iv PREFACE 



Mill utilitarianism.&quot; * It may be that pragmatism 

 will turn out to be all of this formidable array; 

 but even should it, the one who thus defines it has 

 hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever 

 else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit 

 is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind 

 which disposes of anything whatever even so 

 humble an affair as a new method in Philosophy 

 by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the 

 pigeon holes of a filing cabinet. There are other 

 vital phases of contemporary transition and revi 

 sion; there are, for example, a new realism and 

 naturalistic idealism. When I recall that I find 

 myself more interested (even though their repre 

 sentatives might decline to reciprocate) in such 

 phases than in the systems marked by the labels 

 of our German critic, I am confirmed in a belief 

 that after all it is better to view pragmatism quite 

 vaguely as part and parcel of a general move 

 ment of intellectual reconstruction. For other 

 wise we seem to have no recourse save to define 

 pragmatism as does our German author in 

 terms of the very past systems against which it is 

 a reaction ; or, in escaping that alternative, to re 

 gard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to 



1 The affair is even more portentous in the German with 

 its capital letters and series of muses: &quot; Gewiss ist der 

 Pragmatismus erkenntnisstheoretisch Nominalismus, psy- 

 chologisch Voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch Energismus, 

 metaphysisch Agnosticismus, ethisch Meliorismus auf 

 Grundlage des Bentham-Millschen Utilitarismus.&quot; 



