English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth.

  • James Seth
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English philosophers and schools of philosophy / by James Seth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mental process complete : it is but the forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of mentality finds its rhythmic pause. We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have pointed out—the function of defining the direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take.’1 ‘From its first dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental powers—the powers of will. Such a thing as its emancipation and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest colour of plausibility from any fact we can discern.’2 In the Principles of Psychology (1890) he had already pointed out that the whole activity of con¬ ception is determined by ‘ the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing. . . . Our scope is narrow, and we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fullness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour.’ 3 The statement of the theory favoured by Professor Dewey and Dr. Schiller is rather that which is suggested by the actual procedure of science in the verification of hypotheses by the service which they render in the inter¬ pretation of our experience. As Professor James himself summarises their teaching : ‘ Everywhere, these teachers say, “ truth ” in our ideas and beliefs means the same thing that it means in science. It means, they say, nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other 1 The Will to Believe, pp. 123-4. 2 Ibid., p. 140. 3 Principles of Psychology, ii. 334.