and Conduct" concerned mainly with bows and arrows and electric lights, and reflective intelligence represented by Edison. Metaphors and illustrations are often more illuminating than arguments. And it may serve again to mark the pragmatic attitude if I say that it would never occur to me to select Edison as a type of reflective inintelligence as long as I could recall the names of Shakespeare or Goethe, Thackeray or Tourgenieff, Newton or Darwin, Washington or Lincoln, or our own William James. It is quite possible that I fail to appreciate the depth of reflection represented by the electric light; yet while the inventor of the pragmatic logic is bowing deferentially to the inventor of the electric light I find myself wondering whether the pragmatic logic, which has been for me a never-ending source of fruitful questions, should not, in terms of reflective intelligence, stand for more than all of the electric apparatus invented to date.

As a final suggestion of the meaning of the pragmatic attitude I will point to the contrast between the pragmatic attitude and the humanistic. The only term of the kind that I have cared to apply to what I call the "critical" view is the rather vague term "humanism". And "humanism" is the term applied by Dr. Schiller of Oxford to his own version of the pragmatic attitude. Professor Dewey seems to prefer almost any other, and I think he is right in feeling that between his pragmatic attitude and what is generally regarded as "humanistic" the difference is fundamental. As an expression of the humanistic attitude I can think of nothing finer than a passage from the close of Walter Pater's essay on "Pico della Mirandola”:

"He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made dim. . . . For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality-no language they

have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.'

"Nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality." One can hardly state the limits of what this may be taken to mean. Such, however, is the attitude of humanism; and at the lowest terms it offers a complete contrast to the attitude of pragmatism. For whatever else the pragmatic attitude may mean, it means this and such is Professor Dewey's constant iteration that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can have more than a passing vitality.1

§ 30

So much for the pragmatic attitude. The pragmatic attitude, speaking in the name of reflective intelligence, makes the past life an instrument for the present. As against this I am urging that an intelligence genuinely reflective will refuse to treat any part of life as a mere means to another. Reflection I will identify with "imagination"; and a reflective living of life means that we live each moment in the light of the largest possible range of imagination.

But what this would mean in terms of a temporal progression, or of a pattern of life, is a question hardly to be answered. Rather it is to be answered in countless ways, but by poets (speaking in the larger sense) rather than by scientifically prosaic philosophers. It seems that life as thus conceived must be ever continuous yet ever creative; ever a present enjoyment which embraces both a fulfilment of the past and a fulfilment of the future. But how? For imagination works variously. It has, for example, a strangely transforming effect upon the common relation

1 See the very interesting essay on "The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge", reprinted in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, 1910.

of means and ends. To go through a hard and dreary grind for an end to be enjoyed only, if at all, in the distant future, is not morality but brutality. Yet so far as the vision of the future is clear some of its enjoyment is realized in the present. Thus we find grown persons more content to wait, happier in the waiting, than children; at least trained to patient resignation. But patient resignation is by no means a moral ideal. If this is the best one can do with the present way of life, it is better to try another. Yet it may also be that imagination directed upon the present means may make them interesting for themselves. Because a man enjoys eating bacon for breakfast he may be willing to cook it-thus far the eating is profit, the cooking is loss. But presently he may discover that to cook bacon properly is a nice problem from the standpoint both of reflective intelligence and of artistic skill; and then he may find himself eating bacon mainly for the pleasure of cooking it. I make the illustration purposely crude to suggest that the distinction of end and means is a function of imagination and that indefinite possibilities of present realization may lie in the reflective treatment of the means. The business man whose professed purpose is to make money may be really interested in "business". Thus far his attitude has ceased to be merely utilitarian.

In a fashion likewise uncertain and difficult to describe, imagination deals with the past. It does of course make the past available for present uses, as instrumentalism claims. But it also makes the past real and present-just as real and just as present, when you are not disturbed by the need of getting on, as the present moment itself. And thus imagination works to destroy that past-and-gone feature of the temporal past which most of all marks the so-called reality of time: nothing would be irrevocable if your imagination were all-sufficient. Again, however, it makes the past desires living. Yet at the same time it may show us that in ways not contemplated at their inception they have been satisfied and fulfilled.

If I should offer an imaginative picture beginning with, "Life is like," the reader would be reminded of the host of parables and metaphors in which men have sought, each according to the quality of his imagination, to concentrate into one picture the whole meaning of life. How shall we picture the life of reflective intelligence-reflective and also (as pragmatism teaches) creative? Resorting thus to metaphor I might say that for me the life of reflective intelligence is not a business enterprise, in which each past term is only a means to a prospective end; nor, again, a logical exposition, in which the premises are interesting only as leading to a conclusion; but more of the nature of a work of art, such as a symphony, in which there is temporal progression yet no distinction among movements of means and ends, each present passage having its own serene worth, quite as retrospective as prospective, and there is no thought of getting anything over and done with. But to make this an experience of living you must put yourself within the movement of the progression. And then, as I conceive, each new present will be indeed, as pragmatists teach, a newly created unity, a new plan of life, the fruit of ripened experience; yet a unity which will gather together the unfulfilled aspirations of the past quite as much as it looks towards the future.

CHAPTER IX

THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT

§ 31. Intelligence and the serpent. § 32. The moral fault and the intellectual. §33. The clever rogue and the simple honest man. §34. The critical life and the question of intelligence. § 35. Intelligence vs. intellect, mathematical and logical. § 36. Intelligence personal and critical.

§ 31

OW the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." This announcement marks the opening of that brief but portentous drama, representing the conflict between authority and intelligence, which comprises the third chapter of Genesis. And the selection of the serpent to play the part of intelligence expresses an ancient and deeply-rooted human prejudice; a prejudice further illustrated by the choice of Mephistopheles or Iago for the villain of the play. Authoritarian moralists, it goes without saying, are committed to a discouragement of intelligence; since it can never be predicted that an exercise of intelligence will confirm authority. And probably many a parent with a son at college is consoled when the lad learns little by the thought that he might learn too much. Related to these is that considerable class of slow-minded but sentimentally "sensitive" persons whose intercourse with others, ever uneasy, seems to be dominated by the fear of exposing their private thinking to the test of criticism. They have indeed the practical justification that the test may serve only to worst them in an argument without proving anything; and one need not be a sentimentalist to realize