Note 58 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be ‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.’ Man uses science but he lives religion. The part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines for her own convenience.” (p. 329).