64 



THE REV. CANON E. MCCLUEE, M.A., M.E.I .A., ON 



A thing that is true works. Empiricism — that is, a philo- 

 sophy based on practical experience — is decisive in settling 

 what is true or the reverse. Truth depends on application. 

 What cannot be applied can have no meaning — that is the 

 principle of Pragmatism. " It matters not to the Empiricist," 

 Professor James says. " from what quarter an hypothesis may 

 come to him : he may have acquired it by fair means or foul ; 

 passion may have whispered or accident suggested it ; if the 

 total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he 

 (the Empiricist) means by its being true " (The Will to Believe, 

 p. 27). Truth, consequently, demands verification, and verifica- 

 tion means successful emergence from the ordeal of experience. 

 Initial certainty may, therefore, be dispensed with in our 

 reasonings if they afterwards receive the support of continuous 

 verification. So-called " necessary truths" are to be measured 

 by what they lead to. It would be difficult, if not impossible, 

 to apply the Pragmatical principle to science. The mathematics, 

 for instance, of Conic Sections remained valueless for many 

 hundreds of years before Kepler found a value for them, and 

 changed our outlook on the Solar System. Pragmatism seemed 

 to Tyrrell, however, to meet the case of religious traditions. 

 Verification by survival from the ordeal of experience — both 

 past and future — capacity to be assimilated and corroborated in 

 the process, distinguishes for him true ideas from false. This 

 is practically the position taken up by Ritschl and his school, 

 according to which the justification of Christianity proceeds 

 from spiritual experience and from that alone. 



But human experience, one might object, varies with the 

 type of mind in which it originates, and in all mental experience 

 material interests predominate. Materialistic conceptions of 

 things, it may be contended, must always, as they have done, 

 shut eye and ear to all experience of the spirit world. But all 

 the while — 



" Die Geisterwelt ist nicht Yerschlossen, 

 Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt." — 



Goethe's Faust. 



In Tyrrell's last book, Christianity at the Cross Roads, published 

 after his death, he gives us a depressing picture of the Christ of 

 the Gospels regarded from " the results of criticism." 



