make of itself?  The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place.  The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.  To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either.  It will be an alteration in ’the seat of authority’ that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation.  And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy.  It will seem so much sheer trash, philosophically.  But life wags on, all the same, and compasses its ends, in protestant countries.  I venture to think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity.

Lecture IV

The One and the Many

We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward into the river of experience with them and prolongs the perspective by their means.  Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world’s outcome.  Be they false or be they true, the meaning of them is this meliorism.  I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called ‘total reflexion’ in optics as a good symbol of the relation between abstract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it.  Hold a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the water at its surface—­or better still look similarly through the flat wall of an aquarium.  You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, situated on the opposite side of the vessel.  No candle-ray, under these circumstances gets beyond the water’s surface:  every ray is totally reflected back into the depths again.  Now let the water represent the world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the world of abstract ideas.  Both worlds are real, of course, and interact; but they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of everything that lives, and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, is the water.  We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it.  We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch it we are reflected back into the water with our course re-determined and re-energized.  The abstract ideas of which the air consists, indispensable for life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and only active in their re-directing function.  All similes are halting but this one rather takes my fancy.  It shows how something, not sufficient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an effective determinant of life elsewhere.