Essays Philosophical and Psychological Author:William James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A PRAGMATIC SUBSTITUTE FOR FREE WILL By Edward L. Thorndikb In his recent lectures on Pragmatism Professor James emphasizes the fact that the only issue o... more »f consequence in the free-will controversy is rnej- liorism, for which indeterminism gives possibility.1 It has perhaps not been clearly understood that meliorism is possible without the presupposition that the result of any condition of nature is indeterminate, — without any need of our going against, or even beyond, the scientific, matter-of-fact point of view and habit of interpreting the universe. It seems worth while, then, to show that the natural constitution of the world makes meliorism possible, and, in fact, necessary. If the interpretation of human and animal behavior to be offered in the present paper is true, no one needs to deny the accepted doctrine of the conservation of energy or to abate a jot his allegiance to brain physiology or to swap the logic of science for that of hope in order to justify the faith that we make the world better. Indeed, the one thingwhich can justify that faith is precisely brain- physiology as revealed by animal behavior. 1 "Pragmatism." pp. 118-121. What is meant in the discussion that follows will be abundantly clear to a matter-of-fact mind that interprets the terms used by their contexts, but, in case these terms may have been appropriated by philosophers for certain special meanings, I now define them. I shall use satisfying or satisfiers to mean those states of affairs which, in the case of us human beings, are welcomed, cherished, preferred to exist rather than to not exist, and which, in the case of animals in general, the organism does nothing to avoid, often doing such things as attain and preserve them. I shall use discomforting or annoying or troublers to mean...« less