PBEFACE 



AN elaborate preface to a philosophic work 

 usually impresses one as a last desperate effort on 

 the part of its author to convey what he feels 

 he has not quite managed to say in the body of 

 his book. Nevertheless, a collection of essays on 

 various topics written during a series of years 

 may perhaps find room for an independent word 

 to indicate the kind of unity they seem, to their 

 writer, to possess. Probably every one acquainted 

 with present philosophic thought found, with 

 some notable exceptions, in periodicals rather 

 than in books would term it a philosophy of 

 transition and reconstruction. Its various repre 

 sentatives agree in what they oppose the ortho 

 dox British empiricism of two generations ago and 

 the orthodox Neo-Kantian idealism of the last 

 generation rather than in what they proffer. 



The essays of this volume belong, I suppose, to 

 what has come to be known (since the earlier of 

 them were written) as the pragmatic phase of the 

 newer movement. Now a recent German critic has 

 described pragmatism as, &quot; Epistemologically, 

 nominalism ; psychologically, voluntarism ; cosmo- 

 logically^energism; metaphysically, agnosticism; 

 ethically Tmeliorism on the basis of the Bentham- 



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