68 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of idealism, as Mr. Schiller and Professor James and Professor Dewey 

 in their different ways have shown us, are simply methodological cir- 

 cumlocutions produced by the interposition of false issues by an aprior- 

 istic preconception. 



As long as men stop their practise now and again to think, they 

 will be idealists. As long as the process of experience is more than 

 a mere blind rule-of-thumb accidental fumbling or slow learning by 

 the method of trial and error, as long as human progress takes place 

 by experiment and invention as well as by repetition and imitation, the 

 philosophy of experience must in the deepest sense of the word be 

 idealistic. Ideas are not copies of realities beyond experience, but are 

 certain contents which, because of their inadequacy, are undergoing 

 revision in that mode of consciousness which we call knowledge : and 

 consciousness and cognition are simply names for reality when thus 

 undergoing reorganization from within. Ideas, as Professor Dewey 

 says, looked at negatively and in relation to the practise which is break- 

 ing down, are simply facts which have come under suspicion. Thus 

 we say that the sun-going-around-the-earth is a mere idea because it 

 has become doubted: we call it an illusion. Looked at positively, in 

 relation to further practise, an idea is a plan of action; it is one part 

 of experience used as a means of getting further experience. There is 

 no chasm between the world of things and the world of thoughts; the 

 world of thoughts is the world of things viewed in process of becoming 

 something different from what they have been in relation to the needs 

 of former practise. From this point of view there is no need for a 

 timeless, processless, inscrutable absolute to guarantee the integrity of 

 a subjective-objective, mind-matter, ego-alter world: the only absolute 

 required is the concrete process of experience itself. There is no abso- 

 lutely absolute absolute just as there is no absolutely relative relative. 

 Absolute idealism and absolute scepticism are self -contradictory limit- 

 ing conceptions, neither of which is true, taken by itself, but each of 

 which is useful in refuting the other by throwing it back upon the con- 

 crete process whence it was derived and where alone it is significant. 



Quite the most delightful humor of the present philosophical situa- 

 tion is the way in which the pragmatists in practise repudiate prag- 

 matism as a theory, while on the other hand the pragmatic theorists 

 fail to see their own incorrigible idealism. Rotund in the complacency 

 with which they regard their abstract ideals, which they sentimentally 

 revere, but never use, the actual pragmatist looks with contempt upon 

 the theory of his own practise when some ingenuous idealist seeks to 

 formulate it for him. For what is pragmatic theory to him who is a 

 pragmatist in conduct? It is heresy, blasphemy, anarchy — destruc- 

 tion of established ideals which must be protected at all hazards from 

 any pollution by the " given case." He does not realize that he is 

 destroying the only theoretically sound basis of his own practise, that 



