Note 272 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent examination of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, Professor Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, Merz’s History of European Thought during the Nineteenth Century, or Verworn’s General Physiology (with its interesting account of the different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that after all we know matter only through mind and sensation). Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about the origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution, are still as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last century. It is not merely, however, of the actual limits of science at any one time that we are obliged, as human beings, to think, but of the limits of science in view of the fact that our knowledge comes to us in part, under the conditions of space and time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the light of what we would like to know about the universe of life and mind.

I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of specialization and discursiveness and “technic.” It is quite difficult to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, everything, from even some single point of view. And then the wide acceptance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the individual from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the Psy. Rev.) upon “Professor Titchener’s View of the Self,” dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.” Also Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.