Was James Ward a Cambridge Pragmatist?

Abstract

Although the Cambridge Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic James Ward was once one of Britain's most highly regarded Psychologists and Philosophers, today his work is unjustly neglected. This is because his philosophy is frequently misrepresented as a reactionary anti-naturalistic idealist theism. In this article, I argue, first, that this reading is false, and that by viewing Ward through the lens of pragmatism we obtain a fresh interpretation of his work that highlights the scientific nature of his philosophy and his original and promising theory of ‘evolutionary Kantianism’, with its applications to the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. Second, I show that reading Ward as a pragmatist provides us with (1) a more complex history of the reception of pragmatism at Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century than the straightforwardly hostile one traditionally told; and (2) a more detailed understanding of the wide range of philosophical problems to which pragmatism was deemed at this time to have an appropriate application.

Keywords:

• Ward
• James
• pragmatism
• idealism
• evolution

Notes

1 This article was written during a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to the Institute for providing an atmosphere so conducive to research. I would also like to thank Pauline Phemister, Iain Hamilton Grant, Andrew Pyle, Roberto Gronda, two anonymous referees, and the editor of the Journal for their invaluable input and encouragement. I must also thank David Palfrey for helping me locate and navigate James Ward's unpublished manuscripts.

²Dawes Hicks (‘Prof. Ward's Psychological Principles’, 2) wrote that[t]he Encyclopaedia article came at an opportune moment and signalized a complete revolt from the school of which Bain was the last representative. No sooner was it published than it was recognized as a contribution to the science of first-rate value; it laid the foundation, in fact, of the best psychological work that has been done in this country during the last quarter of a century.See also Brett, History of Psychology, 229–39.

³Published in 1899 as Naturalism and Agnosticism. In his review, Taylor wrote ‘one may assert without much fear of contradiction that Prof. Ward's Gifford Lectures are the philosophical book of the last year’ (‘Critical Notice of Naturalism and Agnosticism’, 244). Due to this work's international popularity, in 1904 Ward was invited to California by the American idealist George Holmes Howison to discuss his work with the Philosophical Union. The newspaper clippings found among Ward's personal papers show that his trip to America was extraordinary. He gave a plenary lecture at the world congress of philosophy, dined with President Roosevelt at the Whitehouse, and gave numerous public lectures across the country. The clippings record that he shocked the locals with his ‘iconoclastic’ views regarding the possible ‘remodelling of Christianity’ and the creation of an altogether new religion. To see copies of these clippings, please contact the author.

⁴The best earlier summaries of Ward's work are Dawes Hicks (‘Philosophy of James Ward’), Cunningham (Idealistic Argument, 169–201), Murray (Philosophy of James Ward), and Passmore (Hundred Years of Philosophy, 81–84). On British Idealism see Mander (British Idealism) and Boucher and Vincent (British Idealism). On the relationship between British idealism and early analytic philosophy, see Candlish (Russell/Bradley Dispute), Hylton (Russell, Idealism), and Mander (British Idealism, 526–56).

⁵Such as Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey (see Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism).

⁶In the early 1870s, Ward spent a year working in Leipzig with the German physiologist Carl Ludwig. When he returned to Cambridge, he studied in Michael Foster's Physiology lab, the first experimental biology lab in Britain, established in 1870 (Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, 5). His publications from this research include ‘Animal Locomotion’ and ‘Physiology of the Nervous System’.

⁷Wall (‘John Venn, James Ward’) argued that Ward's work lacked influence because of the little contact he had with Cambridge's students. However, Ward's writings on Psychology, especially his Encyclopaedia article, were the essential starting point for students of ‘mental philosophy’ (today called ‘philosophy of mind’), whether or not they were taught by him. These writings were compulsory readings, for example, for Moore's course attended by Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Goodman (Wittgenstein and William James) attributes Wittgenstein's reading of Ward's Encyclopaedia article as one of the major sources for his learning of James's ideas, and claims that the article is greatly influenced by James. Goodman fails to note that the original publication of the article preceded James's Principles of Psychology by four years and Ward's work is frequently cited in James's Principles. Much of the work in the Encyclopaedia article was also originally included in Ward's earlier 1883 articles, which James also read. James and Ward first met in 1880, they worked on very similar themes during the same period, and they frequently corresponded. Towards the end of James's life they became close friends (see Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 637–57 and Sokal's introduction to WWJ XIV xxxvii–viii).

⁸I borrow this term from Kuklick (Rise of American Philosophy) who uses it to describe James's pragmatism (cf. Carlson, ‘James and the Kantian Tradition’).

⁹Sometimes a radical empiricist, see RE 437.

¹⁰The term ‘Bioplasm’ or ‘Protoplasm’ was used at the turn of the century to describe the ‘sticky fluid’ inside living cells. As Mayr states, it dropped out of use after the introduction of the electron microscope showed ‘what a complex aggregation of structures the cell contents are, with functions undreamed of by the early students of protoplasm’ (Growth of Biological Thought, 654). A useful definition of protoplasm, which suggests how Ward would have understood this term, is found in the 1895 Century Dictionary. It is An albuminoid substance, ordinarily resembling the white of an egg, consisting of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen in extremely complex and unstable molecular combination, and capable, under proper conditions, of manifesting certain vital phenomena, as spontaneous motion, sensation, assimilation, and reproduction, thus constituting the physical basis of all plants and animals. (C VI 4799)Fleshing out the analogy between ‘bioplasm’ and ‘psychoplasm’ Ward wrote thatBetween the advance from the egg to the chicken and that from the child's mind to the man's, the parallel, mutatis mutandis, is very close. At the beginning pronounced homogeneity, plasticity, potentiality, rather than defined features; at the close pronounced heterogeneity, structure, actuality—disclosing a person with unique traits … At every step the subjective and the objective aspects, function and structure, the experient and the experience, mutually mould and modify each other. (PP 410)Although, protoplasm is an out-dated biological concept, the analogy is an important illumination both of Ward's theory of a presentational continuum and his efforts to bring biology and psychology together. His rejection of the ‘mechanistic’ model of mental chemistry, therefore, should not be read as an attempt to distance psychology from the sciences. Ward sometimes even suggests that due to the similarities in the genetic methods of both psychology and biology, the former might be better simply called biology (‘Psychological Principles I’, 166–7).

¹¹See Dupré (Human Nature, Processes of Life, 245–60) for a convincing critique of the premises of evolutionary psychology.

¹²See Klein (‘Science, Religion, and the Will to Believe’) for an excellent reconciliationist reading of James's paper. For a contrary reading see Misak (American Pragmatists, 60–7).

¹³James wrote that ‘[w]e live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards’ (WWJ I 107).

¹⁴Ward was also a direct influence on Dewey (see Dewey, Psychology 1887, 13; and Psychology 1891, vi).

¹⁵Ward suggested to James that he should ‘confine truth to ideas, say not that truth exists but that it is valid, & you have simpler problem. No sane man wishes truth to be other than it is’ (WJC XII 372; cf. RE 414–15).

¹⁶On Peirce's metaphysics see Hookway (Peirce, 262–88) and Reynolds (Peirce's Scientific Metaphysics).

¹⁷Especially his (1891) ‘Architecture of Theories’ (TEP I 285–97).

¹⁸On James's metaphysics see Myers (‘Pragmatist Metaphysics’) and Sprigge (James and Bradley).

¹⁹James stressed the closeness between certain aspects of his metaphysical views with Ward's on the final page of his posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (WWJ VII 110 n.3).

²⁰The main purpose of this section has been to show that on the basis of the principles elaborated in §1 Ward developed a distinctly pragmatic metaphysics. A full defence of such metaphysics is beyond the scope of this article, but I hope to present such a defence, particularly of Ward's metaphysics, elsewhere.