What was the
effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
surrenders.
And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zuerich, attempted to do in his
_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
of our powers.
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