Note 79 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says (in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception of religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry” applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for the purpose of finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion” (The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to human motive.