Note 333 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction (or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all, of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding” and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an alleged lower and an alleged higher way of knowing. This alleged higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old ideal of the perfect demonstration of all the supposed contents of our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption (either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion—under the conditions of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the existence of the conscious beings (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better—in ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others—for humanity. It is this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or a priori, demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves as persons the primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.