SECTION V. PHILOSOPHY, EDUCATION AND RELIGION 

 PHILOSOPHY 1 



Any sketch of the general march of Philosophy during 1910-12 is bound to be, in the 

 main, impressionistic. The ground covered by the philosophical sciences is so vast that 

 any one writer can see only a small portion of it in clear perspective; and even within 

 the partial field where he is most at home, he may well find it hard to catch the real 

 drift of tendencies which have not yet fully disclosed their ultimate scope. It is clear 

 that the next generation or so will see some striking developments in Western philosophy, 

 but the movements from which most may be reasonably expected are yet too undevel- 

 oped to admit of confident prophecy as to the precise direction they are likely to take 

 in the near future. There seems to be at this moment no one type of philosophical 

 thought which promises to be dominant even for the next few decades. The general 

 impression one derives from the recent literature of the subject is rather that the day 

 for the dominance of the main stream of thought by any single tendency is temporarily 

 over, and that in the most immediate future, at any rate, philosophy is likely to witness 

 a struggle for existence between two or three types of doctrine, each of which will pre- 

 sumably become seriously modified as it develops itself in conflict with its rivals. 



There have been few outward signs lately of definite breach with the traditions of 

 the opening years of the century. No startlingly new figure has appeared above the 

 horizon, though we have to chronicle the deaths of at least three distin- 

 . guished representatives of already established types of thought, William 



James, Shadworth Hodgson, and Alfred Fouillee. In Shadworth Hodgson 

 there has passed away from the scene perhaps the last survivor of the classic " Brit- 

 ish "succession of thinkers, whose characteristic method in philosophy was the direct psy- 

 chological analysis of the given " moment of experience " as distinct from metaphysical 

 or epistemological enquiry into the " transcendental " implications of Being or of 

 Thought. His philosophy seems likely to be the last attempt to develop a system in 

 entire independence of the influence of Kant's " Copernican revolution," unless, indeed 

 the recent work of Prof. S. Alexander should prove capable of development into some- 

 thing like a system. William James's work in general philosophy is of too recent a 

 date to pass a judgment upon it with any confidence of anticipating the 

 Jame final verdict of history. To the present writer it appears to exhibit three 

 distinct strains, none too closely connected with one another: (i) a funda- 

 mental metaphysical pluralism, (2) a radical empiricism in method, (3) the adoption in 

 logic of a purely utilitarian theory of truth and falsehood. It is this peculiar view of 

 truth as " that which works," or " that which produces practically useful results " 

 which, from its apparently paradoxical character, has made the principal sensation among 

 James's contemporaries for the moment, and from which he has chosen the name 

 (" pragmatism ") for his type of thought, but it is open to question whether his abiding 

 place in the "history of philosophy will not depend primarily on his brilliant defence of 

 pluralism against the singularism of philosophies of the " one substance " and " abso- 

 lutist " types. His reaction against the type of speculation which denies substantial 

 reality to finite individuals, by resolving them into phases, appearances, or predicates 

 of a single all-inclusive individual, is equally manifest in schemes of thought so different 

 from his own and from one another as those of Dr. Rashdall, Dr. McTaggart, Prof. 

 Varisco, and the "new realists" of Great Britain and the United States.- None of 

 these thinkers, in fact, would accept the view that unqualified empiricism is the sole 

 method of philosophical enquiry, and most of them would hardly acknowledge it as a 

 valid method at all. Nor do any of them adopt the special theory which identifies truth 

 with fertility in " practical " consequences (see particularly for a criticism of this view, 

 the fifth essay in Mr. Bertrand Russell's Philosophical Essays, 1910). The disappear- 

 ance from Continental journals of philosophy of the discussions of "Pragmatism/' 

 1 See generally the E. B. articles enumerated in Index Volume, p. 939. 



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