2o 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ism, rationalists give liim something religious, but to that religion 

 ' actual things are blank.' He becomes thus the judge of us philos- 

 ophers. Tender or tough, he finds us wanting. None of us may treat 

 his verdicts disdainfully, for after all, his is the typically perfect mind, 

 the mind the sum of whose demands is greatest, the mind whose 

 criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run. 



It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer 

 the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both 

 kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but 

 at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest 

 intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with 

 as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near 

 the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now. I 

 will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the 

 present moment to return a little on what I have said. 



If any of you here are professional philosophers, and some of you 

 I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far 

 to have been crude in an unpardonable way in an almost incredible 

 degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded, what a barbaric disjunc- 

 tion! And, in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate 

 intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities, and when every pos- 

 sible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, 

 what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest 

 possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of 

 rough and tumble fight between two hostile temperaments ! What a 

 childishly external view ! And again, how stupid it is to treat the 

 abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them be- 

 cause they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape, rather 

 than as prolongations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories 

 just remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be 

 religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from 

 the crassness of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than 

 raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and a nobler 

 home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles sub- 

 tending all reality, which the intellect divines? How can principles 

 and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines? Was 

 Cologne cathedral built without an architect's plan on paper? Is re- 

 finement in itself an abomination ? Is concrete rudeness the only thing 

 that's true ? 



Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I 

 have given is indeed monstrously over simplified and rude. But like 

 all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can 

 treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an 

 abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact 



