October 11, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



467 



tinguish the " metaphysical " from the " prac- 

 tical " ? Further, " I myself believe that the 

 evidence for God lies primarily in inner per- 

 sonal experiences " (p. 109). What does this 

 imply exactly? What are we forced to con- 

 clude as involved in the very possibility of the 

 statement ? It is all very vcell to hold that " the 

 ' Absolute ' with his one purpose is not the 

 man-like God of common people " (p. 143) ; 

 the problem remains, clamant as always. 

 Where does the commonalty of this God find 

 root? Meseems Mr. James himself can fur- 

 nish forth reply : " The whole naif conception 

 of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name 

 is interpreted as denoting only the law or 

 Regal der Verhindung by which certain of our 

 sensations habitually succeed or coexist " (pp. 

 185-6). And, if so, is Mr. James not making 

 common cause with the much derided 

 " rationalists " ? They, indeed, may have 

 sacrificed " facts " to " principles," but prag- 

 matists may all too easily sacrifice " prin- 

 ciples " to " facts." And, after all, the traffic 

 of philosophy is over the kind of universe in 

 which it has so eventuated that facts and prin- 

 ciples both disappear when separated. To ap- 

 peal to the pragmatic method — if too much 

 " ism " be bad for Green, it is equally bad for 

 Mr. James. Thus the large riddle remains. 

 Why are men always cozened by " isms " ? 

 Mr. James has not escaped the fate of more 

 ordinary mortals. He writes sometimes like 

 a gospeller ; he would be a mediator ; and when 

 the gospel shall have been formulated, we shall 

 know what pragmatism may import and where 

 it proposes to take final stand. 



Despite his humorous anarchism, Professor 

 James has won to responsibility, and a book 

 from his pen counts as an event. I am there- 

 fore bound to record the opinion that the 

 present volume fails to rise' to the level of its 

 author's reputation. There is something too 

 much of " the large loose way " (p. 215) about 

 it. Of course, pages are illuminated by flashes 

 from the psychologist whom we know and in 

 whom we rejoice. Speaking of Leibnitz, he 

 says : " What he gives us is a cold literary 

 exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell- 

 fire does not warm " (p. 27) ; he offers this 



really delicious etching of Spencer : " His dry 

 schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy 

 monotony of him, his preference for cheap 

 makeshifts in argument, his lack of education 

 even in mechanical principles, and in general 

 the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, 

 his whole system wooden, as if knocked to- 

 gether out of cracked hemlock boards " (p. 39) ; 

 while these declarations remind one of many 

 passages in the Principles : " The rationalist 

 mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and 

 authoritative complexion : the phrase ' must 

 be ' is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its 

 universe must be tight. A radical pragmatist, 

 on the other hand, is a happy-go-lucky an- 

 archistic sort of creature. If he had to live in 

 a tub like Diogenes he wouldn't mind at all if 

 the hoops were loose and the staves let in the 

 sun " (pp. 259-60) . On the other hand, some 

 cheap stuff, which one hates to see, has been 

 allowed to creep in. Here is one of its man- 

 nerisms : " Pragmatism is uncomfortable away 

 from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only 

 in the presence of abstractions " (p. 6Y) ; 

 " The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on 

 so high a level of abstraction that they never 

 try to come down " (p. 19) ; " the philosophy of 

 such men as Green ... is pantheistic " (p. 

 17). Here is another, and very different: 

 " The actual world, instead of being complete 

 ' eternally,' as the monists assure us, may be 

 eternally incomplete, and at all times subject 

 to addition or liable to loss " (p. 166) ; and 

 here is a third, like unto the second : " Talk of 

 logic and necessity and categories and the 

 absolute and the contents of the whole philo- 

 sophical machine-shop as you will, the only 

 real reason I can think of why anything 

 should ever come is that some one wishes it to 

 he here" (pp. 288-9). To pirouette, even in 

 a half-conscious way, between the substantive 

 and transitive, the static and dynamic, the uni- 

 versal and particular, the one and many, may 

 be a good " stunt " in a popular lecture-course, 

 but one does not care to have Professor James 

 stereotyped in this attitude. " Between the 

 coercions of the sensible order and those of the 

 ideal order, our mind is thus wedged tightly " 

 (p. 211). Very true, very likely. But here 



