NEW PHILOSOPHY CALLED PRAGMATISM 69 



his so-called ideals are simply masks to conceal the irregularity and 

 irrationality of his practise. 



But the full humor of the situation does not appear until we turn 

 to the supposed teachers of pragmatism — the pragmatists in theory. 

 They are not really pragmatists, most of them, but idealists. They 

 have developed pragmatism simply as a means of realizing a new idea 

 in philosophy which seems more valuable to them than any of the old 

 ideals. The fact that the new ideal is not consciously present or clearly 

 worked out, does not alter the case. The function of the philosophical 

 pragmatist of the day is not to supplant the various forms of idealism 

 which have held sway, but to make their ideals operative as forces in 

 the world of actual conditions and causes. It brings ideals down to 

 earth ; it does not destroy them. The positive mission of the pragmatic 

 theorist is to show men how to use ideals as genuine dynamic functional 

 realities instead of sentimentally worshipping them in their inviolable 

 isolation. Pragmatism means, not the opportunism or expediency 

 philosophy which too often is the only working theory of the man of 

 affairs; it finds the ideal in the conditions, cultivates and guides its 

 growth within the given case, and formulates it by reading off the " law 

 of the process " by which those very conditions have given rise to the 

 given case. 



Men can not get along, and remain civilized, without ideals. It is 

 not only the lover, idolizing the object of his affection, who is actuated 

 by ideals : the successful statesman, scientist or man of business is 

 always an idealist. He has an insight and an outlook — a point of 

 view — which transforms the world of facts in the midst of which he 

 lives, from a brute mass of obstruction and baffling perplexity into a 

 systematic scheme or plan for bringing things to pass. His scheme 

 may be false in certain particulars, but he can no more get along 

 without some centralizing intellectual machinery than a complex organ- 

 ism can get along without a central nervous system or a complex civili- 

 zation without its methods of communication. 



Ideals are simply codes, customs, institutions, habits undergoing 

 reconstruction in the medium of the direct emotional appreciation and 

 rational insight of individuals. A philosophy must at bottom be an 

 idealism because it is a theory of human progress — it seeks to deal in 

 idea methodically with all the conditions by which man evolves an 

 increasingly enriched experience. But experience is not thus mediated 

 when certain standards, relevant in some past situation, are carried 

 over bodily and unrevised into new conditions. This is the fallacy of 

 most of the rationalistic and absolutistic forms of idealism which have 

 held sway. Accepted types of thought and action are imposed on a new 

 situation, and where the new conditions do not fit the rigid framework 

 of the old standard, effort is made to force them into conformity with 

 it. This is the obstructive aspect of absolutism against which pragma- 



