62 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



freedom and immortality " — belief in which he regards as essential to 

 his peace of mind. 



The answer which pragmatism makes to this objection of common 

 sense is to admit its main contention. Concrete experience must, in 

 the last analysis, be the test of the truth of ideas, and philosophy in 

 the past has been out of touch with the interests of practical life. As 

 Mr. Peirce and Professor James put it, there is no difference which 

 does not make a difference. The test of theories must be found in 

 practise. The pragmatic philosophy is a renewed emphasis of this 

 truth. It is a philosophy of doing, and of knowing, only in relation to 

 doing. It is a philosophy of work, of activity, of enterprise, of achieve- 

 ment. And for this reason it has taken up arms against all forms of 

 transcendentalism and absolutism and dogmatism and apriorism in so 

 far as these stand for intellectual interests which do not grow out of or 

 minister to the needs of life. 



But the pragmatic philosophy has one trenchent criticism to make 

 on the attitude of the man of affairs — he stands in his own light, stands 

 so close to his practise that he loses perspective, holding a nominal 

 theory which does not correspond with the real theory of his practise. 

 His attitude is essentially uncritical and primitive — naive, total, im- 

 plicit, rather than reflective, discriminating and definitive. In becom- 

 ing practical, philosophy deals common sense a severe blow by showing 

 its inconsistency and the' narrowness and vulgarity, often, of its empir- 

 icism — for, after all, theories, while not action in an overt sense, are 

 yet themselves just refined forms of adjustment in a complicated 

 environment. 



Another type of person, impressed deeply by the so-called spiritual 

 things of life, by the values as opposed to the facts, believes that the 

 realities which are of most worth are apprehended through the feelings 

 and by faith rather than by purely logical processes, and objects to 

 imilosophy on the score of its being artificial and arbitrary, substituting 

 formulas for vital experience and abstract propositions for warm con- 

 crete appreciations of things. This is the essentially mystical attitude 

 which includes, not only the religionist, but the artist and many others 

 who distrust the purely intellectualist way of looking at the universe. 



Here, again, pragmatism admits the main contention of the objector. 

 Philosophy too often, as Mr. Bradley says, is the finding of bad reasons 

 for what we believe upon instinct, and a substitution of abstract imper- 

 sonal laws for the living personal values of immediate experience. 

 And this new philosophy called pragmatism is trying to so reconstruct 

 the intellectual machinery as to meet the needs of this deeper emotional 

 and volitional nature of man. In so far as pragmatism emphasizes the 

 personal as opposed to the purely formal conditions of thinking, it may 

 be described as mystical in the legitimate and good sense of the word. 



This is the core of the humanism of Mr. Schiller. Faith underlies 



