A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 205 



the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. 

 Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in 

 their philosophies, and always will determine them. The details of 

 systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is work- 

 ing at a system, he may often forget the forest for the single tree. But 

 when the labor is accomplished, the mind performs its big summarizing 

 act, and the system stands over against one like a living thing, with 

 that strange simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, 

 like the wrath of the man, when a friend or enemy of ours is dead. 



Not only Walt Whitman could write ' who touches this book touches 

 a man/ The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. 

 Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical 

 but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philo- 

 sophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the 

 great universe of God. What it is, — and oh so flagrantly ! — is the 

 revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow crea- 

 ture is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get 

 reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce 

 with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human 

 reaction of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We grow as peremptory in 

 our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as a 

 candidate for our favor. Our verdicts are couched in as simple ad- 

 jectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the 

 universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the philosophy proffered 

 us, and one word is enough. 



' Statt der lebendigen Natur,' we say, ' Da Gott die Menschen schuf 

 hinein,' — that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced 

 thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty school-room product, that 

 sick man's dream ! Away with it. Away with all of them ! Im- 

 possible ! Impossible ! 



Our work over the details of his system is indeed what gives us our 

 resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant im- 

 pression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured 

 by the deflniteness of one's summarizing reactions, by the immediate 

 perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. 

 But great expertness is not necessary, for the epithet to come. Few 

 people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But 

 almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total char- 

 acter in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the 

 particular systems that he knows. They don't just cover his world. 

 One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a 

 job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too cloistered, or 

 what not. At any rate he, and we, know off-hand that such philos- 

 ophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of ' whack/ and have 



