The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 263
these alone, but of all three, and all three mutually
implicated and interactive) more
; especially, you insist
that there is "no intellection except for practical
purposes." 1 But immediately you go on as though
will was everything. It suits you, in advocating
voluntarism, to associate intellection with volition
(and rightly enough) but it is no less convenient for
;
you (and this wrongly) forthwith to forget that, if the
theoretical is
nothing apart from the practical, the
practical is always the theoretical in its fulfilment.
This, I say, is what the intellectualist may very
properly rejoin. For there is no question that pragmatists
are disposed to commit two errors.
In the first place, they are apt to forget, and they
do forget, that if
knowledge and morality, if our ideas
and our conduct, are determined by an end or purpose,
this very fact of end or purpose, this very fact of a
plan being presupposed, implies an intellectual factor.
In all conscious actions, intellectual postulates are
involved. We must apprehend what we consciously
aim at, otherwise our volition would become chancedetermined.
The true and the right cannot lie in the
mere realization of an end or purpose, unless the end
or purpose be itself first assumed to be true or right,
unless we have some pre-determined or accepted scale
of values. There are ends and ends ;
and even with
false or unrighteous ends we may, under certain
circumstances, be satisfied : in other words, realizing
an end and resting satisfied therewith characterize the
true and the right, and the false and the wrong, alike ;
and if the distinction between these is to be upheld,
a criterion must be found outside mere desire and its
fulfilment.
But, in the next place, pragmatists deal unfairly
with intellect. Sometimes they ignore it, or so sub-
1
See Professor James, The Will to Believe, p. 140.