Mr. Murray's youthful modesty insists that his study of Pragmatism needs a sponsor; this is not at all my own opinion, but I may take the opportunity of pointing out how singularly qualified he is to give a good account of it. In the first place he is young, and youth is an almost indispensable qualification for the appreciation of novelty; for the mind works more and more stiffly as it grows older, and becomes less and less capable of absorbing what is new. Hence, if our 'great authorities' liv

There is a curious impression to-day in the world of thought that Pragmatism is the most audacious of philosophic novelties, the most anarchical transvaluation of all respectable traditions. Sometimes it is pictured as an insurgence of emotion against logic, sometimes as an assault of theology upon the integrity of Pure Reason. One day it is described as the reckless theorizing of dilettanti whose knowledge of philosophy is too superficial to require refutation, the next as a transatlantic impor

Until the year 1890, when James's Principles were published, the psychology of Hume reigned absolutely in philosophy. [A] All empiricists accepted it enthusiastically, as the sum of philosophic wisdom; all apriorists submitted to it, even in supplementing and modifying it by 'transcendental' and metaphysical additions; in either case it remained uncontested as psychology , and, by propounding an utterly erroneous analysis of the mind and its experience, entangled philosophy in inextricable diffi

The new psychology of James was bound to produce a new theory of knowledge, and though it did not actually explore this problem, it contained several valuable suggestions upon the subject. For instance, in a brief passage discussing 'The Relations of Belief and Will,' James pointed out that belief is essentially an attitude of the will towards an idea, adding that in order to acquire a belief 'we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were rea

Every man, probably, is by instinct a dogmatist. He feels perfectly sure that he knows some things, and is right about them against the world. Whatever he believes in he does not doubt, but holds to be self-evidently or indisputably true. His naive dogmatism, moreover, spontaneously assumes that his truth is universal and shared by all others. If now he could live like a fakir, wholly wrapped in a cloud of his own imaginings, and nothing ever happened to disappoint his expectations, to jar upon

It has been shown in the last chapter how urgent has become the problem of discriminating between the true and false among relative 'truths.' For absolute truth has become a chimera, self-evidence an illusion, and intuition untrustworthy. All three are psychologically very real to those who believe in them, but logically they succumb to the assaults of a scepticism which infers from the fact that no 'truths' are absolute that all may reasonably be overthrown. The only obstacle to its triumph lie

In order to escape the necessity of concerning itself with personality and particular circumstances in questions of truth and error, Intellectualism appeals to Logic, which it conceives as a purely formal science and its impregnable citadel. This appeal, however, rests on a number of questionable assumptions, and most of these are not avowed. 1. It assumes that forms of thought can be treated in abstraction from their matter—in other words, that the general types of thinking are never affected b

We have now struggled through the quagmires of intellectualist philosophy, and found that neither in its Psychology, which divided the mind's integrity into a heap of faculties, and comminuted it into a dust-cloud of sensations; nor in its Epistemology, which ignored the will to know and the value of knowing; nor in its Logic, which abstracted thought wholly from the thinking and the thinker, and so finally from, all meaning, could man find a practicable route of philosophic progress. But our st

The mission of Pragmatism is to bring Philosophy into relation to real Life and Action. So far from regarding Thought as a self-centred, self-enclosed activity, Pragmatism insists upon replacing it in its context among the other functions of life, and in measuring its value by its effect upon them. So far, again, from regarding the abstract intellect as a vast Juggernaut machine which absorbs and crushes the individual thinker, it treats him individually as having his own constitution, raison d'

WILLIAM JAMES: The Principles of Psychology , 1890. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897. The Varieties of Religious Experience , 1902. Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907. A Pluralistic Universe , 1909. The Meaning of Truth , 1909. Some Problems of Philosophy , 1911. Radical Empiricism , 1912. F.C.S. SCHILLER: Riddles of the Sphinx , 1891 (revised edition, 1910). Axioms as Postulates (in Personal Idealism , ed. Henry Sturt, 1902). Humanism: Ph