James

name of The Meaning of Truth (1909). As a
result of this controversy it became clear, as
no one knowing James should ever have doubt-
ed, that pragmatism did not signify an emphasis
on sordid or worldly success, such as was sup-
posed to be peculiarly esteemed in America.
The doctrine that the truth of ideas is relative
to the interests which generate them, implies
nothing whatsoever regarding the character of
these interests, whether high or low. At the
same time, in reply to F. H. Bradley and others,
James explained that he had never meant to deny
the existence of theoretical interests, or their
right of way over others, but only to insist that
they were interests. In using the term "prac-
tical" he had not meant to exclude any ac-
tive, human motive, whether moral, intellectual,
or esthetic. The commonest charge brought
against him, however, was that of sceptical sub-
jectivism. He seemed to his critics to have ex-
posed himself to this charge by allying himself
with the "humanism" proclaimed by F. C. S.
Schiller, who had emphasized the "making of
reality" by thought, and had interpreted so-
called "facts" as the precipitate of past thinking.
In reply James repeatedly affirmed that his po-
sition was "realistic," in the sense of presuppos-
ing an external environment to which thought
was obliged to conform.

James met his last Harvard class on Jan. 22,
1907. Having been invited to give the Hibbert
Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, he de-
cided after some hesitation to take this oppor-
tunity of giving a systematic presentation of his
metaphysical position. The lectures were given
in May 1908, and were published in the follow-
ing year under the title, A Pluralistic Universe.
For some years there had been talk of James's
forthcoming metaphysics, alluded to in the Va-
rieties. This project as originally designed was
never executed, for James had meant a treatise
that should be technical enough, and perhaps
dull enough, to satisfy the critics who had cav-
iled at his lightness of speech. The Hibbert
Lectures found him again before a mixed audi-
ence and irresistibly impelled to be interesting.
But though this volume is again popular in style,
it affords the best and the final synopsis of his
Weltanschauung and of his general philosoph-
ical orientation. He pays his respects to Hegel
and to the absolutists generally, setting forth
the failure of their arguments, and the "thin-
ness" of their results. To reject the absolute
does not imply the rejection of every hypothesis
of a "superhuman consciousness." But instead
of the dialectical method used by the Hegelians
to establish such a consciousness, James com-

James

mended the method of empirical analogy and
free speculation used by Fechner in his doc-
trine of an "earth-soul"; and, instead of a super-
human consciousness that is in some unintel-
ligible sense "all-embracing," James proposed
that it should be finite like human consciousness.
In that case it may without contradiction have
those relations to an environment other than it-
self, and that freedom from evil, which have in
fact always been attributed to it by the religious
worshipper. It was far from James's intention
to increase the distance between man and God.
Man is a part, or is capable under certain con-
ditions of becoming a part, of an enveloping
spiritual life; and that life is like his own,—dif-
ferent in degree, but similar in kind. The prob-
ability of such a hypothesis is supported by the
mystical state, and by allied abnormal and super-
normal experiences to which modern psychol-
ogy has called attention, as well as by the moral
and emotional demands which it satisfies.

James did not reach this metaphysical conclu-
sion lightly. He was keenly alive to its logical
difficulties, and especially to the difficulty con-
nected with "the compounding of consciousness."
In view of the peculiar unity of the conscious
life, how can several lesser consciousnesses form
parts of a greater? Supposing them to have
distinct individualities of their own, how can
they ever unite? Or, supposing them to be
united, how can they possess any distinctness?
It was in the solution of this problem that James
felt himself to be both illuminated and confirmed
by Bergson, with whose work he became famil-
iar as early as 1898, and which he had hailed in
1902 as of epoch-making importance. He now
credited Bergson with giving him the courage
to break with the traditional logic which had
hitherto prevented his acceptance of the com-
pounding of consciousness. Bergson, as had
James in his account of "the stream of con-
sciousness" in the Principles, stressed the con-
tinuity of living experience. Its adjacent parts
coalesce and inter-penetrate, each reaching be-
yond itself and merging into the other. The
logical conception of a serial order of distinct
terms, each of which is exclusively and forever
itself, is a product of conceptual abstraction,—
an artificial diagram created for practical pur-
poses. It affords no proper index of reality it-
self, for which one must plunge into the con-
crete flux of immediacy. Reality so apprehended
is homogeneous, and connected from next to
next; there are possible transitions from every
part to every other part. Most things in the
world are only indirectly, and so externally,
connected; mutually accessible, but not mutual-

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