8 HUMANISM i 



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 the aims of Pragmatism. 

 Hence we 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 

 remotely 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 are rejuvenated by the decisive weight 

 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. 



Now inasmuch as such teleological valuation is also 

 the special sphere of ethical inquiry, Pragmatism may be 

 said to assign metaphysical validity to the typical method 

 of ethics. At a blow it awards to the ethical conception 

 of Good supreme authority over the logical conception of 

 True and the metaphysical conception of Real. The 

 Good becomes a determinant both of the True and of the 

 Real, and their secret inspiration. For from the pursuit 

 of the latter we may never eliminate the reference to the 

 former. Our apprehension of the Real, our comprehension 

 of the True, is always effected by beings who are aiming 

 at the attainment of some Good, and choose between rival 

 claimants to reality and truth according to the services 



1 For a further discussion of the definition of Pragmatism, cp. Studies in 

 Humanism, Essay i., and my article in the Encycl. Britann. ed. xi. 



