A Strange Hymn Laura Thalassa

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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2017, 2023 by Laura Thalassa

Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks

Cover design by Amanda Hudson/Faceout Studio

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Contents
Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17
Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37
Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Epilogue

Excerpt from The Emperor of Evening Stars

Chapter 1

Glossary

About the Author

Back Cover

Astrid,

For you, the universe.

Mighty Nyx came,

Mighty Nyx sought

All that he could

Of his dark lot.

In the deep night,

His kingdom rose.

Beware, great king,

Of that which grows.

Easy to conquer,

Easy to crown,

But even the strongest

Can be cut down.

Raised in the shadows,

Reared in the night,

Your child will come

And ascend by might.

And you, the slain,

Shall wait and see

What other things

A soul can be.

A body to curse,

A body to blame,

A body the earth

Will not yet claim.

Beware the mortal

Beneath your sky.

Crush the human

Who’ll see you die.

Twice you’ll rise,

Twice you’ll fall,

Lest you can

Change it all.

Or perish by day,

Perish by dawn.
The world believes

You’re already gone.

So darken your heart,

My shadow king,

And let us see

What war will bring.

— The Prophecy of Galleghar Nyx

Chapter 1

Wings.

I have wings.

The iridescent black feathers glint under the dim lights of Des’s royal
chambers: now black, now

green, now blue.

Wings.

I stand in front of one of Des’s gilded mirrors, both horrified and

transfixed by the sight. Even

folded, the tops of my wings loom well above my head, and the tips
brush the back of my bare calves.

Of course, wings aren’t the only difference about me. After a

particularly nasty skirmish with

Karnon, the mad King of Fauna, I now have scaly forearms and
claw-tipped fingers too.
And those are just the changes you can see. There’s nothing—
except maybe the wounded look in my

eyes—that I have to show for all those parts of me that were altered
in different, more fundamental

ways.

I spent the better part of a decade fighting the idea that I was a
victim. I’d done a damn fine job of it

too—if I do say so myself—before I came to the Otherworld. And

then came Karnon. A small shiver

courses through me even now as I remember.

All those cleverly crafted layers of armor I wore were shucked away
by a week of imprisonment,

and I’m not quite sure how to deal with it.

To be honest, I really don’t want to deal with it.

But, as bad as I have it, the Master of Animals got it worse. Des
vaporized the dude so completely

that all that’s left of him is a bloodstain on the remains of his throne
room.

Apparently, one does not fuck with the Night King’s mate.

Mate.

That’s another thing I’ve acquired recently—a soul mate. I’m bound
to Desmond Flynn, the

Bargainer: one of the most wanted criminals on earth and one of the
most powerful fae here in the
Otherworld.

But even that—matehood—is more complicated than it appears.

I still have so many questions about our bond, like the fact I never
knew I had a soul mate until a

few weeks ago. Other supernaturals find out this kind of thing back
when they’re teenagers and their

magic Awakens.

So why didn’t I?

There’s also the fact most soul mates can feel the bond that
connects them to their mate like it’s a

physical thing.

I place a hand over my heart.

I’ve felt no such thing.

All I have is Des’s word that we’re soul mates—that and the sweet
ache in my bones that calls for

him and only him.

I drop my hand from my chest.

Behind my reflection, stars glitter just beyond the arched windows of

Des’s Otherworld suite. The

hanging lanterns dangle unlit, and the sparkling lights captured

along the wall sconces have long since

dimmed.
I’m stuck here in the Kingdom of Night.

I doubt there are all that many supernaturals who would complain
about my situation—mated to a

king, forced to live in a palace—but the simple, sobering truth is that

a girl like me cannot waltz back

onto earth with giant wings protruding from her back.

That sort of thing wouldn’t go over well.

So I’m stuck here, far from my friends—okay, friend, but, in all

fairness, Temper’s got the power

and attitude of at least two people—in a place where my ability to

glamour, a.k.a. seduce, others with

my voice is essentially useless. Fairies, as I’ve learned, cannot be

glamoured; my magic is too

incompatible with theirs.

To be clear, that’s not a two-way street. They can still use their
powers on me; the bracelet on my

wrist is proof enough of that.

My eyes return to my wings, my strange, unearthly wings.

“You know, staring at them isn’t going to make them go away.”

I jolt at the sound of Des’s silky voice.

He leans against the wall in a shadowy corner of his dark bedroom,

his expression irreverent as
usual. His white-blond hair frames his face, and even now, even
when I’m bashful and exposed and

oddly ashamed of my own skin, my fingers ache to thread

themselves through that soft hair of his and

pull him close.

He wears nothing but low-slung pants, his muscular torso and sleeve
of tattoos on display. My heart

quickens at the sight. The two of us stare at each other for a beat.
He doesn’t come any closer, though

I swear he wants to. I can all but see it in his silver eyes.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I say quietly.

“I don’t mind being woken,” he says, his eyes glittering. He doesn’t

move from his spot.

“How long have you been there?” I ask.

He crosses his arms over his bare torso, cutting off my view of his
pecs. “Better question: How

long have you been there?”

So typical for Des to answer a question with a question.

I turn back to the mirror. “I can’t sleep.”

I really can’t. It’s not the bed, and it’s definitely not the man who
warms it. Every time I try to flip

onto my stomach or my back, I inevitably roll over a wing and wake

myself up.
There’s also the little matter of the sun never rising in this place. The
Kingdom of Night is

perpetually cast in darkness, as it draws the night across the sky.

There will never be a time when the

sun glances into this room, so I never know when exactly to wake
up.

Des disappears from his spot against the wall. A split second later,
he appears at my back.

His lips brush the shell of my ear. “There are better ways to spend
long sleepless evenings,” Des

says softly, one of his hands trailing down my arm.

My siren stirs at his words, my skin taking on the faintest glow.

His lips graze the side of my neck, and even that lightest of touches
has my breath hitching.

But then I catch sight of my reflection and see the wings. The glow
leaves my skin in an instant.

Des notices the moment my interest wanes, moving away from me

like he was never there. And I

hate that. I feel the distance between us. But I don’t want him to
give me space—I want him to pull

me closer, kiss me deeper, make me extinguish this new insecurity I

have.

“These wings…”

Des comes around to my front. “What about them?” he asks,

blocking my view of the mirror.
I lift my chin. “They’d get in the way.”

He raises an eyebrow. “In the way of what?”

As if he’s unaware of exactly what we’re dancing around.

“Of playing chess,” I say sarcastically. “Of…intimacy.”

Des stares at me for several seconds then his mouth slowly curls
into a smile. It’s a smile full of

tricks and mischievous things.

He steps in close, only a hairbreadth between our faces. “Cherub, I

assure you, your wings will not

be an issue.” His gaze dips to my lips. “But perhaps your mind would
be better eased with a

demonstration?”

At his suggestion, light flares beneath my skin, my siren immediately

ready to go. Whatever my

insecurities are, she doesn’t share them.

I look over my shoulder at my wings, and my worries come roaring

back. “Aren’t they a major

turnoff?”

The moment the words leave my lips, I wish I could catch them and
shove them back down my

throat.

The only thing I hate worse than feeling like a victim is airing my
insecurities. Normally I don all
my emotional armor to hide them—sometimes so deep, I forget
they’re there—but after my ordeal

with Karnon, that armor is lying scattered somewhere around my

feet, and I haven’t yet had the time

or the will to refashion a new set for myself. I’m horribly raw and
painfully vulnerable.

Des raises an eyebrow. At his back, his own wings, which I haven’t
noticed until now, expand. The

leathery silver skin of them pulls taut as they extend to either side of
him, blocking out most of the

room.

“You do realize almost all fae have wings?”

I know they do. But I never have.

I hold up a forearm. In the dim light, the golden scales that plate my
arm from wrist to elbow

shimmer like jewelry. On the tips of my fingers, my nails glint black.

They’re not sharpened at the

moment (thanks to meticulously filing them down), but the second

my siren gets a little angry, they’ll

grow back into curving points.

“How about this?” I ask. “Do most fae have this?”

He clasps my hand in his own. “It doesn’t matter one way or

another. You are mine.” Des kisses the
palm of my hand, and somehow, he manages to make my
insecurities feel small and petty.

He doesn’t release my hand, and I stare at the scales.

“Will they ever go away?” I ask.

His grip tightens. “Do you want them to?”

I should know that voice by now. I should hear the warning notes in
it, the dangerous lilt. But I

don’t, too consumed with my own self-pity.

I meet his eyes. “Yes.”

I get that I’m being a poor sport. Rather than making lemonade out
of lemons, I’m pretty much

cutting open those lemons and squeezing them into my eyes.

My heart speeds up as he fingers one of the hundreds of beads that

still circle my wrist, each one an

IOU for a favor I cashed in long ago.

His eyes flick to mine. “Truth or dare?”

Des’s gaze twinkles as he plays with the bead on my wrist, waiting

for my answer.

Truth or dare?

This is the little game he loves to make out of my repayment plan.

To me, it feels less like the game

ten-year-old girls play at slumber parties and a whole lot more like
Russian roulette with a fully
loaded weapon.

I stare the Bargainer down, his silver eyes both so foreign and so
familiar.

I don’t answer fast enough.

He gives my wrist the lightest of squeezes. “Dare,” he says for me.

The part of me that enjoys sex and violence quakes with excitement,
wanting whatever Des offers.

The rest of me is starting to think I should be scared shitless. This is

the same man known around

these parts as the King of Chaos. Just because we’re mates doesn’t
mean he’ll go easy on me. He’s

still the same wicked man I met eight years ago.

Des smiles, the sight almost sinister. A moment later, a pile of

leathers fall to the floor next to me. I

stare down at them dumbly, not understanding what it is he dared

me to.

For all I know, I just got royally fucked over.

Actually, I’m almost positive I got fucked over.

“Suit up,” Des says, releasing my wrist. “It’s time to start your
training.”

Chapter 2

How hard is it to fight a warrior king without the use of glamour?

Really freaking hard.

The bastard dared me to train with him. And if that sounds vague,
that’s because he meant it to be.

I don’t know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, or how long I’ll be
doing it for. All I know is that

Des gave me leathers and a sword several hours ago, and ever since
then, he’s been systematically

nicking those training leathers and swiping my sword out of my

hand.

Above us, little orbs of light—fairy lights—glitter from the trees

arching over the royal courtyard

that’s doubling as our training ground. They hover over the gurgling
fountain and dot the hedges that

surround us. Beyond them, the stars shine like diamonds, brighter
and denser than any constellations

I’ve seen on earth.

“Lift your elbow,” Des says for the millionth time, snapping me back
to attention. This is just one of

his many instructions…

“The strike must start from your shoulder. The arm is merely the
follow-through.”

“Keep your center of gravity steady. Nothing but a death blow should
make you lose your

balance.”

“Fleet-footed, Callie. What you don’t have in girth, you must make
up for in speed.”
Another random document with
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 activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite
inexplicable.
168
There are, of course, no heavens in the old mediaeval and
Aristotelian sense after the work of Copernicus and Galileo in
the physical sciences, and of Kant in the realm of mind.
169
Professor Moore well points out (Pragmatism and its Critics, p.
13) that the “challenge” of the idea that our thinking has “two
foundations: one, as the method of purposing—its ‘practical’
function; the other as merely the expression of the specific and
independent instinct to know—its ‘intellectual’ function,” marks
the “beginnings of the pragmatic movement.” The idea of two
kinds of thought goes back to Aristotle and is one of the most
famous distinctions of thought. It dominated the entire Middle
Ages, and it is still at the root of the false idea that “culture” can
be separated from work and service for the common good. I
am glad, as I indicate in the text, a few lines further on, that the
idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in breaking
it up. In America there is no practical distinction between
culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as
Americanism.
170
The importance of this consideration about the “attention” that
is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all
“perception,” cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in
childhood and throughout life in the main what interests us,
and what affects our total and organic activity. It is, that is to
say, our motor activity, and its direction, that determine what
we see and perceive and experience. And in the higher
reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion and
philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our
reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in
other words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we
call impulse and effort and will. Modern philosophy has
forgotten this in its treatment of our supposed perception of the
world, taking this to be something given instead of something
that is constructed by our activity. Hence its long struggle to
 overcome both the apparent materialism of the world of the
senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that has been created by
Rationalism between the world as we think it, and the world as
it really is.
171
E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St.
Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy.
“Theory does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of
conation” (p. 9). It “should no doubt be understood as Theoria,
or the entire unimpeded life of the soul” (p. 11; italics mine).
172
This is surely the teaching of the new physics in respect of the
radio-active view of matter. I take up this point again in the
Bergson chapter.
173
See p. 238.
174
See p. 143 or p. 229 (note).
175
See p. 34 in Chapter II. in reference to the idea of M. Blondel.
176
See p. 147 and p. 265.
177
See p. 65, note 3.
178
See p. 192, note 3.
179
Needham, General Biology, 1911. For the mention of this book
as a reliable recent manual I am indebted to my colleague,
Professor Willey of McGill University.
180
Marett, Anthropology, p. 155.
181
Cf. supra, p. 101.
182
So much may, I suppose, be inferred from the contentions
(explicit and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human
life they all seem to regard as a kind of continuity or
development of the life of universal nature, whether their
theory of the origin of life be that of (1) “spontaneous
 generation,” (2) “cosmozoa” (germs capable of life scattered
throughout space), (3) “Preyer’s theory of the continuity of life,”
(4) “Pflüger’s theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,”
or (5) the conclusion of Verworn himself, “that existing
organisms are derived in uninterrupted descent from the first
living substance that originated from lifeless substance”
(General Physiology, p. 315).
183
Creative Evolution, pp. 245–5.
184
It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this
very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come
together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact,
of action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of
the new physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought
psychology into line with the natural sciences by defining its
subject-matter as the actions or the “behaviour” of human
beings and animals. And it is surely not difficult to see that—as
I try to indicate—it is in human behaviour that philosophy and
science come together. Another consideration in respect of the
philosophy of action that has long impressed me is this. If there
is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our traditional
rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came together
in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of
human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire
philosophy of sensations in the matter of the proof of
utilitarianism that caused John Stuart Mill to take up the “social
philosophy” in respect to which the followers of positivism
joined hands with the idealists.
185
See p. 185.
186
See p. 27.
187
See Chapter VII. p. 179.
188
I am thinking of Pyrrho and Arcesilaus and some of the Greek
sceptics and of their ἐποχή and ἀταραξία.
189
See p. 26.
190
Man’s Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and
reviews published by the author during the last four or five
years. They all advocate “humanism in opposition to
naturalism,” or “ethicism in opposition to a too narrow
intellectualism.”
191
The Will to Believe, 1897.
192
“Progress in Philosophy,” art. Mind, 15, p. 213.
193
Practical Ethics; Essays.
194
Mental Development—Social and Ethical Interpretations (a
work crowned by the Royal Academy of Denmark). We can
see in this book how a psychologist has been led into a far-
reaching study of social and ethical development in order to
gain an understanding of the growth of even the individual
mind. We may indeed say that the individualistic intellectualism
of the older psychology is now no more. It was too “abstract” a
way of looking at mind. Professor Royce, it is well known, has
given, from the stand-point of a professed metaphysician, a
cordial welcome to the work of Professor Baldwin. In an
important review of Mr. Stout’s two admirable volumes on
Analytic Psychology (Mind, July, 1897), Professor Royce has
insisted strongly upon the need of supplementing introspection
by the “interpretation of the reports and the conduct of other
people” if we would know much about “dynamic” psychology. It
is this “dynamic” psychology—the “dynamics” of the will and of
the “feelings”—that I think constitutes such an important
advance upon the traditional “intellectual” and “individualistic”
psychology.
195
The Psychology of the Moral Self. Macmillan, 1897. I have
tried, in a short notice of this book in the Philosophical Review
(March, 1898), to indicate the importance of some of its chief
contentions.
196
Philosophical Lectures and Remains, edited by Professor
Bradley.
197
Editor of La Science Sociale. His recent work on the
Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons (À quoi tient la supériorité des
Anglo-Saxons?)—a chapter in the study of the conditions of
race survival—ran through seventeen editions in a few months,
and set the whole press of France and Germany (other
countries following suit) into commotion, as well as calling forth
pronunciamientos from most of the prominent editors and
critics of France,—men like Jules Lemaître, Paul Bourget,
Marcel Prevost, François Coppée, Édouard Rod, G. Valbert,
etc.
198
Now Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison.
199
In different ways by all of the following English writers:
Professor A. Seth (“It is not in knowledge, then, as such, but in
feeling and action that reality is given,” Man’s Place, etc., p.
122, etc. etc.), by Mr. Bradley (Appearance and Reality), by Mr.
Balfour (in his Foundations of Belief), and by Professor James.
Professor Eucken, of Jena, in his different books, also insists
strongly upon the idea that it is not in knowledge as such, but
in the totality of our psychical experience that the principles of
philosophy must be sought. Paulsen, in his Einleitung in die
Philosophie, and Weber, in his History of Philosophy (books in
general use to-day), both advocate a kind of philosophy of the
will, the idea that the world is to be regarded as a striving on
the part of wills after a partly unconscious ideal. Simmel, in an
important article in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale,
IV. 2, expresses the idea (which it would be well to recognize
generally at the present time) that truth is not something
objectively apart from us, but rather the name we give to
conceptions that have proved to be the guides to useful
actions, and so become part of the psychical heritage of
human beings. Professor Ribot, of Paris, has written more
extensively upon the will and the feelings than upon the
 intellect,—a fact in keeping with the scientific demands of our
day.
200
See, e.g., an article by Fouillée in the Revue Philosophique,
XXI. 5, with the very title “Nécessité d’une interprétation
psychologique et sociologique du monde.” Fouillée finds there,
as he does elsewhere, that will is the principle that enables us
to unify the physical with the psychical world,—an illustration of
the fact that the two characteristics I am referring to are really
one. A present instance of the introduction of the element of
will (the will of man, even) is to be seen in the contention of
such a book as M. Lucien Arréat’s Les Croyances de Demain
(1898). According to Mind, M. Arréat proposes to substitute the
idea that man can by his efforts bring about the supremacy of
justice for the traditional idea that justice reigns in the universe.
201
Manual of Ethics, according to Mr. Stout, International Journal
of Ethics, October 1894. There are many similar sentences
and ideas in the book.
202
Elements of Ethics, p. 232.
203
Now Professor of Logic in St. Andrews.
204
International Journal of Ethics, October 1894, p. 119.
205
I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson’s
Christianity and Idealism.
206
And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of
which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert
Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become,
Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a
personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical
rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this
romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I
would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this
heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time,
and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom
 this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was
exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for
example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant,
clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in Literature,
p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the
cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same
thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy.
Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was
also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or
by conviction—hence the elevation of his tone and style in
spite of his belated naturalism.
207
In Un Romantisme utilitaire (Paris, Alcan, 1911), chiefly a study
of the Pragmatism of Nietzsche and Poincaré.
208
I am indebted for this saying of one of my old teachers to Mr.
C. F. G. Masterman, in his essay upon Sidgwick in that
judicious and interesting book upon the transition from the
nineteenth to the twentieth century, In Peril of Change.
209
Stoicism and Epicureanism, as the matter is generally put,
both substitute the practical good of man as an individual for
the wisdom or the theoretical perfection that were
contemplated by Plato and Aristotle as the highest objects of
human pursuit. For Cicero, too, the chief problems of
philosophy were in the main practical, the question whether
virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, the problem of practical
certainty as opposed to scepticism, the general belief in
Providence and in immortality, and so on. And Lucretius thinks
of the main service of philosophy as consisting in its power of
emancipating the human mind from superstition. All this is
quite typical of the essentially practical nature of the Roman
character, of its conception of education as in the main
discipline and duty, of its distrust of Greek intellectualism, and
of its preoccupation with the necessities of the struggle for
existence and for government, of its lack of leisure, and so on.
I do not think that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its
 desire to return to a practical conception of life, although a
tendency in this direction doubtless exists in it.
210
The idea that our “demonstrable knowledge is very short, if
indeed we have any at all, although our certainty is as great as
our happiness, beyond which we have no concernment to
know or to be” (Essay, iv. 2–14); or Locke’s words: “I have
always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their
thoughts.”
211
Schopenhauer, for example, used to be fond of repeating that
his own philosophy (which took will to be the fundamental
reality) was on its very face necessarily more of an ethic than a
system like that of Spinoza, for example, which could only be
called an ethic by a sort of lucus a non lucendo.
212
The Practical Reason to Aristotle is the reason that has to do
with the pursuit of aims and ends, in distinction from the
reason that has to do with knowledge, and the “universal” and
science. This twofold distinction has given many problems to
his students and to his commentators, and to succeeding
generations. It is responsible for the entire mediæval and
Renaissance separation of the intellectual life and the
intellectual virtues from the practical life and the practical
virtues.
213
It might be added here that Logic has always recognized the
validity, to some extent, of the argument “from consequences”
of which Pragmatism makes so much. The form of
argumentation that it calls the Dilemma is a proof of this
statement. A chain of reasoning that leads to impossible
consequences, or that leads to consequences inconsistent
with previously admitted truths, is necessarily unsound. That
this test of tenable or untenable consequences has often been
used in philosophy in the large sense of the term must be
known only too well to the well-informed reader. As Sidgwick
says in his Method of Ethics: “The truth of a philosopher’s
premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his
 conclusions; if in any important point he is found in flagrant
conflict with common opinion, his method will be declared
invalid.” Reid used the argument from consequences in his
examination of the sceptical philosophy of Hume. It is used
with effect in Mr. Arthur Balfour’s Foundations of Belief in
regard to the supposed naturalism of physical science.
Edmund Burke applied it to some extent to political theories, or
to the abstract philosophical theories upon which some of them
were supposedly based.
214
Pragmatism has been called by some critics a “new-Humism”
on the ground of its tendency to do this very thing that is
mentioned here in respect of Hume. But the justice or the
injustice of this appellation is a very large question, into which
it is needless for us to enter here.
215
Cf. “Intelligence is the aptitude to modify conduct in conformity
to the circumstances of each case” (The Positive Philosophy,
Martineau, i. 465).
216
Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. It is also an eminently
pragmatist idea on the part of Descartes to hold that “I should
find much more truth in the reasoning of each individual with
reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested,
and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has
judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in
his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical
moment” (Method, Veitch’s edition, p. 10).
217
Principles of Philosophy, Part II. iii. p. 233.
218
See Principles of Psychology, ch. ii., “Assumption of
Metaphysicians,” and also elsewhere in his Essays.
219
“Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight
was held by us to be the definition of existence” (Sophist,
Jowett’s Plato, iv. p. 465).
220
The Theory of Knowledge, Preface, p. ix.
221
“The independence of the doctrines of any science from the
social life, the prevalent thought of the generation in which they
arise, is indeed a fiction, a superstition of the scientist which
we would fain shatter beyond all repair; but the science
becomes all the sounder for recognizing its origins and its
resources, its present limitations and its need of fresh light
from other minds, from different social moulds” (pp. 215–216).
222
See p. 81.
223
Cf. p. 13.
224
The New Knowledge, p. 255.
225
It would indeed be easy to quote from popular writers of the
day, like Mr. Chesterton or Mr. A. C. Benson or Mr. H. G. Wells,
to show that a knowledge of the existence of Pragmatism as a
newer experimental or “sociological” philosophy is now a
commonplace of the day. Take the following, for example, from
Mr. Wells’s Marriage (p. 521): “It was to be a pragmatist essay,
a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that
scholastic logic-chopping which still lingers like the sequelae of
a disease in our University philosophy ... a huge criticism and
cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation as a
preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those religious
and social issues our generation still shrinks from.” “It is
grotesque,” he said, “and utterly true that the sanity and
happiness of all the world lies in its habits of generalization.”
226
I cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I
remember copying it out of something by Karl Pearson.
227
In the Literary Digest for 1911.
228
See p. 234.
229
From a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, quoted in A. C. Benson’s
Walter Pater, p. 200.
230
Lecture I. towards the beginning.
231
See p. 62 and p. 197. It should be remembered that our
reasoned opinions rest upon our working beliefs.
232
Vol. ii. p. 86.
233
See the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic
of Prezzolini.
234
In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.
235
Cf. p. 81.
236
Professor Pratt makes an attempt in his book on What is
Pragmatism? (pp. 75–6–7) to show that the true meaning of
the “correspondence theory” is not inconsistent with
Pragmatism or that Pragmatism is not inconsistent with this
truth.
237
Cf. supra, p. 64.
238
See the Note on p. 21.
239
Cf. supra, p. 67.
240
Papini, in fact (in 1907), went the length of saying that you
cannot even define Pragmatism, admitting that it appeals only
to certain kinds of persons.
241
For a serviceable account, in English, of the differences
between the pragmatist philosophy of hypotheses and the
more fully developed philosophy of science of the day, see
Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, chapter xiii., upon
“Pragmatism and Physical Science.”
242
Cf. supra, p. 10 and p. 15. And this failure to systematize
becomes, it should be remembered, all the more exasperating,
in view of the prominence given by the pragmatists to the
supreme principles of “end” and “consequences.”
243
In the “Axioms as Postulates” essay in Personal Idealism.
244
Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists
have the illusion that “reality is unstable.” Professor Stout has
something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller’s “primary
reality” in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only
the reality with which we have to do (reality πρὸς ἡμᾶς as an
Aristotelian might say) that is “in the making”: for God there
can be no such distinction between process and product. But it
is quite evident that Pragmatism does not go far enough to
solve, or even to see, such difficulties. It confines itself in the
main to the contention that man must think of himself as a
maker of reality to some extent—a contention that I hold to be
both true and useful, as far as it goes.
245
Pragmatism, p. 264.
246
“Pragmatism,” October 1900.
247
The same line of reflection will be found in James’s
Pragmatism, p. 96.
248
Professor Moore has a chapter in his book (Pragmatism and
its Critics) devoted to the purpose of showing the necessary
failure of Absolutism (or of an Intellectualism of the absolutist
order) in the realm of ethics, finding in the experimentalism and
the quasi-Darwinism of Pragmatism an atmosphere that is, to
say the least, more favourable to the realities of our moral
experience. While I cannot find so much as he does in the hit-
and-miss ethical philosophy of Pragmatism, I quite sympathize
with him in his rejection of Absolutism or Rationalism as a
basis for ethics. The following are some of his reasons for this
rejection: (1) The “purpose” that is involved in the ethical life
must, according to Absolutism, be an all-inclusive and a fixed
purpose, allowing of no “advance” and no “retreat”—-things
that are imperative to the idea of the reality of our efforts. (2)
Absolutism does not provide for human responsibility; to it all
actions and purposes are those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical
 ideal of Absolutism is too “static.” (4) Absolutism does not
provide any material for “new goals and new ideals.” See pp.
218–225 in my eighth chapter, where I censure, in the interest
of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical philosophy of
Professor Bosanquet.
249
See p. 224, where I arrive at the conclusion that the same
thing may be said of the Absolutism of Dr. Bosanquet.
250
Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon
Ethics, the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will
remember that Sidgwick expressly states it as a grave
argument against Utilitarianism that it is by no means
confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral distinctions.
As we go back in history we do not find that moral
prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
251
What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science”
will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state,
however, that I look upon the distinction between the
“descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of
the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both
fundamental and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were,
that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of
philosophy—-“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis
and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute
the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of
facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the
“methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main
concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown
itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical
science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences
(ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of
reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality.
252
Cf. Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism (vol. ii. p.
155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own
 experience is, I repeat, objective reality in the most
fundamental sense.”
253
Introduction to Science, p. 137.
254
“But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of
events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there
emerged the supreme Mammal, who by and by had a theory of
it all, then the primitive Amoebae which had in them the
promise and the potency of all this were very wonderful
Amoebae indeed. There must have been more in them than
met the eye! We must stock them, with initiatives at least. We
are taking a good deal as ‘given.’” [Italics mine.]—J. H.
Thomson, Introduction to Science, p. 137.
255
See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii.
generally. The sentence further down in respect of the
permanent fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse,
vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of
things like the “purity of the home, truthfulness, hospitality,
help”, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao
Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness
revealed in the Book of the Dead, of the contributions of
monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
256
Cf. p. 167.
257
It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to
some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others
have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”—its
tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may
also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the
divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact
that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of
the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the
heavens (impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of the Stoic
sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as
Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates)
 that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to
the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of
thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism”
of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert,
I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the
Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction”
and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little
whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We
know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and
consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not
Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
258
By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon
our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific
items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what
not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our
total general activity of all the particular happenings and
incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast
system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical
organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which
we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience.
And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of
the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and
memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single
lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the
present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might
interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like
the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some
things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the
highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we
attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course
of events—the significance upon which the philosophy of
history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the Philosophy
of History in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s Kultur der
Gegenwart.
259
See our second chapter upon the different continental and
British representatives of the hypothetical treatment of
 scientific laws and conceptions that is such a well-marked
tendency of the present time. By no one perhaps was this
theory put more emphatically than by Windelband (of
Strassburg) in his Präludien (1884) and in his Geschichte und
Naturwissenschaft (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real
individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with
the impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe
to this distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the
thought of recent times.
260
See “truth and real existence” in the Republic, 508 d—Jowett’s
rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real
existence are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The
cause of science and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ
ἀληθείας. In 389 e we read that a “high value must be set on
truth.” Of course to Plato “truth” is also, and perhaps even
primarily, real existence, as when he says (Rep. 585), “that
which has less of truth will also have less of essence.” But in
any case truth always means more for him than “mere being,”
or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being,
the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher
reason.
261
To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note
2.
262
The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon.
263
Ibid. p. 4.
264
The Poetry of the Old Testament, p. 160.
265
Ibid. pp. 183–184.
266
It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content” that
wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in Appearance
and Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from
Professor Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s Philosophy of Life, p. 109)
in respect of the attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as
 a personal ideal. “The ultimate criterion of truth is not the
clearness and the distinctness of our thinking, nor its
correspondence with a reality external to it, nor any other
intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness as invariably
realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as
springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources
which our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”
267
It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to
include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of
philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in
not allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to
the world through the insight of individuals and through the
actions and the creations of original men.
268
There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot but
think at this point, and which so far at least as the rationalist-
pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest and
most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is
one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in
reference to something that he has just been discussing—in
this case the “object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And
what he adds in the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “The
primary objects of these two things are the same”—τούτων τὰ
πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά—rendered by Smith and Ross “the primary
objects of thought and desire are the same.” The translation, of
course, is a matter of some slight difficulty, turning upon the
proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the first things,” although, of
course, the student soon becomes familiar with what Aristotle
means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,” and “first in
nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his
commentary on this passage (Commentaria in Aristotelem
Graeca, vol. v. i-vi; Themistius in Metaphysica, 1072 and 17–
30) puts it that “in the case of immaterial existences the
desirable and the intelligible are the same—in primis vero
principiis materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque
intelligibile.” I am inclined to use this great idea of the identity
of the desirable and the intelligible—for conscious, intelligent
 beings as the fundamental principle of the true Humanism of
which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in this identity
that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says: “I am
persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want
and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward
argument” (Preface to Individuality and Value. See the eighth
chapter of this book). It is certainly true that the constructive
philosophy of which we are in search to-day must leave no gap
between thought and desire.
269
I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the
following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the
“good,” which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and
feeling and volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape
from God, because good is God in man; and insists on
omniscience” (Victorian Age in Literature, p. 246—italics mine).
A belief in goodness is certainly a belief in an active goodness
greater than our own; and it does raise a desire for a
comprehension of things.
270
The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin’s Social
and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development upon the
relation of truth and thought to desire, and also upon the
social, or the pragmatist or the experimental test of beliefs.
271
See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson’s “creative activity.”
272
The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits
of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult
such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent
examination of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, Professor
Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, Merz’s History of
European Thought during the Nineteenth Century, or
Verworn’s General Physiology (with its interesting account of
the different theories of the origin of life, and its admission that
after all we know matter only through mind and sensation).
Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this
whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about
 the origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution,
are still as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last
century. It is not merely, however, of the actual limits of science
at any one time that we are obliged, as human beings, to think,
but of the limits of science in view of the fact that our
knowledge comes to us in part, under the conditions of space
and time, and under the conditions of the limits of our senses
and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly limited in the
light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and in the
light of what we would like to know about the universe of life
and mind.
I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our
knowledge is such a burning question to-day as it was some
years ago, there being several reasons for this. One is that we
live in an age of specialization and discursiveness and
“technic.” It is quite difficult to meet with people who think that
they may know, some day, everything, from even some single
point of view. And then the wide acceptance of the hypothetical
or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused us to
look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as
a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain
points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even
warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as
separate in the old way, nor can we separate the life of the
individual from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor
man from God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898
in the Psy. Rev.) upon “Professor Titchener’s View of the Self,”
dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits, of the point of
view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.” Also
Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent
number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
273
See Chapter II. p. 35.
274
Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its “subjectivism,” p.
134.
275
That is to say, the simple truth that there is no “object” without
a “subject,” no “physical” world without a world of “psychical”
experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our
earth existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was
only as a part of some other “system” which we must think of
as the object of some mind or intelligence.
276
See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is
suggested that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of
course, exhaust matter.
277
Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable
Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject,
suggestive of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as
elsewhere, of studying philosophy and letters, and nearly
everything else in the mental and moral sciences, from the
point of view of social anthropology) are the clearness and the
relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the importance
of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as
agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows
us (p. 146) “reason for believing that the collective ‘we’
precedes ‘I’ in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in
America and elsewhere, ‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of
us,’ or selective, meaning ‘some of us only.’ Hence a
missionary must be very careful, and if he is preaching, must
use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’ whereas, in
praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be
included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form
amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily
employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used
only in special cases. Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’
the Apache will reply, ‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he
were recounting his personal exploits, he says sheedah, ‘I-by-
myself,’ to show they were wholly his own. Here we seem to
have group-consciousness holding its own against individual
self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the
more normal attitude of mind.” It is indeed to be hoped that, in