The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
Pure
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262 APPENDIX
Lastly, pragmatism has good ground for resisting
Absolutism, if by Absolutism is meant the doctrine that
demands an Absolute out of all relation to us and
incapable of ever being brought into relation ;
or if it
means a ghostly otiose something, serving no purpose
and explanatory of nothing at all. If the Absolute be
approached from the side of our activities, an Absolute
of the purely intellectual and bloodless type
is an
impossibility.
thought which is not tested
by action and correlated with experience, means nothing,
l
and in the end turns out mere pseudo-thought."
III
But pragmatism or Humanism, with its virtues, has
two of which may here be specialized.
also its defects ;
For one thing, it over-emphasizes action or the will.
In its eagerness to avoid the lop-sidedness of intellectualism,
it is prone to fall into the opposite
extreme of pure voluntarism. It objects to intellectualism
(an objection perfectly relevant to intellectual
monism, Spinozistic or other) that, while the intellectualist
explicitly admits that man is not merely intellect,
but has also feelings and conative impulses which must
be reckoned with by the philosopher, he has no sooner
made the admission than he proceeds to ignore it,
going on his way henceforth unimpeded
it
by and
building up his system on the sole assumption that
man is an intellectual being, and that everything must
be explained and interpreted solely in the light of
reason. But the intellectualist may very well turn
round on the pragmatist and say, You too are very
explicit in your enunciation that man s personality
consists of feeling, intellect, and will (not of one of
1
Mr. Schiller, Personal Idealism, p. 128.