A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 35* 



A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 1 

 II. What Pragmatism Means 



By Professor WILLIAM JAMEg 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



SOME years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I 

 returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a 

 ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a 

 squirrel — a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree- 

 trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was 

 imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the 

 squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he 

 goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always 

 keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of 

 him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this : Does 

 the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure 

 enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the 

 squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had 

 been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate, 

 and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, 

 therefore, appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the 

 scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must 

 make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: 

 " Which party is right," I said, " depends on what you practically mean 

 by ' going round ' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north 

 of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the 

 north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he 

 occupies these successive positions. But if, on the contrary, you mean 

 being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, 

 then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that 

 the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the 

 squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, 

 and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occa- 

 sion for any further dispute. You are both right and both wrong 

 according as you conceive the verb ' to go round ' in one way or 

 another practical fashion." 



Although one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a, 



1 The second of a course of eight lectures on ' Pragmatism : A New Name 

 for an Old Way of Thinking,' given before the Lowell Institute, Boston, and 

 the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, Columbia University. 



