The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and
being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation,
and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation--so
much rationalism will allow; but never that either reality itself or
truth itself is mutable. Reality stands complete and ready-made from
all eternity, rationalism insists, and the agreement of our ideas
with it is that unique unanalyzable virtue in them of which she has
already told us. As that intrinsic excellence, their truth has
nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content
of experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is
supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely. It doesn't EXIST,
it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to another dimension from that of
either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in short, to the
epistemological dimension--and with that big word rationalism closes
the discussion.
Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does
rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her
inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks
that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
Pages:
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190