The notion of a reality
calling on us to 'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but
simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent,' is
one that I can make neither head nor tail of. I try to imagine
myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what
more I would 'claim' if I were allowed to. If you suggest the
possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from
out of the void inane and stand and COPY me, I can indeed imagine
what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What
good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind
to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and in principle
ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist
authorities) I cannot fathom. When the Irishman's admirers ran him
along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he
said, "Faith, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might as
well have come on foot." So here: but for the honor of the thing, I
might as well have remained uncopied. Copying is one genuine mode of
knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary
transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to
repudiate); but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed
forms of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or
leadings or fittings, or any other processes pragmatically
definable, the WHAT of the 'agreement' claimed becomes as
unintelligible as the why of it.
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