Note 258 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course of events—the significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the Philosophy of History in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s Kultur der Gegenwart.