Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/136

120 determinism or free will, atheism or theism. One is a doctrine of despair, the other a doctrine of hope. "On practical principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Experience shows that it certainly does work." "Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and novel fact is always the most imperious claimant." Yet consistency is not the sole criterion of truth, according to James; in order to be true, a philosophy must satisfy other than logical demands. And the practical, moral, and religious demands favor pluralism, freedom and individualism, spiritualism and theism. The will demands consistency, coherency; the will to know, the intelligence, asserts its rights in James,—so much of the old rationalism is still in his bones,—but he refuses to make intelligence the absolute judge: knowledge is not knowledge that does not satisfy all the cravings of the will. In the case of conflict preference is to be given to what will satisfy the life-long hunger in the human heart. James can take this position because he believes that the will somehow reaches down into a mysterious spiritual underworld, and that its cravings can be satisfied in the world of experience, that they can be made true. A belief or theory is true in so far as it can be made to work in the field of human experience.

Peculiar to the anti-intellectualistic philosophies of the present day is their antagonism to ultra-deterministic systems of any kind, materialistic or idealistic. They all plead for a more elastic universe, for a world in which human life can amount to something more than a mere puppet show or a drama in which the characters simply play the parts cast for them. They all repudiate a world in which freedom, initiative, individual responsibility, novelty, adventure, risk, chance, romance,—life as the individual unspoiled by philosophy, seems to live it,—are lacking; the interest is shifted from the universal to the particular, from the machine-like to the organic, from the intellect to the will, from logic to intuition, from the theoretical to the practical,