The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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264 APPENDIX
ordinate it to will and feeling as to disparage it ;
thereby forgetting their
own doctrine that man must
be taken in his entire personality, that feeling, intellect,
and will are all functions of human nature, and each is
of co-ordinate value with the others, and that they are,
moreover, mutually implicated where the one is, the
others are also. There can be no real harmony or
complete development of our being, if
any one of these
is
degraded. But sometimes also they write as though
intellect were actually resolved into feeling and volition,
were actually created or
"originated" by action;
thereby confounding things that differ, and dispensing
with that mental function which is perhaps the most
fundamental of all, and without which there could be
no discrimination or apprehension of difference, and,
therefore, no consciousness.
The other defect that calls for notice is, that prag
matism, though strong psychologically , is iveak meta
physically.
Indeed, metaphysics is distasteful to the pragmatist
or humanist: he condemns all noble, clean-cut, fixed,
eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy
(so Professor J
James puts and he
it) gives the
;
following in the humanist s defence: "These con
tradict the temperament of Nature, as our dealings
with Nature and our habits of thinking have so far
brought us to conceive it. They seem oddly personal
and artificial, even when not bureaucratic and pro
fessional in an absurd degree. We turn from them
to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of Truth
as we feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience
as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our
wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual
abodes."
1
See Mind, vol. xiii. p. 467.