8 HUMANISM i 



structure, even if it has not moulded it out of pre-rational 

 instincts. In short, a reason which has not practical value 

 for the purposes of life is a monstrosity, a morbid aberra 

 tion or failure of adaptation, which natural selection must 

 sooner or later wipe away. 



It is in some such way that I should prefer to pave the 

 way for an appreciation of what we mean by Pragmatism. 

 Hence I may now venture to define it as the thorough 

 recognition that the purposive character of mental life 

 generally must influence and pervade also our most re 

 motely cognitive activities. 1 



In other words, it is a conscious application to the 

 theory of life of the psychological facts of cognition as 

 they appear to a teleological Voluntarism. In the light 

 of such a teleological psychology the problems of logic 

 and metaphysics must appear in a new light, and decisive 

 weight must be given to the conceptions of Purpose 

 and End. Or again, it is a systematic protest against 

 the practice of ignoring in our theories of Thought and 

 Reality the purposiveness of all our actual thinking, and 

 the relation of all our actual realities to the ends of our 

 practical life. It is an assertion of the sway of human 

 valuations over every region of our experience, and a denial 

 that such valuation can validly be eliminated from the 

 contemplation of any reality we know. 



And inasmuch as such teleological valuation is also 

 the special sphere of ethical inquiry, Pragmatism may be 



] This is wider, and I think more fundamental, than any of the definitions in 

 Baldwin s Dictionary of Philosophy (ii. pp. 321-322), for the reason that the logical 

 development of pragmatist method in my essay on Axioms as Postulates came 

 out (in Personal Idealism} too recently to be available for the purposes of the 

 Dictionary. I think, however, that intrinsically also neither Peirce s, nor James s, 

 nor Baldwin s accounts are quite adequate. In Peirce s sense, that a conception 

 is to be tested by its practical effects, the principle is so obvious as to be com 

 paratively unimportant, and, perhaps, as he says, is somewhat a matter of 

 youthful buoyancy. James s definition, that the whole meaning of a conception 

 expresses itself in practical consequences, does not emphasise the essential priority 

 of action to thought, and does not explicitly correlate it with his own will to 

 believe. Baldwin tries to confine it to the genetic sphere and to deny that it 

 yields a philosophy of reality. But his own subsequent account (s.v. Truth] of 

 the psychology of the truth-valuation seems inconsistent with this and far more 

 satisfactory. He fails, moreover, to explain how he can get at reality without 

 knowing it, and how our estimations of what truth is can disregard and become 

 nd ependent of our modes of establishing it. 



