NE]Y PHILOSOPHY CALLED PRAGMATISM 67 



relevant to the proximate needs of concrete issues. Taken abstractly, 

 these complementary principles have significance only as limiting con- 

 cepts, like the infinite and the infinitesimal in mathematics; they are 

 signs of operations to be performed, not absolute realities blocking 

 progress. There is no experience in general or in the abstract, no 

 absolute experience; experience is always in specific centers of concrete 

 interest and value. Hence questions of the absolute origin or absolute 

 givenness of reality are unintelligible because irrelevant. We partici- 

 pate in the evolution of reality by every moment of conscious expe- 

 rience. The truth hasn't all happened yet, as Professor James says. 

 Kant was right in a sense when he said that the understanding creates 

 the world. But it is equally true that for any particular individual 

 and for any particular moment of conscious experience, the high-lights 

 of attentional consciousness are set over against a background of what, 

 for the situation, must be taken as given — and this is the truth the 

 metaphysical realists have built into a wall of separation between a 

 subjective and an objective world. 



These are some of the implications of the pragmatic philosophy as 

 a doctrine of empiricism. But we maintained that it likewise repre- 

 sents a form of idealism, and that this is not only consistent with, but 

 absolutely indispensable to the integrity of the empirical side of its 

 method. 



The pragmatic philosophy, by virtue of the fact that it purports to 

 be a philosophy, is a form of idealism. All philosophies are idealistic 

 in the deepest sense of the word — they are simply developed ideas of 

 the universe. Pragmatic idealism is only a closer-knit synthesis of 

 practise and theory than other forms of philosophy. If we define 

 idealism as any philosophy which finds the key to the nature of reality 

 in ideas, then pragmatism is a form of idealism, since it is itself a 

 theory, an idea, a conception, a philosophy of experience. There is no 

 necessary antagonism between pragmatism and idealism, since there 

 is no necessary conflict between practise and theory. Pragmatism is 

 not opposed to theory, but only to bad theory ; it is not opposed to ideas, 

 but only to ideas that do not work in practise; it is not opposed to 

 ideals, but only to ideals that do not stand in organic relation to life. 



The idealistic phase of pragmatism is to be found in its theory of 

 knowledge, in its doctrine of the relation of ideas to action. Thinking, 

 it holds, is action in process of transformation into more adequate 

 action; the pragmatic philosophy is only human action or practise 

 passing into the idea or theory phase for the sake of evolving a more 

 adequate practise. Whether pragmatism is idealistic in either of the 

 other two historically important senses of the word, which hold respect- 

 ively that ultimate reality is mental (metaphysical idealism) and that 

 the objective world has no existence independent of a knowing subject 

 (epistemological idealism), is easily answered: it is not. These forms 



