Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism

1.314-316, 322-323, 5.14-212G-1903-1


  314. Philosophers, who very properly call all things into
question, have asked whether we have any reason to suppose
that red looks to one eye as it does to another. I answer that
slight differences there may be, but [consider the blind man
imagining] red to resemble the blare of a trumpet. He had
collected that notion from hearing ordinary people converse
together about colors,and since I was not born to be one of those
whom he had heard converse, the fact that I can see a certain
analogy, shows me not only that my feeling of redness is
something like the feelings of the persons whom he had heard talk,
but also his feeling of a trumpet's blare was very much like
mine. I am confident that a bull and I feel much alike at the
sight of a red rag. As for the senses of my dog, I must confess
that they seem very unlike my own, but when I reflect to how
small a degree he thinks of visual images, and of how smells

  * An undelivered (?) passage in Lecture IV of the " Lectures on Pragmatism,"
1903.
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play a part in his thoughts and imaginations analogous to the
part played by sights in mine, I cease to be surprised that the
perfume of roses or of orange flowers does not attract his
attention at all and that the effluvia that interest him so much,
when at all perceptible to me, are simply unpleasant. He does
not think of smells as sources of pleasure and disgust but as
sources of information, just as I do not think of blue as a
nauseating color, nor of red as a maddening one. I know very
well that my dog's musical feelings are quite similar to mine
though they agitate him more than they do me. He has the
same emotions of affection as I, though they are far more
moving in his case. You would never persuade me that my horse
and I do not sympathize, or that the canary bird that takes
such delight in joking with me does not feel with me and I with
him; and this instinctive confidence of mine that it is so, is to
my mind evidence that it really is so. My metaphysical friend
who asks whether we can ever enter into one another's feelings
 -- and one particular sceptic whom I have in mind is a most
exceptionally sympathetic person, whose doubts are born of
her intense interest in her friends -- might just as well ask me
whether I am sure that red looked to me yesterday as it does
today and that memory is not playing me false. I know
experimentally that sensations do vary slightly even from hour to
hour; but in the main the evidence is ample that they are
common to all beings whose senses are sufficiently developed.
  315. I hear you say: "All that is not fact; it is poetry."
Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer
than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the
artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they
are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is
looking for.
  316. I hear you say: "This smacks too much of an
anthropomorphic conception." I reply that every scientific
explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is
something in nature to which the human reason is analogous; and
that it really is so all the successes of science in its applications
to human convenience are witnesses. They proclaim that
truth over the length and breadth of the modern world. In the
light of the successes of science to my mind there is a degree of
baseness in denying our birthright as children of God and in
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shamefacedly slinking away from anthropomorphic
conceptions of the universe.

  322. The second category that I find, the next simplest
feature common to all that comes before the mind, is the
element of struggle.
  This is present even in such a rudimentary fragment of
experience as a simple feeling. For such a feeling always has a
degree of vividness, high or low; and this vividness is a sense of
commotion, an action and reaction, between our soul and the
stimulus. If, in the endeavor to find some idea which does not
involve the element of struggle, we imagine a universe that
consists of a single quality that never changes, still there must be
some degree of steadiness in this imagination, or else we could
not think about and ask whether there was an object having
any positive suchness. Now this steadiness of the hypothesis
that enables us to think about it -- and to mentally
manipulate it -- which is a perfectly correct expression, because our
thinking about the hypothesis really consists in making
experiments upon it -- this steadiness, I say, consists in this, that if
our mental manipulation is delicate enough, the hypothesis
win resist being changed. Now there can be no resistance
where there is nothing of the nature of struggle or forceful
action. By struggle I must explain that I mean mutual action
between two things regardless of any sort of third or medium,
and in particular regardlless of any law of action.
  323. I should not wonder if somebody were to suggest that
perhaps the idea of a law is essential to the idea of one thing
acting upon another. But surely that would be the most
untenable suggestion in the world considering that there is no one
of us who after lifelong discipline in looking at things from the
necessitarian point of view ** has ever been able to train himself
to dismiss the idea that he can perform any specifiable act of

  * From "Lectures on Pragmatism," II, First Draught, c. 1903.
  ** See vol. 6, bk. I, ch. 2.
|p162

the will. It is one of the most singular instances of how a
preconceived theory will blind a man to facts that many
necessitarians seem to think that nobody really believes in the
freedom of the will, the fact being that he himself believes in it
when he is not theorizing. However, I do not think it worth
while to quarrel about that. Have your necessitarianism if you
approve of it; but still I think you must admit that no law of
nature makes a stone fall, or a Leyden jar to discharge, or a
steam engine to work.