xiv HUMANISM 



these essays. The practical advantages of the prag- 

 matist method are so signal, the field to be covered 

 is so immense, and the reforms to be effected are so 

 sweeping, that I would fain hasten the acceptance of 

 so salutary a philosophy, even at the risk of prematurely 

 flinging these informal essays, as forlorn hopes, against 

 the strongholds of inveterate prejudice. It is in the hope 

 therefore that I may encourage others to co-operate and 

 to cultivate a soil which promises such rich returns of 

 novel truth, that I will indicate a number of important 

 problems which seem to me urgently to demand treatment 

 by pragmatic methods. 



I will put first a reform of Logic. Logic hitherto has 

 attempted to be a pseudo-science of a non-existent and 

 impossible process called pure thought. Or at least we 

 have been ordered in its name to expunge from our think 

 ing every trace of feeling, interest, desire, and emotion, as 

 the most pernicious sources of error. 



It has not been thought worthy of consideration that 

 these influences are the sources equally of all truth and 

 all-pervasive in our thinking. The result has been that 

 logic has been rendered nothing but a systematic mis 

 representation of our actual thinking. It has been made 

 abstract and wantonly difficult, an inexhaustible source 

 of mental bewilderment, but impotent to train the mind 

 and to trace its actual workings, by being assiduously kept 

 apart from the psychology of concrete thinking. Yet a 

 reverent study of our minds actual procedures might have 

 been a most precious aid to the self-knowledge of the 

 intellect. To justify in full these strictures (from which 

 a few only of modern logicians, notably Professors 

 Sigwart and Wundt, and Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, 1 can be 

 more or less exempted) would be a long and arduous 



1 Whose writings, by reason perhaps of the ease of their style, have not 

 received from the experts the attention they deserve. 



