http://www.bartleby.com/227/1025.html
Most of James’s life was a fight against accepting the monistic philosophy simply because of its æsthetic nobility. He rejected it precisely because it was “too buttoned up and white-chokered, too clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breeding, unconscious kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.” It is true, however, that absorption in the psychologic factor, personal or æsthetic, which actually does make some people prefer a narrowly classic universe and others a generously romantic one, made him obscure the distinction between the causes of belief and the evidence for the truth which we believe. We may all start with a biased or emotional preface, but that is neither evidence nor guaranty of our arriving at scientific truth. Like other violent opponents of intellectualism, James himself falls into the intellectualistic assumption that we must either wholly believe or wholly disbelieve, just as one must either go to church or stay out. He ignores the scientific attitude of suspended judgment and the fact that men may be compelled to act without being constrained in judgment. We may vote for X or Y and yet know that owing to the absence of adequate information our choice has been little more than a blind guess. His interest in vital preferences and his impatience with the emotionally thin air of purely logical argumentation led James, towards the end of his life, to the acceptance of the extreme anti-logical view of Bergson that our logical and mathematical ideas are inherently incapable of revealing the real and changing world. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
