Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/72

68 of idealism, as Mr. Schiller and Professor James and Professor Dewey in their different ways have shown us, are simply methodological circumlocutions produced by the interposition of false issues by an aprioristic preconception.

As long as men stop their practise now and again to think, they will be idealists. As long as the process of experience is more than a mere blind rule-of-thumb accidental fumbling or slow learning by the method of trial and error, as long as human progress takes place by experiment and invention as well as by repetition and imitation, the philosophy of experience must in the deepest sense of the word be idealistic. Ideas are not copies of realities beyond experience, but are certain contents which, because of their inadequacy, are undergoing revision in that mode of consciousness which we call knowledge: and consciousness and cognition are simply names for reality when thus undergoing reorganization from within. Ideas, as Professor Dewey says, looked at negatively and in relation to the practise which is breaking down, are simply facts which have come under suspicion. Thus we say that the sun-going-around-the-earth is a mere idea because it has become doubted: we call it an illusion. Looked at positively, in relation to further practise, an idea is a plan of action; it is one part of experience used as a means of getting further experience. There is no chasm between the world of things and the world of thoughts; the world of thoughts is the world of things viewed in process of becoming something different from what they have been in relation to the needs of former practise. From this point of view there is no need for a timeless, processless, inscrutable absolute to guarantee the integrity of a subjective-objective, mind-matter, ego-alter world: the only absolute required is the concrete process of experience itself. There is no absolutely absolute absolute just as there is no absolutely relative relative. Absolute idealism and absolute scepticism are self-contradictory limiting conceptions, neither of which is true, taken by itself, but each of which is useful in refuting the other by throwing it back upon the concrete process whence it was derived and where alone it is significant.

Quite the most delightful humor of the present philosophical situation is the way in which the pragmatists in practise repudiate pragmatism as a theory, while on the other hand the pragmatic theorists fail to see their own incorrigible idealism. Rotund in the complacency with which they regard their abstract ideals, which they sentimentally revere, but never use, the actual pragmatist looks with contempt upon the theory of his own practise when some ingenuous idealist seeks to formulate it for him. For what is pragmatic theory to him who is a pragmatist in conduct? It is heresy, blasphemy, anarchy—destruction of established ideals which must be protected at all hazards from any pollution by the "given case." He does not realize that he is destroying the only theoretically sound basis of his own practise, that