A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 355 



practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experi- 

 ence. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for 

 more work. 



Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which 

 we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward by their 

 aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets 

 each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with 

 many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism, for 

 instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in 

 emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal 

 solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions. 



All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies. Against 

 rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed 

 and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no par- 

 ticular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. 

 As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the 

 midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable cham- 

 bers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic 

 volume; in the next, some one on his knees praying for faith and 

 strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a 

 fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a 

 fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own 

 the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable 

 way of getting into or out of their respective rooms. 



No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orienta- 

 tion, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking 

 away from first things, principles, ' categories,' supposed necessities ; 

 and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. 



So much for the pragmatic method ! Meanwhile the word prag- 

 matism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a 

 certain theory of truth. I ask for your redoubled attention here. 

 If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures. 



One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in 

 our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions 

 under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have 

 begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature 

 and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, 

 physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical and 

 natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so 

 carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, 

 that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the 

 eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also reverberated in 

 syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots, and 

 ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler's laws for the 



