Nor is the transformation very
hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
not psychologism.
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