We have seen reason
to suspect it, to suspect that in spite of their being so venerable,
of their being so universally used and built into the very structure
of language, its categories may after all be only a collection of
extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically discovered or
invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by
everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial
unified and straightened the discontinuity of their immediate
experiences, and put themselves into an equilibrium with the surface
of nature so satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes that it
certainly would have lasted forever, but for the excessive
intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo, Berkeley,
and other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed.
Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.
The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various
types of thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for
certain purposes, yet all conflicting still, and neither one of them
able to support a claim of absolute veracity, to awaken a
presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all our theories
are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather
than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted
world-enigma? I expressed this view as clearly as I could in the
second of these lectures.
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