APPENDIX II 



THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF REALITY 1 



Recent discussions of the practical character of reality seem 

 very significant when one considers their bearing on the relation 

 between what are probably the two most distinctive doctrines 

 of pragmatism. The first of these doctrines may be called in- 

 strumentalism ; the second is immediatism. By instrumentalism 

 is meant that element of pragmatism which has grown out of the 

 application of the evolutionary method to logical problems. The 

 evolutionary method in general prescribes that, in order to under- 

 stand the existing nature of anything, we inquire into its origin 

 and development, and that this development be in every case 

 explained as an adjustment to the specific conditions under which 

 it has taken place. When this method is applied to logic, it 

 means, in the first place, that thought itself has arisen as a mode 

 of organic adjustment to environment, and that its whole de- 

 velopment has been, and is, determined with reference to this 

 function. In the second place, and more particularly, instru- 

 mentalism means that all distinctions and terms of thought, that 

 is to say, all meanings, are relative to the specific conditions which 

 have called them forth and to the functions which they perform. 

 This carries with it a denial of absolutism in all its historic forms, 

 from the Platonic doctrine of the absolute good to the neo-Hege- 

 lian conception of reality as completely organized experience. 



It is from the standpoint of instrumentalism that the pragma- 

 tist has so effectively sought to discredit the venerable disciplines 

 of ontology and epistemology, whose aim is the investigation of 

 reality as such or knowing as such. As profitably, argues the 

 pragmatist, might we discuss with the pre-Kantian rationalist 

 the nature of man as such, without reference to his biological 

 relations to lower species and the conditions of his development 



Reprinted from the PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, July, 1909. 



235 



