valuing a cognitive situation.

    Truth and Error therefore are continuous, as history shows.
    Either may develop out of the other, and both are rooted
    in the same problems of knowing, which are ultimately
    problems of living. The "truths" of one generation become
    the "errors" of the next, when it has achieved more valuable
    and efficient modes of interpreting and manipulating the
    apparent "facts", which the new "truths" are continuously
    transforming. And conversely, what is now scouted as "error"
    may hereafter become the fruitful parent of a long progeny
    of "truths."

    It follows also that (as every examiner who marks a paper
    knows) Truth and Error admit of quantitative differences.
    Both can vary in importance, and can attain (or fail of)
    their purpose to a greater or a less degree. But neither
    is absolute. An answer to a question is in general called
    true, if it is true enough for the purpose in hand. But this
    does not preclude a greater exactitude if (for a different
    purpose) it should be required. It is a true answer to the
    question--"when do you leave?" to reply "to-morrow"; but if
    necessary I can specify the train I go by. Thus the demand
    for absolute exactness is both humanly unnecessary and
    scientifically unmeaning. Indeed a degree of accuracy higher
    than the situation demands would be irrational. No one wants
    to know the height of a mountain in millimeters, and if he
    did, he could not ascertain it, because his methods would
    not measure fine enough. Scientific truths are infinitely
    perfectible, but never absolute.[6]

    Now if philosophers are wise, they will accept this sort of
    truth, and admit that any truth is "absolute" enough so soon
    as it is equal to the demands made upon it, while none must
    ever be so absolute as to become incorrigible and incapable
    of further growth.

A human factor, an element of personal desire, enters into all
our thinking; otherwise why should we bother to think? Even our
most abstract and general theorems have a hidden _Hinterland_ of
subconscious motives, limitations, and conditions.

    The abstract statement that "two and two make four" is
    always incomplete. We need to know to what "twos" and
    "fours" the dictum is applied. It would not be true of lions
    and lambs, nor of drops of water, nor of pleasures and
    pains.[7]

This suppressed context of thought is of course largely personal,
and with it is suppressed the human interest of philosophy. Hence
the endeavor to drag it to light was very properly called Humanism.
Schiller conceives every thought as some one's experiment for which he
is responsible.

"Every thought", he says, "is an act and even the most 'theoretical'
assertions are made to gratify an interest." He finds in the present
war a most unpleasant confirmation of his theory that thought is
subordinate to action and never free from human volitional influence:[8]

    If only philosophers could be got to face the facts of
    actual life, could any of them fail to observe the enormous
    object-lesson in the truth of pragmatism which the world
    has been exhibiting in the present crisis? Everywhere the
    "truths" believed in are relative to the nationality and
    sympathies of their believers. It is, indeed, lamentable
    that such an orgy of the will to believe should have been
    needed to illustrate the pragmatic nature of truth, but
    who will dispute that for months say 999 persons out of
    1000 have been believing what they please, and consciously
    or unconsciously making it "true" with a fervor rarely
    bestowed even by the most ardent philosophers on the most
    self-evident truths? No improbability, no absurdity, no
    atrocity has been too great to win credence, and the
    uniformity of human nature has been signally attested by the
    way in which the same stories (_mutatis mutandis_) have
    been credited on both sides.

Since the controversy over pragmatism hinges on this theory of truth, I
will quote in condensed form what Schiller says in his discussion with
Miss Stebbing:[9]

    It is an inevitable corollary of the belief in absolute
    truth that absolute truth cannot find lodgment in human
    mind, nor be attained by way of human science. We were
    led, therefore, to examine how in fact belief in the
    accepted "truths" grew up. We found that every thought was
    essentially a _personal experiment_ that might succeed
    or fail, and that whether it did or not depended on its
    consequences. But it seemed clear that "true" was the term
    appropriated by language to the success, as false was to
    failure, of such experiments. Of course both "success" and
    "truth" are relative terms. _Absolute_ "success" is found
    as little as absolute "truth" and for the same reason. All
    "truths" remain (preferred) truth-claims and retain an
    infinite appetite for assimilating further confirmation.

    But there does come a point, alike in the individual's
    experience and in social opinion at any time, at which it
    seems that certain truth-claims have received confirmation
    enough to make them _pragmatically_ certain. These form the
    reigning truths. But they never form a closed oligarchy or
    an immutable system. Merit can force its way into their
    ranks, and inefficiency entails degradation. Thus, though
    their position is (psychologically) unchallenged, it
    is never (logically) unchallenged. So it can not be said
    that because they work they are _absolutely_ true. They are
    _called_ true because they work, and there is no sense in
    calling anything true for any other reason; but the progress
    of knowledge may nevertheless supersede them at the next
    step.

Since Schiller indignantly repudiates the formula often ascribed to
pragmatism that "All that works is true", and since Mr. Bradley has
come to say[10] "I agree that any idea which in any way 'works' has in
some degree truth", it would seem that these old antagonists are really
not so far apart in their opinions as their words would indicate.

For classical authority for his Humanism Schiller goes back to the
famous dictum of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." In
Plato's "Dialogues", Protagoras is represented as having been argued
quite out of court by Socrates, but Schiller appeals to posterity
against this decision, and he has written several supplemental
dialogues of his own to prove that Protagoras was really in the
right.[11]

Schiller's most serious work so far is his destructive criticism
of the Aristotelian logic. Since my own study of logic came to
an abrupt end as soon as I had secured a passing mark on Jevons, I
shall not attempt to express an opinion upon the value of Schiller's
"Formal Logic", but will instead quote from the review of the volume by
Professor Dewey of Columbia.[12]

    In substance, the volume (a large octavo of about four
    hundred pages) is an unrelenting, dogged pursuit of the
    traditional logic, chapter by chapter, section by section.
    Not a single doctrine, nor, I think, a single distinction
    of the official textbooks escapes Schiller's demolishing
    hand.... A vital and wholesome sense of the realities of
    actual thinking pervades the whole book; it supplies the
    background against which the criticisms of formal doctrine
    are projected. Mr. Schiller brings out, in case after case,
    with a cumulative effect which is fairly deadly, that at the
    crucial point each formal distinction is saved from complete
    meaninglessness only by an unacknowledged and surreptitious
    appeal to some matter of context, need, aim, and use. Why
    not, then, frankly recognize the indispensableness of such
    volitional and emotional factors, and instead of pretending
    to a logic that excludes them, build up a logic that
    corresponds to human intellectual endeavor and achievement.
    It is difficult to see how even the most hardened devotee of
    a purely theoretical intellectualism can lay down the book
    without such questions haunting him....

    While traditional logic has much to say about truth, the
    truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since
    it declines to consider the material application of its
    premises. Relevance--a fundamental conception of concrete
    thought--is excluded because it goes with selection, with
    selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic
    professes an all-inclusive ideal. Selection, moreover, is a
    voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a
    doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical.
    Finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude,
    abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life
    blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts
    and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and
    experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat
    arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision.

Much of the criticism of "Formal Logic" contained in this large
volume is too technical for any save professionals to follow, but at
my request Mr. Schiller was kind enough to write an article for _The
Independent_ putting the main points of it in a form "understanded of
the common people." From this I quote the passage in which he shows
that the syllogism cannot lead unerringly to new truth:

    The peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover
    a form of "valid inference." By this was meant a form of
    words so _fool-proof_ that it could not be _misapplied_,
    and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the
    soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been
    fortunate enough to start from true premises. In the
    syllogism it was supposed that such a form had been found.
    From _all swans are white_ and _this bird is a swan_ it was
    to follow inevitably that _this bird is white_, and the
    course of nature would eternally conform to the prophetic
    demonstrations of logic.

    Yet logicians also had soon to note that even formally there
    was something wrong about this syllogistic form. It seemed
    to "prove" what was either nothing new or nothing known. To
    justify the "major premise" "_all_ swans are white", must
    not its assert or have already seen _this_ swan and know
    that _it_ is white? Or, if he did _not_ know this, is he not
    _risking_ an assertion about some "swans" on the strength of
    what he knows about others? And what right had he thus to
    argue from the known to the unknown? Can an "inference" be
    "valid" if it involves a _risk_?

    When therefore _black_ swans arrive from Australia to upset
    his dogmatizing, what is he to do? Will he say his major
    premise was a definition, and no bird, however swan-like,
    shall be _called_ a "swan" if it cannot pass his color-test?
    If so, his reasoning is still caught in the old dilemma,
    that he either "proves" nothing _new_ or begs the question
    in another way. For he then had no right to assert his
    "minor premise", _this bird is a swan_, if he knew not
    it was white. Or will he, desperately, say "in both of
    these interpretations the syllogistic form is fatuous; but
    kindly understand it as asserting a _law of nature_ which
    is immutable, and applied to the particular case in the
    minor premise." But, if so, how does he know that his "law"
    applies to the "case"? that the "case" is such as he takes
    it to be? that he has picked out the right "law" to deal
    with the case and formulated it correctly? If it is quite
    certain that the "law" applies to the "case", his conclusion
    proves nothing new; if it is not, he runs the risk that
    the case of which he is trying to predict the behavior may
    be so exceptional as to break or modify his law. And if he
    runs that risk, is he not renouncing his ideal of reaching
    fool-proof certainty?

    There seems to be _no_ way, therefore, of saving "valid
    inference", of so interpreting the syllogism that it is
    both formally valid and humanly instructive. If it is to be
    instructive, it can only enlighten human ignorance, and then
    its premises _cannot_ be _certainly_ true.[13]

Some critics, having in mind how little attention is paid to formal
logic in American schools, have expressed the opinion that Schiller
was wasting his powder on dead game. But however little it may be used
in reasoning, formal logic is still the object of formal reverence
everywhere, and in Oxford it is strongly entrenched and heavily
subsidized as Schiller says in the passage:

    That the same doctrine, in perfect verbal continuity, should
    have been taught and examined on for over two thousand years
    would be the most stupendous fact in education, were it not
    surpassed by the still more surprising fact that during all
    this time no one has arisen to call it nonsense through and
    through, and that every would-be improvement has been
    countered by the retort that it was "not in Aristotle." ...
    The great mass of logicians have always been true to their
    salt. For Aristotle is still very heavily endowed.

    In the University of Oxford alone three philosophy
    professors, twenty-eight _literae humaniores_ tutors, and
    about 460 classical scholars and exhibitioners are paid, at
    an annual cost of over £50,000, to believe that the theory
    of thought has stood still, or stumbled into error when it
    tried to move, ever since the composition of the "Organon",
    and that all modern science may be read into and out of
    the obscurities of the "Posterior Analytics." The Secret
    Doctrine in which this is taught has never been divulged in
    print, but examiners know that there are passages in the
    ordinary Oxford Logic Lecture which must have been copied
    down by two hundred generations of students ever since the
    twelfth century.

Like James and Bergson and unlike Dewey, Schiller has interested
himself in psychical research as a possible way of proving personal
immortality.[14] He does not seem from his published work to have yet
obtained any satisfactory experimental evidence of a future life,
but he regards immortality as an ethical postulate, necessary to the
conceptions of a moral universe, for if we reject it "we should be
plunged in that unfathomable abyss where Scepticism fraternizes with
Pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised."

But in his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx" he expressed the
opinion that nowadays few people took a real interest in the question
of immortality and that it had little influence upon conduct. This
unconventional opinion was confirmed many years later when the Society
for Psychical Research conducted a _questionnaire_ on the subject and
found that of the many thousand persons interrogated a large proportion
did not regard a future life as of practical importance to them.[15]

Within the last few years Schiller has entered a new field, the
eugenics movement, where his keen wit and power of analysis are doing
good service. In his review of Nietzsche's work[16] he recognizes
that Nietzsche is not without reason when he asserts that the moral
qualities he dislikes, such as pity and sympathy, may lead to
decadence, for, as Schiller elsewhere shows, social reform, unless it
is eugenically directed, may lead to the growth of the evils it aims
to alleviate. In a very remarkable article published shortly before
the outbreak of the war,[17] he foretold the collapse of European
civilization and suggested that the Japanese or Chinese, through the
greater importance they attach to the family, might be found more
worthy of preeminence.

    If the ancestor-worship of the animist can be developed into
    the descendant-worship of the eugenist, I can see no reason
    why one should not prognosticate for both of them a rosier
    future and a more assured continuance than for our European
    societies, if these latter yield to the pressure of those,
    whether called individualists, socialists, or militarists,
    who tempt them to destruction.

The danger to European culture lies, he says, in that "our Hellenistic
political philosophy exhibits all the marks of senile dementia and
progressive paranoia."

    The evidence goes to show that throughout the most valuable
    part of the nation, not only in the upper classes but also
    in the middle classes and in the best parts of the working
    classes, the birth-rate per marriage has in a generation
    sunk from four and a half to two, and is now only half the
    size required to keep up the numbers in those classes.
    In other words, society is now so ordered that in every
    generation it sheds one-half of the classes it itself
    values most highly, and supplies their places with the
    offspring of the feeble-minded and casual-labourer classes,
    whose families still average more than seven. What
    seriously aggravates the evil is the whole trend of social
    legislation. Social reform costs money, and the money is
    raised by taxation, which bears very hardly on the middle
    classes, who cannot curtail luxuries like the rich, and
    will not lower their standard of comfort. They meet the
    extra expense, therefore, by further postponing the age of
    marriage, and further reducing their output of children. One
    of the chief effects, therefore, of our present methods of
    improving social conditions is to deteriorate the race. And
    this in a twofold manner: they eliminate the middle class,
    and they promote the survival of the unfit and defective.

    It is perfectly possible, therefore, to tax the middle
    classes out of existence. Indeed, it has been done.
    History exhibits a great object-lesson in the decline of
    the Roman empire. This appears to have been mainly due
    to an unscientific system of taxation which crushed the
    middle class and left no breeding ground for ability and
    ambition between the millionaire nobles, who had nothing to
    rise to, and the pauperised masses, who had no chance of
    rising. Consequently, the empire had to take from without
    its borders the men it needed to conduct its military and
    civil administration. The barbarians alone could furnish
    the men to run the empire, and consequently the barbarians
    inevitably came to overrun the empire.

The Great War which he could not foresee has immeasurably accelerated
the degenerative process which he foretold. The death roll of
university students and graduates, representing, however inadequate
the examination system, a selected class of young men of superior
intellectual ability, is probably higher than in any other class.
When I visited Oxford a few years before the war the students were
already drilling for the impending conflict and practically all who
were eligible enlisted at the first call. Raising an army by appeals
to patriotism as was done in England means sending to the front
to bear the brunt of battle longest those who are most energetic,
self-sacrificing, and intelligent, while the slackers, the incompetent,
the weaklings, the selfish, and the dull were left to the last or not
taken at all.

Besides this the burden of taxation resting upon the middle classes
that Schiller thought unbearable in 1914 has been multiplied and will
act as a deterrent to large families more strongly than ever in the
future. A Royal Commission has been appointed to consider methods for
checking the alarming decline in the birth-rate.

One anti-eugenic agency which Schiller fails to mention but which
strikes an outsider as very serious is Labanism. It was formerly
the custom to require all Oxford fellows to remain celibate. Later
they were allowed to marry after serving seven years, whence the
name. Recently this prohibition has been removed, but the antiquated
social organization of the colleges acts as a practical deterrent
of marriage. So by this elaborate and expensive system of examination,
competitions, and promotions--which unfortunately is not so
inefficient as its occasional mistakes might lead us to think--the
university prevents those whom it deems to have the brightest minds
from transmitting their mental endowments to posterity. The devil
could not have devised a more ingenious scheme for the promotion of
mediocrity. Since Oxford has been in existence for about eight hundred
years it must have had a considerable influence on the reduction of
British genius.

As Schiller points out, any measures to be eugenically effective must
apply to the young. The rewards bestowed upon ability are not only
frequently misapplied but they are invariably too long delayed. The
youthful genius is too often forced to give up having a family or
compelled to support it on faith, hope and charity. To this defect
in our civilization Schiller has given the apt name of "social
hysteresis."[18]

    In all the professions (except, perhaps, that of the
    actress) the young are underpaid, and established
    reputations are overpaid. It would be eugenically
    preferable to do the opposite. Yet the existing practice
    is largely due to unintentional stupidity, and failure
    to discover ability soon enough. Now to the individual
    this system brings compensation, if he lives long enough,
    because he continues to be rewarded for work he has done
    long ago, and even is no longer capable of doing, and
    is eventually raised to the status of a "grand old man"
    whom ancient institutions delight to honour, by dint of
    sheer longevity. But eugenically this social _hysteresis_,
    this delay in recompensing merit, has a fatal effect. It
    renders the capable, ambitious and rising members of the
    professional classes unduly sterile, owing to compulsory
    celibacy, postponement of marriage, overwork, etc. Thus a
    large proportion of the ability which rises to the top of
    the social ladder lasts only for one generation, and does
    not permanently benefit the race.

From this passage it will be seen that Schiller does not fall into the
common fallacy of unconsciously assuming that the upper classes of our
present social system necessarily consist of superior individuals.
But he does lay stress upon something often overlooked, that this
assumption is more justified as society becomes more democratic:

    Precisely in proportion as a society improves the
    opportunities of the able to rise, it must accelerate the
    elimination of fitness in the racial stock. So long as a
    relatively rigid social order rendered it almost impossible
    for ability to rise from the ranks, reservoirs of ability
    could accumulate unseen in the lower social strata, and
    burst forth in times of need, as in the French Revolution:
    but the more successfully a _carrière ouverte aux talents_
    is instituted, the more surely are these strata _kept
    drained_, and incapacitated from retrieving the waste of
    ability in the upper layers of society. Now it is doubtless
    true that the _primary_ need of society is to find persons
    capable of conducting its affairs ably, and that a social
    order which does not allow ability to rise is therefore bad:
    but nations cannot with impunity so order themselves as to
    eliminate the very qualities they most admire and desire,
    and must husband their resources in men as in the other
    sources of their wealth and welfare.[19]

That is to say, it did not matter much if in former times the nobility
did tend to die out in a few generations, for in hereditable ability
they were not much above the average. But in the more just regime
that we are trying to introduce, especially in America, when the
opportunities for higher education and advancement are extended to
the gifted of all classes, it will be disastrous if the professional
and well-to-do classes fail to contribute their share to the future
population, for it means a continuous reversal of the method of the
survival of the fittest by which evolution has been accomplished. This
is not a law that man can repeal however he may disregard it. So it
happens that civilized societies tend to die at the top and the
human race makes little or no progress in native ability. As Schiller
says:

    The inventor of the wheel or even of a new mode of chipping
    flints may well have been as great a genius as the human
    race has produced, and it accords well with this that the
    early paleolithic races seem to have possessed a cranial
    capacity, not less, but greater than our own. For in the dim
    red dawn of man the fool-killing apparatus of nature was
    terribly effective, and society could do little to mitigate
    its horrors and to protect its inefficient members.

The injustice, and what is more important, the injurious effects of the
present distribution of honors and emoluments he exposes in his article
on "National Self-Selection":

    Is it not nonsense to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury
    is paid £15,000 a year and Prof. J. J. Thomson seven or
    eight hundred, because the persons fitted to perform the
    latter's functions are twenty times as common as those
    suited to the former's? Is not the real reason plainly that
    the former is the beneficiary of a long social development
    which has liberally endowed the Church, while the social
    appreciation of the value of science is only just beginning,
    and has not yet raised the makers of new truths to a par
    with the custodians of time-honoured revelations? Our
    example, however, draws attention to a very general fact,
    viz., that the social position of various functions is
    very largely the product of past valuations which have
    persisted from mere habit. Hence their present salaries
    do not really prove that an Archbishop is twenty times as
    valuable to a nation as a scientific genius, or thrice as
    precious as a Premier, nor even that men now think so.
    How many of us, for example, really now believe that mere
    descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient
    merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the House of
    Lords? If we continued to value fighting qualities as highly
    as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. When
    we want really to defend the House of Lords, we point to
    its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the
    economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses.

    Hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires
    to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a
    thorough revision of social status. It must bring the
    social position of various services into closer agreement
    with their present value. And it must induce a greater
    feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and
    transvaluations of functions, which are constantly exalting
    the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above
    the consolidators of man's permanent welfare. It is _not_
    good for a society that a cricketer or a prize-fighter or a
    dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the
    man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.[20]

The humanistic view of metaphysics Schiller expresses in the preface to
the 1910 edition of his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx."

    Practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever
    pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may
    start is always in the end one man's personal vision about
    the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong
    in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe
    what one thinks of it. Of course, the tale may be worth
    telling if told well.

This describes the "Riddles of the Sphinx" exactly. In it the youthful
Schiller tells the universe what he thinks of it and it is told well.
But his thoughts have changed in the twenty-five years since this
volume was published so that even in its revised form it does not so
well express his views as do his later volumes, "Humanism" and "Studies
in Humanism", of which revised editions were brought out in 1912.

The doctrine known as Absolute Idealism was, Schiller explains,
imported from Germany, "soon after its demise in its native country",
for the purpose of counteracting the anti-religious developments
of science. But the abstract conception of the Absolute is, in his
opinion, of no value to religion or anything else. The pragmatic demand
for God is, first, as "a human _moral_ principle of help and justice",
and second, as "an aid to the _intellectual_ comprehension of the
universe", but the metaphysical Absolute satisfies neither of these
cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to
explain anything.

In his chapter on "Absolutism and the Dissociation of Personality"[21]
he generously offers his aid to the idealistic monists who have
difficulty in conceiving how the One became the Many and why the
individualistic minds included in the Universal Mind should be so
antagonistic. Schiller suggests that it is an analogous case to the
dissociation of that celebrated Boston lady "Miss Beauchamp" into
several secondary personalities. But he admits that it is "a little
startling at first to think of the Absolute as morbidly dissociated or
even as downright mad", especially since in the case of the Absolute
there is no outsider, like Doctor Morton Prince, to put the parts
together again.

Many years before he had said[22]

    The conception of a Deity absorbed in perfect, unchanging
    and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon the Divine energy
    which might be permitted to the heathen ignorance of
    Aristotle, but which should be abhorred by all who have
    learnt the lesson of the Crucifixion. A theology which
    denies that the imperfection of the world must be reflected
    in the sorrows of the Deity simply shows itself blind to
    the deepest and truest meaning of the figure of Him that
    was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" and deaf
    to the gospel of Divine sympathy with the world. Thus the
    world-process is the process of the _redemption_ alike of
    God, of the world and of our own selves.

The conception of a struggling and self-developing God which Schiller
adduced from Christian principles is remarkably like that to which
Bergson was led by other lines of reasoning.[23]

The value of the pragmatic method to religion is discussed by Schiller
in his article on "Faith, Reason and Religion",[24] where he shows that
even the most rigorous scientific reasoning involves the element of
faith, and on the other hand that faith is devoid of value unless it is
verified in the only way by which anything can be verified, that is, by
works. He says:

    Christianity is an essentially human and thoroughly
    pragmatic religion, hampered throughout its history and at
    times almost strangled by an alien theology, based upon
    the intellectualistic speculations of Greek philosophers.
    Fortunately the Greek metaphysic embodied (mainly) in the
    "Athanasian" creed is too obscure to have ever been
    really functional; its chief mischief has always been to
    give theological support to "philosophic" criticisms, which
    by identifying God with "the One" have aimed at eliminating
    the human elements from the Christian religion. As against
    all such attempts, however, we must hold fast to the
    principle that the truest religion is that which issues in
    and fosters the best life.

The pragmatic criterion of truth, that all truths must work, is not
a lax one as its opponents assert but the most stringent that can be
applied. It means--"You shall back your beliefs with your acts and
shall not assert the truth of whatever suits you without any testing at
all." It eliminates as meaningless all theories that make no difference
whether they are believed or disbelieved. It demands constant
confirmation of all beliefs by their consequences. It insists upon
the unity of theory and practice, of faith and works. This point was
plainly put by Schiller in his address before the Pan-Anglican Church
Congress of 1908:

    For any theory to work, it must be believed in, e.g.,
    believed to be _true_. It is impossible, e.g., to practice
    prayer merely as a piece of spiritual hygiene, and in order
    to get the strengthening which is said to result from the
    practice. The practice need not, of course, start with a
    firm belief in the reality of its object. But unless it
    engenders a real belief, it will become inefficacious.
    Hence, to conceive of Pragmatism as ultimately sanctioning
    an "act-as-if" attitude of religious make-believe is a
    misapprehension; it is to confound it with the discredited
    and ineffectual dualism of Kant's antithesis of practical
    and theoretic "reason." Lastly, it should be noted that
    any theory which works must evoke some response from the
    objective nature of things. If there were no "God", i.e.,
    nothing that could afford any satisfaction to any religious
    emotion, the whole religious attitude would be futile.
    If it is not, it must contain essential truth, though it
    may remain to be determined what is the objective fact
    corresponding to the postulate.

HOW TO READ SCHILLER

"Humanism" (1903, new edition 1912) and "Studies in Humanism"
(1907, new edition 1912) are both collections of papers presenting
various phases of Schiller's philosophy. Either one may serve as an
introduction to the author. "Riddles of the Sphinx" (1891), though
also revised (1910), represents an earlier mode of thought. "Formal
Logic" (1912) is too technical for any but well prepared students. All
Schiller's works are published by The Macmillan Company.

The reader who loves a fight and does not faint at the sight of inkshed
will find what he wants in almost any volume of the Oxford Mind or the
Columbia _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_.
Where the conflict rages most fiercely there Schiller will be seen in
the midst of the combatants, thrusting in all directions at the
weak points in their armor. To enumerate all of his controversial and
fugitive writings would be impossible here, but the following articles
at least must be mentioned:

"Do Men Desire Immortality?" (_Fortnightly_, vol. 76, p. 430).

"The Desire for a Future Life" (_Independent_, September 15, 1904).

"Psychical Research" (_Fortnightly_, vol. 83, p. 60). Presidential
Address (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, 1914-1915).

Miss Beauchamp (_Journal Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods_, vol. 4, p. 20; and _Mind_, No. 70, p. 183).

"The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche" (_Quarterly Review_, 1913).

"Choice" and "Infallibility" (_Hibbert Journal_, 1909).

"Plato" (_Quarterly Review_, vol. 204, p. 62). "Pluralism"
(_Proceedings of Aristotelian Society_, 1908-1909).

"The Rational Conception of Truth" (_Proceedings Aristotelian Society_,
1906).

"Oxford of the Workingman" (_Fortnightly_, February, 1913).

"Cosmopolitan Oxford" (_Fortnightly_, May, 1902). "War Prophecies"
(_Journal Society Psychical Research_, June, 1916).

"Criticism of Perry's Realism" (_Mind_, 1914).

Discussions of pragmatism (_Mind_, 1913, 1915). "New Developments of
Mr. Bradley's Philosophy" (_Mind_, 1915).

"Present Phase of Idealistic Philosophy" (_Mind_, January and October,
1910). __

"Realism, Pragmatism, and William James" (_Mind_, 1915)

"The Humanism of Protagoras" (Mind, April, 1911).

"Logic _versus_ Life" (_Independent_, vol. 73, p. 375). "Aristotle's
Refutation of the Aristotelian Logic" (_Mind_, vol. 23, pp. 1, 395,
558).

"The Working of Truths and Their Criterion" (_Mind_, vol. 22, No. 88).

"Error" (IV Congresso internazionale di filosofia, Bologna, 1911).

"Relevance" (_Mind_, vol. 21, No. 82).

"The Working of Truths" (_Mind_, vol. 21, No. 84). "National
Self-Selection" (_Eugenics Review_, April, 1914)

"Our Critic Criticized" (_Eugenics Review_, January, 1914). Criticism
of Schiller and other pragmatists may be found in the controversies
referred to, but I may also add the following references:

"Vital Lies" by Vernon Lee (John Lane Company, 1913).

"Pragmatism" (_Quarterly Review_, April, 1909).

"British Exponents of Pragmatism" by Professor M'Gilvary (_Hibbert
Journal_, April, 1908).

"Der Pragmatismus von James und Schiller," by Doctor Werner Bloch
(1913).

[1] Schiller says that "Professor Santayana, though a pragmatist in
epistemology is a materialist in metaphysics."

[2] The Philosophy of Wang Yang-ming is now accessible in English,
through the translation of Doctor Henke (Open Court Publishing Company,
Chicago, 1916).

[3] "Major Prophets of To-day," First Series, 1914. Little, Brown, and
Company, Boston.

[4] Of course any one who wants to find out at first hand what
pragmatism is will not bother with what I say but will turn to
William James's "Pragmatism" or invest fifty cents in the briefer and
more comprehensive survey of the movement in D. L. Murray's primer
of "Pragmatism." A definition of pragmatism that is anything but
monosyllabic may be found in the chapter on Dewey. The story is told
of a college woman who was asked what Professor James's lecture on
pragmatism was going to be about and replied that she thought it had
something to do with the royal succession in Austria. Schiller's own
definition is to be found in his "Studies in Humanism:"

Pragmatism is the doctrine (i) that truths are logical values; (2)
that the "truth" of an assertion depends on its application; (3) that
the meaning of a rule lies in its application; (4) that ultimately all
meaning depends on purpose; (5) that all mental life is purposive.
Pragmatism is (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the
purposiveness of actual knowing, and it is (7) a conscious application
to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies,
ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic.

[5] Address on "Error" before the Congresso Internazionale di
Filosofia, Bologna, 1911.

[6] I find the following incident reported of a Boston school which
would indicate that the philosophy of William James is influencing the
younger generation in his home city:

"Well, Waldo," said the professor of geometry, "can you prove any of
to-day's theorems?"

"No, sir, I'm afraid I can't," said Waldo hopefully; "but I can render
several of them highly probable."

[7] "Studies in Humanism."

[8] "Realism, Pragmatism and William James." _Mind_, 1915.

[9] _Mind_, vol. 22, p. 534, 1913.

[10] "Essays on Truth and Reality" by F. H. Bradley. See Schiller's
"New Developments of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy" in _Mind_, 1915.

[11] See "Protagoras the Humanist", and "Gods and Priests" in "Studies
in Humanism", and "Useless Knowledge" and "Plato or Protagoras" in
"Humanism."

[12] _The Independent_. Schiller's "Formal Logic" gave rise to much
controversy. See for instance _Mind_, vol. 23, p. 1, 398, 558. One
critic called it "a sympathetic appreciation of all known logical
fallacies."

[13] "Logic _versus_ Life" in _The Independent_, vol. 73, p. 375.

[14] The latter part of "Humanism" and of "Riddles of the Sphinx" is
devoted to this topic. Schiller succeeded Bergson as President of the
Society for Psychical Research in 1914.

[15] See Schiller's article on this in _The Independent_ of September
15, 1904, or in _Fortnightly Review_, vol. 76, p. 430.

[16] _Quarterly Review_, 1913.

[17] "Eugenics and Politics" in _The Hibbert Journal_, January, 1914.

[18] "Practical Eugenics in Education."

[19] "Practical Eugenics in Education."

[20] _Eugenics Review_, April, 1910.

[21] In "Studies in Humanism."

[22] "Riddles of the Sphinx," p. 431.

[23] See "Creative Evolution" and Chapter II of "Major Prophets of
To-day"; also Wells and Shaw in this volume.

[24] In "Studies in Humanism" and _Hibbert Journal_, January, 1906. See
also "Science and Religion" in "Riddles of the Sphinx", new edition.

CHAPTER V

JOHN DEWEY

Teacher of Teachers

If some historian should construct an intellectual weather map of
the United States he would find that in the eighties the little
arrows that show which way the wind blows were pointing in toward Ann
Arbor, Michigan, in the nineties toward Chicago, Illinois, and in
the nineteen hundreds toward New York City, indicating that at these
points there was a rising current of thought. And if he went so far
as to investigate the cause of these local upheavals of the academic
atmosphere he would discover that John Dewey had moved from one place
to the other. It might be a long time before the psychometeorologist
would trace these thought currents spreading over the continent back to
their origin, a secluded classroom where the most modest man imaginable
was seated and talking in a low voice for an hour or two a day. John
Dewey is not famous like W. J. Bryan or Charlie Chaplin. He is not
even known by name to most of the millions whose thought he is guiding
and whose characters he is forming. This is because his influence has
been indirect. He has inspired individuals and instigated reforms in
educational methods which have reached the remotest schoolhouses of the
land. The first of the Dewey cyclones revolved about psychology, the
second about pedagogy, and the third about philosophy.

I was a thousand miles away from the first storm center, yet I
distinctly felt the vibrations. That was in the University of Kansas
when the psychology class was put in charge of a young man named
Templin just back from his _Wanderjahr_ in Germany. This study had
hitherto belonged _ex officio_ to the Chancellor of the university who
put the finishing touch on the seniors' brains with aid of McCosh. But
the queer looking brown book stamped "Psychology--John Dewey" that was
put into our hands in 1887 relegated the Princeton philosopher to the
footnotes and instead told about Helmholtz, Weber, Wundt and a lot of
other foreigners who, it seemed, were not content to sit down quietly
and search their own minds--surely as good as anybody's--but went
about watching the behavior of children, animals, and crazy folks and
spent their time in a laboratory--the idea!--measuring the speed of
thought and dissecting brains. This young man in Michigan made bold
to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of
metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager
materials as were available at the time. His "Psychology" appeared,
as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of
James and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened
in the United States. In taking down again my battered brown copy of
Dewey's "Psychology" I am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned
some of it sounds. Although Dewey thought he had thrown overboard all
metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it
unconsciously.

But the commotion started by Dewey's "Psychology" was a tempest in
an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when
he began to put his theories into practice at the University of
Chicago in 1894. I heard echoes of it as far west as Wyoming. The
teachers who went to the summer session of the University of Chicago
came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according
to their temperaments. The very idea of an "experimental school"
was disconcerting, suggesting that the poor children were being
subjected to some sort of vivisection or--what was worse--implying
that the established educational methods were all wrong. "He lets the
children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their
stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their
time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in
making them do what they did not want to do. "He lets the children
talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all
the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the
school-room platform. Could it be that there was a better way, that
this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce
to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no
less harmful to the children than to themselves? "I'd like to see John
Dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she
suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy
on the back seat with a tap of her pencil.

As a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they
pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety
of activities provided they would like what they did and their
activities could be so arranged as to result in getting knowledge
and in forming good habits of thought. The common assumption that
the main idea was to have the children do and study what they liked
was a complete missing of the intellectual idea or philosophy of the
school, which was an attempt to work out the theory that knowledge,
with respect to both sense observation and general principles, is
an offshoot of activities, and that the practical problems arising
in connection with consecutive occupations afford the means for a
development of interest in scientific problems for their own sake. The
social grouping of children, and the attempt to get coöperative group
work, was always just as important a phase as individual freedom--not
only on moral grounds, but because of the theoretical conception that
human intelligence developed under social conditions and for social
purposes--in other words, "mind" has developed not only with respect to
activity having purpose, but also social activity. These same notions
of the central place of intelligence in action and the social nature of
intelligence are fundamental in Dewey's "Ethics."

The real distinguishing characteristic of schools of the Dewey type is
not absence of discipline but a new ideal of discipline. This is most
clearly stated in one of his more recent works:

    Discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause.
    Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent
    intellectual initiative and control have been achieved.
    Discipline represents original native endowment turned
    through gradual exercise into effective power.... Discipline
    is positive and constructive. Discipline, however, is
    frequently regarded as something negative--as a painfully
    disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial
    to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at
    the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less
    remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with
    drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy
    of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into
    a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the
    mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to
    a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly
    foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort,
    whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental
    discipline. Its aim and result are not _habits of thinking_
    but uniform _external habits of action_. By failing to ask
    what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into
    supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency
    by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual
    activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or
    mental passivity and servility.--"How We Think", p. 63.

But even more revolutionary than Dewey's rejection of the strict
discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of
industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for
the purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less
with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of
making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly
because it is only through participation in industry that one can
get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution
of the social organism. In the old days when most industries were
carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them
by observation and participation. School was then a place where this
very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book
learning."

But Dewey faced frankly the fact that the house-hold arts and
handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in
the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various
esthetic and socialist movements of the William Morris and Ruskin
type. He recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay,
and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must
receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make
him realize the significance of the work he does. Or as Dewey said in
"School and Society" in 1899:

    We sometimes hear the introduction of manual training,
    art and science into the elementary, and even into the
    secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend
    toward the production of specialists--that they detract
    from our present system of generous, liberal culture. The
    point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not
    often so effective as to make it tragic. It is our present
    education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow.
    It is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval
    conception of learning. It is something which appeals for
    the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our
    natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information,
    and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our
    impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to
    produce, whether in the form of utility or art.

Mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as Dewey said
it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. His
method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as
hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise.

    We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving,
    sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not
    as distinct studies. We must conceive of them in their
    social significance, as types of processes by which society
    keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the
    child some of the primal necessities of community life, and
    as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing
    insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities
    through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form
    of active community life, instead of a place set apart in
    which to learn lessons.

So Dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man
and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial
processes. They picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into
thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for
the most part of their own devising. This gave opportunity for personal
experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not
repeating a verbal version of history. And the history they thus learnt
was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen
people.

This recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried
to an extreme. Acting on the idea that children normally pass through
the same stages as European civilization some teachers seem to think
it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. So they
cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans
and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less
repugnant to the modern mind. So careful are they to avoid anachronism
that if a boy should by any accident behave like a Christian before
he reached the grade corresponding to A.D. 28 he would be likely to
get a bad mark for it. So, too, I have known teachers of mathematics
who would not allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer
by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of
chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in
classroom until the term was half through. But such extravagances find
no countenance in Dewey's writings or the examples he cites.

In the laboratory school of the University of Chicago Professor and
Mrs. Dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying
out their theories. Their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress
the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the
interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in
artistic expression. The volume in which Professor Dewey explained
what he was trying to do and why, "School and Society", was first
published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to
the present.[1] It might well have borne the same title as Benjamin
Tucker's volume on anarchism: "Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to
Write One." It consists of the stenographic reports of three informal
talks by Professor Dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends
of his school, supplemented by some fugitive papers. Yet it has an
influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps
Herbert Spencer's tract on "Education."

How far the seed was sown is shown by "Schools of To-morrow",[2]
which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel
and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. But it is
characteristic of Dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for
priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the
methods described were first devised and tried out in the Dewey school
at Chicago nearly twenty years ago. He gives the credit for the theory
to Rousseau and the credit for the practice to Mr. Wirt of Gary, Mrs.
Johnson of Fairhope, Mr. Valentine of Indianapolis, Professor Merriam
of Missouri, and others.

Mr. Wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of Gary,
Indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools
of New York City, owes his inspiration and ideas, as I have heard
him say, very largely to Dewey.[3] The Gary system differs from the
trade schools in that the industries are used for their educative
value. The pupils are shifted around from one shop to another three
times a year. Their tasks are artificial, symbolic or imitative, but
from the fifth grade up real constructive work, for the boys making
school furniture, iron castings, laying concrete, and printing; and
for the girls, sewing, cooking, marketing, millinery, and laundry, and
for both, gardening, pottery, designing, bookbinding and bookkeeping.
Arithmetic, writing, history, and geography come in necessarily and
naturally in connection with their work. Under this régime the pupils
make better progress in the traditional subjects than those who devote
their whole time to books. That it does not divert them from higher
education is shown by the fact that one third of all the pupils who
have left the Gary schools in the eight years of their existence are
now in the state university, an engineering school, or a business
college, a remarkable record for a population mostly composed of
foreign-born steel mill laborers. All the schoolrooms are in use for
something all day long, so the "peak load" is avoided and a great
economy effected. The grounds and buildings also serve as community
centers and the last trace of the ancient feud between "town and gown"
has been wiped out.

The chief advantage which these "schools of tomorrow" have over those
of the past is, in Dewey's opinion, that they come a step nearer
toward giving the type of training necessary to prepare citizens for
democracy. In this new book, then, he is working toward the ideal he
promulgated at the beginning of his career when he entered the faculty
of the University of Michigan as the youngest man ever appointed
to a professorship in that institution. He sounded the note of his
philosophy thirty years ago in a paper on "The Ethics of Democracy",[4]
and he has never faltered in his allegiance to the high ideal he
there set forth, although he has broken away from the Hegelian mode
of thought he then used. The paper was written to confute Sir Henry
Maine who, in his "Popular Government", argued that democracy was an
historical accident and the most fragile, insecure, and unprogressive
form of government. Dewey objects to his mechanical and mathematical
conception of democratic government and sets forth a very different
conception as the following quotations will show:

    The majority have a right to "rule" because their majority
    is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the
    manifestation of the purpose of the social organism.

    Government is to the state what language is to the thought:
    it not only communicates the purposes of the state, but in
    so doing gives them for the first time articulation and
    generality.

    A vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a
    manifestation of some tendency of the social organism
    through a member of that organism.

    The democratic formula that government derives its powers
    from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy
    the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but
    two aspects of the same fact--the fact of the possession by
    society of a unified and articulate will.

    The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be
    inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into
    their proper positions in the social organism....

    Democracy means that _personality_ is the first and final
    reality.... It holds that the spirit of personality indwells
    in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must
    proceed from that individual. From this central position
    of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty,
    equality, fraternity--words which are not mere words to
    catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which
    humanity has yet reached--the idea that _personality_ is
    the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that
    in every human individual there lies personality.... It
    means that in every individual there lives an infinite and
    universal possibility: that of being a king or priest.
    Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality.

Even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at
least in academic circles, Dewey was not afraid to say that: "Democracy
is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well
as civil and political.... A democracy of wealth is a necessity."
Twenty-five years later I saw Professor Dewey giving a public
demonstration of his faith in democracy when I found him marching with
a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while
the crowds that lined Fifth Avenue jeered and hissed at us. Who would
then have thought that five years later all parties would be committed
to equal suffrage and four presidential candidates would be bidding
against one another for the privilege of giving the women the vote!

Education for democracy is the burden of Dewey's message to the world,
and I must give one more quotation on this point:

    Democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so
    much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies
    as it is the perception of their social or spiritual
    meaning. Democracy is an absurdity where faith in the
    individual as individual is impossible; and this faith is
    impossible where intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power,
    not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies.

    ... Democracy is estimable only through the changed
    conception of intelligence that forms modern science, and
    of want, that forms modern industry. It is essentially a
    changed psychology. The conventional type of education which
    trains children in docility and obedience, to the careful
    performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed,
    regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic
    society. These are the traits needed in a state where there
    is one head to plan and care for the lives and institutions
    of the people. But in a democracy they interfere with the
    successful conduct of society and government.... If we
    train our children to take orders, to do things simply
    because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence
    to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost
    insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present
    defects of our system and of establishing the truth of
    democratic ideals.

    Children in school must be allowed freedom so that they will
    know what its use means when they become the controlling
    body, and they must be allowed to develop active qualities
    of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness, before the
    abuses and failures will disappear.--"School and Society",
    p. 304.

The old theory of education has been most pungently put by "Mr.
Dooley", the saloon-keeper of Archey Road, in one of his monologues
with Mr. Hennessy: "It don't matter much what you study--so long
as you don't like it." Professor Dewey takes almost the opposite
ground when he says:[5] "Interest ought to be the basis for selection
because children are interested in the things they need to learn."

This, as he shows, does not mean that in the new schools things are
"made easy"; on the contrary the pupils work harder because things are
made interesting.

    The range of the material is not in any way limited by
    making interest a standard of selection. Work that appeals
    to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of
    resulting in something to their own interests, involves
    just as much persistence and concentration as the work that
    is given by the sternest advocate of disciplinary drill.
    The latter requires the pupil to strive for ends which he
    cannot see, so that he has to be kept at the task by means
    of offering artificial ends, marks, and promotions, and by
    isolating him in an atmosphere where his mind and senses
    are not being constantly besieged by the call of life which
    appeals so strongly to him. But the pupil presented with a
    problem, the solution of which will give him an immediate
    sense of accomplishment and satisfied curiosity, will bend
    all his powers to the work: the end itself will furnish the
    stimulus necessary to carry him through the drudgery....
    Since the children are no longer working for rewards,
    the temptation to cheat is reduced to a minimum. There
    is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result
    shows whether the child has done the work, the only end
    recognized.--"School and Society."

We have then two fundamentally different theories of training, the
Dooley versus the Dewey system. They are now on trial in some degree
all the way up from the beginning of the primary to the end of the
college.[6] One is authoritarian; the other libertarian. One cultivates
obedience; the other initiative. One strives for uniformity; the other
diversity. In one the impelling motive is duty; in the other desire. In
one the attitude of the student is receptivity; in the other activity.
In one there is compulsory coördination; in the other voluntary
coöperation.

Obviously neither could be carried to an exclusive extreme, and in
practice we find each more or less unconsciously borrowing methods from
the others. Doubtless the optima for different temperaments, ages, and
studies will be found at different points along the line connecting the
two extremes. How far one may safely go in either direction is to be
determined by the pragmatic test of experiment. But at present it is
safe to say that the tide of reform is running in the direction Dewey
pointed out a quarter of a century before, though recently a strong
counter-current of militarism has set in. That Dewey is a true prophet
is proved by the extent to which his ideas are being carried out in
these "schools of tomorrow" that are already in existence to-day.

The third period in Dewey's life began with his appointment to the
chair of philosophy at Columbia University in 1905. This relieved him
of the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the laboratory
school at Chicago and enabled him to concentrate his thought upon
the fundamental problems of knowledge. It was then perceived that
he belonged on the left or radical wing of that movement to which
James applied Peirce's name of "pragmatism." But Dewey is reluctant
to call himself a pragmatist, partly because of his constitutional
dislike to wearing a tag of any kind, partly, I surmise, because
he has an aversion to the spiritualistic tendencies of the two men
who are usually classed with him as the leaders of the pragmatic
movement--James of Harvard and Schiller of Oxford.

Dewey's doctrine of cognition, the theory of instrumentalism, is now to
be found in two recent volumes, one technical and the other popular.
The ordinary skimming reader will find the "Essays in Experimental
Logic" rather hard sledding, so he will be relieved to find that
it has been translated by the author into ordinary English in the
little volume entitled "How We Think." This is intended primarily
for teachers whose business is supposed to be that of teaching their
youngsters how to think, though in reality most of their time has to be
taken up with the imparting of information.

[Illustration: John Dewey.]

The "Ethics" of John Dewey and James H. Tufts (1908) is not only a
practical textbook admirably clear in expounding the conflicting
theories and eminently fair in criticizing them, but it would be useful
to any reader for broadening the mind and pointing the proper way of
approach to modern problems. Professor Tawney of the University of
Cincinnati in reviewing it for the _American Journal of Sociology_
says: "Probably no more convincing effort to construct a system of
moral philosophy by a strictly scientific method has ever been carried
out."

Moral philosophers are generally disposed to keep their carefully
constructed systems of ethics under a glass bell jar rather than
risk the hard knocks they must receive if taken into the street and
marketplace. But Dewey as a professed experimentalist could not
consistently adopt this cautious method. His is no cloistered morality
but a doctrine reduced from practical life and referable to the same
authority for the validification of its influences. An interesting
instance of the practical application of his principles is found in
his essay on "Force and Coercion."[7] Here he discusses chiefly the
question of the allowability of the use of force by a government as
in war or by a class as in a strike and repudiates the Tolstoyan view
that all use of force is wrong. On such a delicate question it would be
improper for me to paraphrase his argument, so I quote instead his own
summary of his conclusions:

    First, since the attainment of ends requires the use of
    means, law is essentially a formulation of the use of force.
    Secondly, the only question which can be raised about the
    justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and
    economy in its use. Thirdly, what is justly objected to as
    violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and
    destructive means of accomplishing results. Fourthly, there
    is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate
    use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of
    violence; and per contra that measures condemned as recourse
    to mere violence may, under the given circumstances,
    represent an intelligent utilization of energy. In no case,
    can antecedents or _a priori_ principles be appealed to
    as more than presumptive: The point at issue is concrete
    utilization of means for ends.

In this essay Dewey inclines to the view that "all political questions
are simply questions of the extension and restriction of exercise of
power on the part of specific groups in the community", and says
further that: "With a few notable exceptions, the doctrine that the
state rests upon or is common will seems to turn out but a piece of
phraseology to justify the uses actually made of force. Practices of
coercion and constraint which would become intolerable if frankly
labelled Force seem to become laudable when baptized with the name of
Will, although they otherwise remain the same."

I trust that Dewey is one of "the few notable exceptions", for the
quotations from his paper on the "Ethics of Democracy" which I have
given on a previous page show that Dewey in his earlier years went as
far as Fichte in his later years toward identifying government--and a
bare majority at that--with the common will of the social organism.
Such a Germanic doctrine of the power of the State could be used to
justify worse things than the German Government has ever done, and it
is perhaps a realization of this that has led Dewey latterly to look
with more favor upon the use of force by the minority.

The proper use of force is, in Dewey's opinion, "the acute question of
social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has
beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history
is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the
question." In an article on "Force, Violence and Law"[8] he discusses
the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion:

    At various times of my life I have, with other wearied
    souls, assisted at discussions between those who were
    Tolstoyans and--well, those who weren't. In reply to the
    agitated protests of the former against war and the police
    and penal measures, I have listened to the time-honored
    queries about what you should do when the criminal attacked
    your friend or child. I have rarely heard it stated that
    since one cannot even walk the street without using force,
    the only question which persons can discuss with one another
    concerns the most effective use of force in gaining ends
    in specific situations. If one's end is the saving of
    one's soul immaculate, or maintaining a certain emotion
    unimpaired, doubtless force should be used to inhibit
    natural muscular reactions. If the end is something else,
    a hearty fisticuff may be the means of realizing it. What
    is intolerable is that men should condemn or eulogize force
    at large, irrespective of its use as a means of getting
    results. To be interested in ends and to have contempt for
    the means which alone secure them is the last stage of
    intellectual demoralization.

    It is hostility to force as force, to force intrinsically,
    which has rendered the peace movement so largely an
    anti-movement, with all the weaknesses which appertain
    to everything that is primarily anti-anything. Unable to
    conceive the task of organizing the existing forces
    so they may achieve their greatest efficiency, pacifists
    have had little recourse save to decry evil emotions and
    evil-minded men as the causes of war.... And no league to
    enforce peace will fare prosperously save as it is the
    natural accompaniment of a constructive adjustment of the
    concrete interests which are already at work.... The passage
    of force under law occurs only when all the cards are on the
    table, when the objective facts which bring conflicts in
    their train are acknowledged, and when intelligence is used
    to devise mechanisms which will afford to the forces at work
    all the satisfaction that conditions permit.

Dewey's primary purpose has always been the development of a type
of ethical thinking and a method of school training suited to the
democratic and industrial society of modern America. Speaking of the
mental revolution that has been effected by the advance of science he
says:

    Whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be
    termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the
    applied and experimental habit of mind is of little account.
    What is of moment is that intelligence has descended from
    its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence
    it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its
    seat in the moving affairs of men. Theory may therefore
    become responsible to the practices that have generated
    it; the good be connected with nature, but with nature
    naturally, not metaphysically conceived, and social life be
    cherished in behalf of its own immediate possibilities,
    not on the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic
    reason and absolute end.--"Influence of Darwin", p. 55.

In the preface to the "Influence of Darwin" he quotes a German
definition of pragmatism:[9]

    Epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically,
    voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically,
    agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the
    Bentham-Mill-utilitarianism.

Dewey, who dislikes to wear even one tag--and that a nice new clean
one--naturally resents having these five old ones tied to him, so he
says:

    It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this
    formidable array, but even should it the one who thus
    defines it has hardly come within earshot of it. For
    whatever else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit
    is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind which
    disposes of anything whatever--even so humble an affair as
    a new method in philosophy--by tucking it away, after this
    fashion, in the pigeon-holes of a filing cabinet....

    It is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and
    parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction.
    For otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define
    pragmatism--as does our German author--in terms of the
    very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in
    escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival
    system making like claim to completeness and finality. And
    if, as I believe, one of the marked traits of the pragmatic
    movement is just the surrender of every such claim, how have
    we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?

In one of his Socratic dialogues[10] Dewey brings in at the close
Chesterton's flip refutation of pragmatism:

    _Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of
    Chesterton's that I read recently: "I agree with the
    pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole
    matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the
    things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that
    one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective
    truth. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of
    the first of human needs is to be something more than a
    pragmatist."

    You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back
    upon the necessity of the "human mind" to believe in certain
    absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the
    human mind and all its works.

    _Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with
    you. This _enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed
    that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic
    doctrine of the personal (or "subjective") factor in
    belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk
    in the absolutist's coconut.

    It is curious to see how many different classes are now
    holding up Germany as a horrible example of the dangers
    of the theories they oppose. The Anglican Catholics blame
    Luther for the war and look upon the prospective triumph
    of the Allies as the final destruction of Protestantism
    in the world. The orthodox believe that Germany got into
    trouble through higher criticism. The classicists say
    that she is suffering from an overdose of science. The
    Absolute Idealists ascribe the bad conduct of Germany to her
    desertion of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte to follow after the new
    gods--or no gods--of Haeckel and Nietzsche. But Dewey, on
    the contrary, holds Kant, Hegel, and Fichte responsible for
    it all. "That philosophical absolutism may be practically
    as dangerous as matter-of-fact political absolutism history
    testifies." This is no new notion cooked up for the
    occasion, like so many of them, but one which Dewey plainly
    stated six years before the outbreak of the war in his
    address on Ethics at Columbia University. In speaking of
    Kant's denudation of Pure Reason of all concrete attributes
    he said:

    Reason became a mere voice, which having nothing particular
    to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the
    existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great
    the congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory
    in the concrete. The marriage of freedom and authority was
    thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental
    primacy went to the former and practical control to the
    latter.--"Influence of Darwin", p. 65.

After the war began he expanded this idea in his McNair lectures at
the University of North Carolina.[11] Because Germany has developed
continuously without any decided break with its past like the French
Revolution or the transplanting of Europeans to America, German
thinkers have come to declare all progress as the unfolding of national
life and to declare impossible the construction of constitutions such
as we have in the New World. Dewey traces the intellectual process by
which the German people have reached the very startling opinions they
now hold as to their mission in the world as follows:

    The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First,
    the German Luther who saved for mankind the principle of
    spiritual freedom against Latin externalism; then Kant
    and Fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final
    philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion,
    the German nation organized in order to win the world to a
    recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the
    rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole.... In
    the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that
    might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long
    line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right
    to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be
    merely ideal. The State represents exactly this incarnation
    of ideal law and right in effective might.

A hundred years ago Fichte in his "Addresses to the German Nation"
roused his countrymen to make a stand against Napoleon and fulfill
their mission to "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious
of all peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the
world." "There is no middle ground: If you sink, so sinks humanity
entire with you, without hope of future restoration."

This sounds very much like what we hear in Germany to-day, although the
present German Empire differs markedly in some respects from the ideal
State that Fichte foresaw. It is also the same sort of language as is
being used in England and the other allied countries. In fact every
nation has the same sense of its historic divine mission and unique
importance to the world's civilization. Certainly we cannot deny the
existence of that feeling among Americans. To quote again from Fichte:
"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the
existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism
is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to
which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over
the entire race."

This might seem a harmless and indeed inspiring conception of
patriotism, but when the Fichtean idea of a particular State as the
incarnation of the divine will is combined with the Hegelian idea of
progress through conflict, it makes a fatal mixture, as Dewey shows:

    Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from
    a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms.
    History is the movement, the march of God on earth through
    time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence
    the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in
    history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by
    which unique place passes from one nation to another. War
    is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the
    divine spirit in its onward movement.

This fallacious line of argument is, in Dewey's opinion, the logical
outcome of the _a priori_ and absolutist metaphysics which has
prevailed in Europe during the last century, and for which he would
substitute the method of intelligent experimentation. He says, "The
present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the
whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural,"
and he urges as a substitute the promotion of "the efficacy of human
intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national
limits." When we see the appalling results to which the doctrine of
Nationalism has led, we may indeed regard it with Dewey as a logical
breakdown, but I fear that actually it has become more powerful,
pervading, and firmly fixed than ever through the psychological and
economic experiences of the war.[12]

Doctor F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford calls Dewey's "German Philosophy and
Politics" "an entirely admirable book; clear, calm, cogent, and popular
without being shallow" and he further says:

    Professor Dewey was assuredly the ideal person to handle
    the subject. For though he had made a deep and sympathetic
    study of German philosophy, he had in the end turned
    away from it to become a leader in the movement which is
    most antithetical to the traditionally German type of
    philosophizing. It must not indeed be alleged that the
    Anglo-Saxon world has a monopoly of the pragmatic habit
    of mind; for all men have to act and pragmatism is only
    the theoretic apprehension of the attitude which imposes
    itself on every agent everywhere. But it is probably right
    to regard this habit of mind as characteristically congenial
    to Anglo-Saxon life, and it was a perception of this that so
    infuriated our germanized professors who prided themselves
    on their superiority to the vulgar practicality of the
    national bent.[13]

A stranger who drops into one of Professor Dewey's classes is at first
apt to be puzzled to account for the extent of his influence and the
devotion of his disciples. There is nothing in his manner of delivery
to indicate that he is saying anything of importance, and it takes some
time to realize that he is. He talks along in a casual sort of way with
a low and uneventful voice and his eyes mostly directed toward the
bare desk or out of the window. Occasionally he wakes up to the fact
that the students in the back seats are having difficulty in hearing
him, and then he comes down with explosive stress on the next word,
a preposition as like as not. His lectures are punctuated by pauses
but not in a way to facilitate their comprehension. Sometimes in the
midst of a sentence, perhaps between an adjective and its noun, his
train of thought will be shunted off on to another line, and the
class has to sit patiently at the junction station until it comes
back, as it always does eventually. The difficulty of utterance in his
lectures, like the tortuous style of his technical writings, results
from overconscientiousness. When he misses the right word he does not
pick any one at hand and go on but stops talking until he finds the
one he wants, and he is so anxious to avoid a misunderstanding that he
sometimes fails to insure an understanding. Talking has never become
a reflex action with Dewey. He has to think before he speaks. Few
professors and almost no instructors are bothered that way.

In profile Professor Dewey looks something like Robert Louis Stevenson,
the same long lean face and neck and nose. From the front one would
take him to be a Kentucky colonel disguised in spectacles. His long
straight black hair, parted in the middle, is now getting gray, but his
drooping mustaches, being twenty years younger, are still dark. His
eyes are black and keen, and one can catch a twinkle in them if the
lids do not drop too quick. His neck-tie is usually awry, and several
thousands of orderly schoolma'ams have felt their hands itch to jerk it
straight. His drawling careless tone and hesitant manner quite disguise
the boldness of his thought and the logical order of its wording.
Questions from the class never disconcert him, however inopportune, and
the more he is heckled the better he talks.

One of his former students at Columbia, Randolph S. Bourne, gives this
pen sketch of Professor Dewey:[14]

    Nothing is more symbolic of Professor Dewey's democratic
    attitude towards life than the disintegrated array of his
    published writings. Where the neatly uniform works of
    William James are to be found in every public library, you
    must hunt long and far for the best things of the man who,
    since the other's death, is the most significant thinker
    in America. Pamphlets and reports of obscure educational
    societies; school journals, university monographs, and
    philosophical journals, limited to the pedant few; these
    are the burial-places of much of this intensely alive,
    futuristic philosophy.... No man, I think, with such
    universally important things to say on almost every social
    and intellectual activity of the day, was ever published in
    forms more ingeniously contrived to thwart the interest of
    the prospective public.

    Professor Dewey's thought is inaccessible because he has
    always carried his simplicity of manner, his dread of show
    or self-advertisement, almost to the point of extravagance.
    In all his psychology there is no place for the psychology
    of prestige. His democracy seems almost to take that extreme
    form of refusing to bring one's self or one's ideas to
    the attention of others. On the college campus or in the
    lecture-room he seems positively to efface himself. The
    uncertainty of his silver-gray hair and drooping mustache,
    of his voice, of his clothes, suggests that he has almost
    studied the technique of protective coloration. It will do
    you no good to hear him lecture. His sentences, flowing and
    exact and lucid when read, you will find strung in long
    festoons of obscurity between pauses for the awaited right
    word. The whole business of impressing yourself on other
    people, of getting yourself over to the people who want
    to and ought to have you, has simply never come into his
    ultra-democratic mind.

    A prophet dressed in the clothes of a professor of logic, he
    seems almost to feel shame that he has seen the implications
    of democracy more clearly than anybody else in the great
    would-be democratic society about him, and so been forced
    into the unwelcome task of teaching it.

Knowing that every biographer is expected to show that the subject of
his sketch got his peculiar talents by honest inheritance, I wrote to
Professor Dewey to inquire what there was in his genealogy to account
for his becoming a philosopher. His ancestry is discouraging to those
who would find an explanation for all things in heredity.

    My ancestry, particularly on my father's side, is free from
    all blemish. All my forefathers earned an honest living as
    farmers, wheelwrights, coopers. I was absolutely the first
    one in seven generations to fall from grace. In the last
    few years atavism has set in and I have raised enough
    vegetables and fruit really to pay for my own keep.

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, October 20, 1859, the
son of Archibald S. and Lucina A. (Rich) Dewey. His elder brother,
Davis Rich Dewey, is professor of economics and statistics in the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the Special
Report on Employees and Wages in the 12th Census as well as of many
other works on finance and industry.

John Dewey went to the State University in his native town and received
his A. B. degree at twenty. Being then uncertain whether his liking
for philosophical studies was sufficient to be taken as a call to that
calling he applied to the one man in America most competent and willing
to decide such a question, W. T. Harris, afterward United States
Commissioner for Education, but then superintendent of schools in St.
Louis. Think of the courage and enterprise of a man who while filling
this busy position and when the war was barely over started a _Journal
of Speculative Philosophy_ and founded a Philosophical Society and
produced a series of translations of Hegel, Fichte, and other German
metaphysicians. It would be hard to estimate the influence of Doctor
Harris in raising the standards of American schools and in arousing
an interest in intellectual problems. When young Dewey sent him a brief
article with a request for personal advice he returned so encouraging a
reply that Dewey decided to devote himself to philosophy. So, after a
year spent at home reading under the direction of Professor Torrey of
the University of Vermont, one of the old type of scholarly gentleman,
Dewey went to Johns Hopkins University, the first American university
to make graduate and research work its main object. Here he studied
under George S. Morris and followed him to the University of Michigan
as Instructor in Philosophy after receiving his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins
in 1884. Two years later he married Alice Chipman of Fenton, Michigan,
who has been ever since an effective collaborator in his educational
and social work. In 1888 he went to the University of Minnesota as
Professor of Philosophy but was called back to Michigan at the end of
one year.

When President Harper went through the country picking up brilliant
and promising young men for the new University of Chicago, Dewey was
his choice for the chair of philosopher. During the ten years Dewey
spent on the Midway Plaisance he had the opportunity to try out the
radical ideas of education of which I have spoken. In 1904 Dewey was
called to Columbia University, where he has since remained. Besides his
classwork he has always been active though rarely conspicuous in many
educational and social movements. One of the latest of these is the
formation of the Association of University Professors, of which he was
the first president.

The title of his latest volume, "Democracy and Education", gives
the keynote of his philosophy and the aim of his life. In a recent
article[15] he puts it in these words:

    I am one of those who think that the only test and
    justification of any form of political and economic society
    is its contribution to art and science--to what may roundly
    be called culture. That America has not yet so justified
    itself is too obvious for even lament.. .. Since we can
    neither beg nor borrow a culture without betraying both it
    and ourselves, nothing remains save to produce one.. ..
    Our culture must be consonant with realistic science and
    with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them....
    It is for education to bring the light of science and the
    power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover
    its quality. For in a spiritually democratic society
    every individual would realize distinction. Culture would
    then be for the first time in human history an individual
    achievement and not a class possession.

HOW TO READ DEWEY

As has been said previously, Dewey's writings are scattered far and
wide in various periodicals and educational series. He has never been
able to say "no" to any struggling journal of socialism or school
reform that begged him for an article although it meant no pay, little
influence, and speedy oblivion for his contribution. The graduate
student of twenty-five years hence who undertakes to get a Ph.D. by
making a complete collection of Dewey's works will earn his degree. The
main principles of Dewey's philosophy, imparted viva voce to successive
generations of students, have never been printed in a complete and
systematic form, though his ideas have interfused the schools of the
country through the teachers he has trained and the educational books
he has written.

The nearest thing to a short cut to Dewey's philosophy that he has
given us is "How We Think" (Heath, 1910), and with this the reader
may well begin. "Essays in Experimental Logic" (University of Chicago
Press, 1916) requires for its complete comprehension some knowledge
of current controversies in philosophy. But the review of James's
"Pragmatism", contained in the chapter "What Pragmatism Means", will be
of interest to any reader seeking an answer to that question.

His epoch-making work, "The School and Society" (University of Chicago
Press, first edition 1899, second edition 1915), has by no means lost
its value although much that was prophecy then is now fulfilled. Most
readers will be more interested in the fulfillments as described in
"Schools of Tomorrow" (Dutton, 1915). This contains, besides the
description of the new schools by his daughter, Evelyn Dewey, several
chapters by Professor Dewey on the theory and aims of the educational
movement they represent. A more complete and systematic exposition
of the principles of education under modern conditions is to be
found in his most recent book, "Democracy and Education" (Macmillan,
1916). Professor Moore of Chicago who reviews this volume in the
_International Journal of Ethics_ (1916, p. 547) says of it: "The
thinking world has long since learned to expect from Professor Dewey
matters of prime importance. Of the general significance of this,
volume it is perhaps enough to say that, in the reviewer's opinion, it
is the most important of Professor Dewey's productions thus far. In
defiance of possible imputations of chauvinism, the reviewer will also
say that it would be difficult to overstate its import and value for
all students of education, philosophy, and society."

The volume clumsily entitled "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy
and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought" (Holt, 1910) contains,
besides the anniversary address which gives it its title, ten essays
chiefly concerned with the exposition and defense of Dewey's form of
pragmatism, "immediate empiricism." "German Philosophy and Politics"
(Holt, 1915) is discussed in the preceding pages. Dewey's "Psychology"
(Harper, 1886) has largely lost its interest through the rapid advance
of the science and the altered viewpoint of the author. The "Ethics"
which he wrote in collaboration with Professor Tufts I have previously
mentioned (Holt, 1908).

The practical applications of Dewey's philosophy to current educational
and public questions may best be found in the brief and popular
articles that he contributed frequently to _The New Republic_
(New York) in 1915-1916. His professional contributions to logical
theory and epistemology appear mostly in the fortnightly organ of
the philosophical department of Columbia University, the _Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_.

A volume of eight essays on the pragmatic attitude was published in
January 1917 by Henry Holt under the title of "Creative Intelligence."
The leading essay on "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" is by John
Dewey.

Besides the articles to which reference has been made in the footnotes
of the preceding pages the following writings of Dewey should be
mentioned: "Science as Subject-matter and as Method", the vice
presidential address of the section on education of the Boston meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1909, (in
_Science_, January 28, 1910); "The Problem of Truth", George Leib
Harrison lectures before the University of Pennsylvania, 1911 (in _Old
Penn Weekly Review_), "Maeterlinck" (_Hibbert Journal_, vol. 9, p.
765) and "Is Nature Good?" (_Hibbert Journal_, vol. 7, p. 827); "The
Existence of the World as a Problem" (_Philosophical Review_, vol.
24, p. 357); "Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy" (_Popular Science
Monthly_, vol. 75, p. 90); Presidential address to the American
Association of University Professors (_Science_, January 29, 1915);
"Professional Spirit Among Teachers" (_American Teacher_, New York,
October, 1913); _The International Journal of Ethics_ published "Force
and Coercion" (vol. 26, p. 359); "Progress" (vol. 26, p. 311); "Nature
and Reason in Law" (vol. 25, p. 25); "History for the Educator" and
other articles appeared in _Progressive Journal of Education_, Chicago,
1909; "Voluntarism in the Roycean Philosophy" in the _Philosophical
Review_, May, 1916; "Logical Foundations of The Scientific Treatment of
Morality" in the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago.

A criticism of Bergson by Dewey under the title of "Perception and
Organic Action" may be found in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods_, November 21, 1912. Professor Wilhelm Ostwald,
who, as I said in my chapter on him, has devoted much attention to
educational reforms, includes a sketch of Dewey by Franz Ludwig in
the series on _Moderne Schulreforme in Das Monistische Jahrhundert_
of May 31, 191-5. For a criticism of Dewey's social philosophy see
the articles by Lester Lee Bernhard of the University of Chicago in
_American Journal of Sociology_.

No biography of Dewey has yet been written and none ever will be if he
can prevent it. H. W. Schneider of Columbia University has prepared a
complete bibliography of Dewey's writings, not yet published.

[1] The University of Chicago Press published a second edition of
"School and Society", revised and enlarged, in 1915.

[2] "Schools of To-morrow", by John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey (Dutton),
1915.

[3] Doctor Georg Kerschensteiner who founded the famous "workshop
schools" of Munich also acknowledges his indebtedness to Dewey.

[4] No. I of Series 2 of Philosophical Papers of the University of
Michigan, 1887.

[5] "Schools of To-morrow", p. 301.

[6] See the admirable article in _Atlantic Monthly_ of November, 1908,
by President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation, contrasting Harvard
and West Point, "The College of Freedom and the College of Discipline."

[7] _International Journal of Ethics_, vol. 26, p. 359-367.

[8] _The New Republic_, January 22, 1916.

[9] To get the full force of this portentous definition one
must read it in the original: _Gewiss ist der Pragmatismus
erkenntniss-theoretisch Nominalismus, psychologisch Voluntarismus,
naturphilosophisch Energismus, metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch
Meliorismus auf Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus._

[10] "A Catechism Concerning Truth" in "The Influence of Darwin on
Philosophy and Other Essays."

[11] Published as "German Philosophy and Politics" (Holt), 1915.

[12] "German Philosophy and Politics" is sympathetically reviewed by
Professor Santayana in the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_ for November 25, 1915. The same Journal reprints
(vol. XII, p. 584) a criticism appearing in _The New Republic_ (vol.
IV, p. 234) by Professor Hocking of Harvard, who thinks that the
fault of the Germans is being too pragmatic. Professor Dewey's reply
is published with it. See also Dewey's admirable analysis of the
national psychology of Germany, France, and England in his article "On
Understanding the Mind of Germany", _Atlantic_, vol. 117, p. 251.

[13] _Mind_, April, 1916.

[14] _The New Republic_, March 13, 1915.

[15] _The New Republic_, July 1, 1916.

CHAPTER VI

RUDOLF EUCKEN

APOSTLE OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

    To the history of and criticism of these conceptions and
    their terminology Professor Eucken has brought thorough and
    careful reading, acute and candid criticism, and a clear
    and solid style. While he is at home among the systems of
    the past, he seems equally familiar with the controversies
    of the present. Above all, he has studied brevity, and has
    mastered the art of expressing in a few words the results of
    patient research and critical discrimination.

    The writer of this notice was constrained to recommend the
    work for translation to his friend and former pupil by his
    estimate of the intrinsic value of the treatise and the
    desire that it might be brought within reach of English
    readers as eminently suited to the times. He can say with
    assured confidence that there are few books within his
    knowledge which are better fitted to aid the student who
    wishes to acquaint himself with the course of superlative
    and scientific thinking and to form an intelligent estimate
    of most of the current theories.[1]

These were the words with which Professor Eucken was introduced to
the American public in 1880 by one who was a good judge of men and
books, the primary qualification of a college president. Thirty-two
years later Professor Eucken came to America; this time in person, but
under the auspices of Harvard and the University of New York, instead
of Yale. This time he reached a larger audience; partly owing to his
greater fame, partly to a change in the popular attitude toward the
views he presents. In 1908, when Eucken received the Nobel prize for
the greatest work of idealistic literature, there was no book of his
accessible to the English reader, for the translation instigated by
President Porter was out of print. Since then all his important works
have been brought out in England and America; and the periodical
indexes record a growing interest in his thought, corresponding to that
which is manifested in Germany.

The Nobel prizes have failed to carry out the intention of their
founder, which was to place $100,000 or so immediately into the hands
of a man who had made a signal contribution to science, literature,
or peace. Instead of this, the Nobel committees absorb a liberal moiety
of the income of the fund in local "administrative expenses" and
usually give the residue, now amounting to some $37,000, to men whose
reputations have long been established; for example, in literature,
Sully-Prudhomme, Mommsen, Björnson, Mistral, Kipling, and Heyse. But
in so interpreting their mandate the Nobel committees have fulfilled
another useful function, possibly as much needed as that conceived by
Alfred Nobel. If they have not discovered original genius, they have at
least pointed it out to the world at large. The men thus distinguished
as having contributed to human progress have extended their influence
over their contemporaries, as well as received a due appreciation of
their efforts. The Nobel prize does not add to the stature of a man,
but it does elevate him to a pulpit.

In the case of Eucken the value of this is evident. He did not need the
assistance of the Nobel fund in order to prosecute his researches, for
the laboratory expenses of a metaphysician are but slight, and Jena is
as cheap a place to live as can nowadays be found in civilized lands.
The award of the prize did not, of course, add to his reputation in
philosophical circles, but Eucken does not believe that the influence
of a philosopher should be confined to philosophical circles. He