TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. 83
use of a value of π calculated out to a hundred decimal places. Does this prevent my saying truly that one or other of the statements in question, and only one of them, must be true? Or would it justify Mr. Schiller in declaring, as his philosophy seems to require him to do, that neither statement has any meaning at all? Or shall we suggest, as Prof. James seems to do (Will to Believe, p. 15), that after all his opponent's baby is "only a very little one," and therefore apparently to the philosophic eye as good as nonexistent? Yet one more illustration, this time from the history of metaphysics, and I have done. It has long been recognised that the Berkeleyan subjectivism leads to no practical consequences in our operations on physical things other than those which would equally result from every-day empirical realism, or any other meta-physical interpretation of the data of perception. Moreover, though that is neither here nor there, the Berkeleyan doctrine is, in my opinion, one which admits of complete formal logical disproof. Yet it would be news to me, and I think to many besides myself, that Berkeleyanism, because leading to no special practical consequences, must be 'meaningless'?
If I may make so bold as to offer a conjecture, Mr. Schiller would probably meet these objections by urging that my illustrations unduly narrow down the range of the concept of the practical. But my difficulty with Mr. Schiller and his friends is precisely that they seem to have themselves no intelligible account to offer of the scope of that concept. And, in consequence, I find myself in a dilemma. Either the meaning of 'practice' has to be so extended that the mere inferability of one proposition from another takes rank as a 'practical consequence,' in which case the first principle of the new creed degenerates into the empty truism that something is implied by any assertion. Or else, you still continue to draw a distinction between the practical consequences of an assertion and other consequences which are merely theoretical. In that case the proposition that the truth of a statement depends solely on its practical, to the entire exclusion of its theoretical, consequences, ceases to be a platitude and becomes a tremendous paradox. And I do not see that it is sufficient proof of the paradox to cry to those who boggle at it, "O fools and slow of heart to believe what the prophets have written". As an illustration of this ambiguous use of the new catch-word, I find that in Mr. Schiller's present utterance the meaning of "practice" is apparently at once to be widened to include what myself and others "imagine" to be the disinterested pursuit of "useless" knowledge, and narrowed down to exclude certain unspecified philosophical doctrines which Mr. Schiller dislikes. In all soberness, Mr. Schiller seems to me to come dangerously near making "practically applicable assertions" mean neither more nor less than "those assertions which I like to admit, and no others".[1]
- ↑ Properly speaking, the former consequences are consequences of the 'truth' itself, the latter consequences of an individual's belief in the
