He began by trying to explain this divide, proposing that there are two very different basic forms of ‘intellectual temperament,’ what he called the ‘tough-’ and ‘tender-minded.’ He did not actually say that he thought these temperaments were genetically endowed – 1907 was a bit early for anyone to use such a term – but his choice of the word temperament clearly hints at such a view. He thought that the people of one temperament invariably had a low opinion of the other and that a clash between the two was inevitable. In his first lecture he characterised them as follows:
Tender-minded Tough-minded Rationalistic (going by principle) Empiricist (going by facts) Optimistic Pessimistic Religious Irreligious Free-willist Fatalistic Dogmatic Pluralistic Materialistic Sceptical
One of his main reasons for highlighting this division was to draw attention to how the world was changing: ‘Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific.’10
Nevertheless, this did not make James a scientific atheist; in fact it led him to pragmatism (he, after all, had published an important book Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902).11 He thought that philosophy should above all be practical, and here he acknowledged his debt to Peirce. Beliefs, Peirce had said, ‘are really rules for action.’ James elaborated on this theme, concluding that ‘the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one…. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.’12 Metaphysics, which James regarded as primitive, was too attached to the big words – ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘the Absolute.’ But these, he said, were only worth dwelling on insofar as they had what he called ‘practical cash value.’ What difference did they make to the conduct of life? Whatever it is that makes a practical difference to the way we lead our lives, James was prepared to call ‘truth.’ Truth was/is not absolute, he said. There are many truths, and they are only true so long as they are practically useful. That truth is beautiful doesn’t make it eternal. This is why truth is good: by definition, it makes a practical difference. James used his approach to confront a number of metaphysical problems, of which we need consider only one to show how his arguments worked: Is there such a thing as the soul, and what is its relationship to consciousness? Philosophers in the past had proposed a ‘soul-substance’ to account for certain kinds of intuitive experience, James wrote, such as the feeling that one has lived before within a different identity. But if you take away consciousness, is it practical to hang on to ‘soul’? Can a soul be said to exist without consciousness? No, he said. Therefore, why bother to concern oneself with it? James was a convinced Darwinist, evolution he thought was essentially a pragmatic approach to the universe; that’s what adaptations – species – are.13
America’s third pragmatic philosopher, after Peirce and James, was John Dewey. A professor in Chicago, Dewey boasted a Vermont drawl, rimless eyeglasses, and a complete lack of fashion sense. In some ways he was the most successful pragmatist of all. Like James he believed that everyone has his own philosophy, his own set of beliefs, and that such philosophy should help people to lead happier and more productive lives. His own life was particularly productive: through newspaper articles, popular books, and a number of debates conducted with other philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell or Arthur Lovejoy, author of The Great Chain of Being, Dewey became known to the general public as few philosophers are.14 Like James, Dewey was a convinced Darwinist, someone who believed that science and the scientific approach needed to be incorporated into other areas of life. In particular, he believed that the discoveries of science should be adapted to the education of children. For Dewey, the start of the twentieth century was an age of ‘democracy, science and industrialism,’ and this, he argued, had profound consequences for education. At that time, attitudes to children were changing fast. In 1909 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key published her book The Century of the Child, which reflected the general view that the child had been rediscovered – rediscovered in the sense that there was a new joy in the possibilities of childhood and in the realisation that children were different from adults and from one another.15 This seems no more than common sense to us, but in the nineteenth century, before the victory over a heavy rate of child mortality, when families were much larger and many children died, there was not – there could not be – the same investment in children, in time, in education, in emotion, as there was later. Dewey saw that this had significant consequences for teaching. Hitherto schooling, even in America, which was in general more indulgent to children than Europe, had been dominated by the rigid authority of the teacher, who had a concept of what an educated person should be and whose main aim was to convey to his or her pupils the idea that knowledge was the ‘contemplation of fixed verities.’16
Dewey was one of the leaders of a movement that changed such thinking, in two directions. The traditional idea of education, he saw, stemmed from a leisured and aristocratic society, the type of society that was disappearing fast in the European democracies and had never existed in America. Education now had to meet the needs of democracy. Second, and no less important, education had to reflect the fact that children were very different from one another in abilities and interests. For children to make the best contribution to society they were capable of, education should be less about ‘drumming in’ hard facts that the teacher thought necessary and more about drawing out what the individual child was capable of. In other words, pragmatism applied to education.
Dewey’s enthusiasm for science was reflected in the name he gave to the ‘Laboratory School’ that he set up in 1896.17 Motivated partly by the ideas of Johann Pestalozzi, a pious Swiss educator, and the German philosopher Friedrich Fröbel, and by the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the institution operated on the principle that for each child there were negative and positive consequences of individuality. In the first place, the child’s natural abilities set limits to what it was capable of. More positively, the interests and qualities within the child had to be discovered in order to see where ‘growth’ was possible. Growth was an important concept for the ‘child-centred’ apostles of the ‘new education’ at the beginning of the century. Dewey believed that since antiquity society had been divided into leisured and aristocratic classes, the custodians of knowledge, and the working classes, engaged in work and practical knowledge. This separation, he believed, was fatal, especially in a democracy. Education along class lines must be rejected, and inherited notions of learning discarded as unsuited to democracy, industrialism, and the age of science.18