PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 



THE appearance of this volume demands more than the 

 usual amount of apology. For the philosophic public, 

 which makes up for the scantiness of its numbers by the 

 severity of its criticism, might justly have expected me to 

 follow up the apparently novel and disputable position I 

 had taken up in my contribution to Personal Idealism 

 with a systematic treatise on the logic of Pragmatism. 

 And no doubt if it had rested with me to transform wishes 

 into thoughts and thoughts into deeds without restrictions 

 of time and space, I should willingly have expanded my 

 sketch in Axioms as Postulates into a full account of the 

 beneficent simplification of the whole theory of knowledge 

 which must needs result from the adoption of the principles 

 I had ventured to enunciate. But the work of a college 

 tutor lends itself more easily to the conception than to the 

 composition of a systematic treatise, and so for the present 

 the philosophic public will have to wait. 



The general public, on the other hand, it seemed more 

 feasible to please by an altogether smaller and more 

 practicable undertaking, viz., by republishing from various 

 technical journals, where conceivably the philosophic public 

 had already read them, the essays which compose the bulk 

 of this volume. I have, however, taken the opportunity 

 to add several new essays, partly because they happened 

 to be available, partly because they seemed to be needed 



