Note 347 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

“For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws” and “dispositions” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to activity!] Some of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).