xiv HUMANISM 



In the field of Ethics Pragmatism naturally demands 

 to know what is the actual use of the ethical principles 

 which are handed on from one text-book to another. 

 But it speedily discovers that no answer is forthcoming. 

 Next to nothing is known about the actual efficacy of 

 ethical principles : Ethics is a dead tradition which has 

 very little relation to the actual facts of moral sentiment. 

 And the reason obviously is that there has not been a 

 sufficient desire to know to lead to the proper researches 

 into the actual psychological nature and distribution of 

 the moral sentiments. Hence there is implicit in 

 Pragmatism a demand for an inquiry to ascertain the 

 actual facts, and pending this inquiry, for a truce to the 

 sterile polemic about ethical principles. In the end this 

 seems not unlikely to result in a real revival of Ethics. 



If finally we turn to a region which the vested 

 interests of time-honoured organisations, the turbid 

 complications of emotion, and a formalism that too often 

 merges in hypocrisy, must always render hard of access 

 to a sincere philosophy, and consider the attitude of 

 Pragmatism towards the religious side of life, we shall 

 find once more that it has a most important bearing. 

 For in principle Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis 

 of Faith and Reason. It shows on the one hand that 

 Faith must underlie all Reason and pervade it, nay, 

 that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate 

 of Faith. Without Faith, therefore, there can be no 

 Reason, and initially the demands of Faith must be as 

 legitimate and essentially as reasonable as those of the 

 Reason they pervade. On the other hand, it enables 

 us to draw the line between a genuine and a spurious 

 Faith. The spurious faith, which too often is all 

 theologians take courage to aspire to, is merely the 



Ostwald is not a professional philosopher at all, but a chemist, and has very 

 likely never heard of Pragmatism ; but he sets forth the pragmatist procedure 

 of the sciences in a perfectly masterly way. 



