354 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates 

 was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley 

 and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. 

 Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they 

 are ' known as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in frag- 

 ments. They were a prelude only. Only in our time has it generalized 

 itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a con- 

 quering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by 

 inspiring you with my belief. 



Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, 

 the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both 

 in a more radical, and in a less objectionable form than it has ever 

 yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all 

 upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He 

 turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, 

 from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and 

 pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and 

 adequacy, towards facts, towards action, towards power. That means 

 the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely 

 given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against 

 dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth. 



At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a 

 method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean 

 an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ' tempera- 

 ment ' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would 

 be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as 

 the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Sci- 

 ence and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact 

 work absolutely hand in hand. 



Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. 

 You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and 

 you know what a great part, in magic, ivords have always played. If 

 you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you 

 can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. 

 Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and knowing their names, he 

 held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared 

 to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be 

 sought in the shape of some illuminating word or some power-bringing 

 word or name. That word names the universe's Principle, and to 

 possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. ' God,' 

 ' Matter,' ' Reason,' ' the Absolute,' ' Energy,' are so many solving 

 names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of 

 your metaphysical quest. 



But if you follow the pragmatic method, you can not look on any 

 such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its 



