70 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tism has raised its timely protest and its demand that all the factors 

 of a situation must be represented constructively in the result. 



The pragmatic philosophy, in other words, is a functional idealism : 

 its method is at once intrinsic or immanent and functional or organic. 

 By saying that its method is immanent, we mean that experience must 

 be interpreted from within. We can not jump out of our skins, as 

 Professor James says; we can not pull ourselves up by our own boot- 

 straps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience 

 and may define what it is only by working back and forth within the 

 current. " We don't know where we're going but we're on the way." 

 If it be asked, Where does this " concrete " experience come from ? 

 the question, as Professor Dewey replies, is irrelevant. Experience 

 does not " come from " an} r where. It is here. We begin with 

 it as the reality-here-and-now. To pursue the question of the origin 

 of experience in an absolute sense, is to seek to run out on an abstrac- 

 tion as if it were a tight-rope, when it has no support at the other end. 

 " How experience became we shall never find out," writes Professor 

 Dewey, " for the reason that experience always is. We shall never 

 account for it by referring it to something else, for ' something else ' 

 is only for and in experience." Or, as Professor James has put it, 

 " Though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to 

 make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be 

 conceived, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on 

 nothing." 



By organic or functional is meant that all distinctions in theory 

 are true only in relation to the specific situation within which they are 

 set up. There is no truth in general or in the abstract : there are only 

 truths. It further means that in the case of all the dualisms of reflect- 

 ive thought which have occasioned so much controversy in the history 

 of philosophy, each abstract member of the dichotomous distinction is 

 true only in relation to the other. Does a man walk more with his left 

 or with his right leg ? asks Professor James. If he is lost in the forest 

 in the northern hemisphere, he may be said perhaps to walk more with 

 his right leg when he goes around in a circle to the left, but more 

 important than the fact of inequality is the fact that he must use them 

 both and that they must cooperate to a common end, if he is to be said 

 to walk at all. When I follow the squirrel around the tree, do I or 

 do I not go around the squirrel? As Professor James here, too, has 

 pointed out, I do, and I do not, go around the squirrel according to 

 which situation of " going around " is under discussion. As he con- 

 tinues, it is not particularly illuminating when you ask what o'clock 

 it is, to be told, as the traditional metaphysician tells us, that he lives 

 in Kensington Place. 



Only by a functional interpretation of the time-honored antinomies 

 of reflective thought is it possible to put any practical meaning into the 



