NEW PHILOSOPHY CALLED PRAGMATISM ji 



dualisms of actual and ideal, finite and infinite, one and the many, 

 subject and object, mind and matter, ego and alter, reason and faith, 

 good and evil, right and wrong, experience and reality, and the host 

 of other antitheses which the dialectical ingenuity of sapient man has 

 teased out of the intricate meshwork and living tissue of concrete 

 experience. 



In conclusion it should be said that, just because pragmatism is 

 idealistic, it is not egoistic, as it has been falsely charged with being, in 

 either the social or the ethical sense. 



One of the main contentions of the pragmatists who have been 

 quoted in the foregoing paragraphs, especially of Professor Dewey, who 

 is its most consistent exponent on this side, is the social conditioning 

 of consciousness and of the knowledge process by which reality is con- 

 stituted in experience. This is not the place to expand upon it, but 

 it is important to note that for the pragmatic idealist, consciousness 

 is essentially social in its content, individuals are functions of each 

 other, selfhood is achieved only through interaction of selves; and 

 cognition, which is ordinarily conceived as a mental process going on 

 in the head of some so-called individual, is a process which includes 

 the object as well as the subject in its activity. As Professor Eoyce 

 has so ably set forth, the external world is the communicable world, is 

 socially constructed, and it may with truth be said, as a recent writer 

 expresses it, that it is as proper to call ultimate reality a society-of- 

 selves as to call it the absolute. 



The pragmatic ethics is currently described as the art of making 

 one's self comfortable in the long run, or, in its more cynical form, if 

 you can't have what you want, don't want it. The reply to the implied 

 criticism in the first formulation is that egoism is not incompatible 

 with altruism. It is true, not only that what is good for society is 

 good for the individual, but that what is good for the individual must 

 in the long run be good for society. Egoism or individualism in a 

 functional sense, which recognizes the relationship of the self to the 

 social whole, is the very essence of progress. Egoism and altruism, like 

 other abstractions, when taken in isolation, confute each other. An 

 altruism which is only an excuse for trying to manage other people's 

 affairs is not different from a self-centered egoism; while an egoism 

 which conceives of the self so widely and so generously that it can not 

 find happiness save through the happiness of others, is a very genuine 

 kind of altruism. And the alternative suggested in the second formu- 

 lation of the pragmatic morality is not the only one: another would 

 be : If you can't have what you want, want it more vitally, more organ- 

 ically, until you get it. A pragmatic ethics refuses to believe that 

 any craving or impulse of human nature is bad as such. There is no 

 absolute evil. Error and evil, like truth and good, are matters of rela- 

 tionship; and, just as the truth is not attained until all the so-called 



