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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXTY. No. 863 



losophical generalization of the efficiency- 

 doctrine just mentioned. To be sure, any- 

 closer reader of James's "Pragmatism" 

 ought to see that his true interests in the 

 philosophy of life are far deeper than those 

 which the maxims "Be efficient," and, 

 ' ' Play the game ' ' mostly emphasize. And, 

 for the rest, the book on pragmatism is 

 explicitly the portrayal of a method of phi- 

 losophical inquiry, and is only incidentally 

 a discourse upon ethically interesting mat- 

 ters. 'James himself used to protest vigor- 

 ously against the readers who ventured to 

 require of the pragmatist viewed simply as 

 such, any one ethical doctrine whatever. 

 In his book on "Pragmatism" he had ex- 

 pounded, as he often said, a method of 

 philosophizing, a definition of truth, a cri- 

 terion for interpreting and testing the- 

 ories. He was not there concerned with 

 ethics. A pragmatist was free to decide 

 moral issues as he chose, so long as he used 

 the pragmatic method in doing so, that is, 

 so long as he tested ethical doctrines by 

 their concrete results, when they were ap- 

 plied to life. 



Inevitably, however, the pragmatic doc- 

 trine that both the meaning and the truth 

 of ideas shall be tested by their empirical 

 consequences of these ideas and by the 

 practical results of acting them out in life, 

 has seemed both to many of James's orig- 

 inal hearers, and to some of the foreign 

 critics just mentioned, a doctrine that is 

 simply a characteristic Americanism in 

 philosophy — a tendency to judge all ideals 

 by their practical efficiency, by their visible 

 results, by their so-caUed "cash values." 



James, as I have said, earnestly pro- 

 tested against this cruder interpretation 

 of his teaching. The author of "The 

 Varieties of Religious Experience" and of 

 the "Pluralistic Universe" was indeed an 

 empiricist, a lover of the concrete and a 

 man who looked forward to the future 



rather than backward to the past; but de- 

 spite his own use, in his "Pragmatism" of 

 the famous metaphor of the "cash values" 

 of ideas, he was certainly not a thinker 

 who had set his affections upon things 

 below rather than upon things above. 

 And the "consequences" upon which he 

 laid stress when he talked of the prag- 

 matic test for ideas, were certainly not the 

 merely worldly consequences of such ideas 

 in the usual sense of the word "worldly." 

 He appealed always to experience; but 

 then for him, experience might be, and 

 sometimes was, religious experience — ex- 

 perience of the unseen and of the super- 

 human. And so James was right in his 

 protest against these critics of his later 

 doctrine. His form of pragmatism was 

 indeed a form of Americanism in philos- 

 ophy. And he too had his fondness for 

 what he regarded as efficiency, and for 

 those who "play the game," whenever the 

 game was one that he honored. But he 

 also loved too much those who are weak in 

 the eyes of this present world — the re- 

 ligious geniuses, the unpopular inquirers, 

 the noble outcasts. He loved them, I say, 

 too much to be the dupe of the cruder 

 forms of our now popular efficiency doc- 

 trine. In order to win James's most en- 

 thusiastic support, ideas and men needed 

 to express an intense inner experience 

 along with a certain unpopularity which 

 showed that they deserved sympathy. Too 

 much worldly success, on the part of men 

 or of ideas, easily alienated him. Unworld- 

 liness was one of the surest marks, in his 

 eyes, of spiritual power, if only such un- 

 worldliness seemed to him to be joined 

 with interests that, using his favorite 

 words, he could call "concrete" and "im- 

 portant." 



In the light of such facts, all that he 

 said about judging ideas by their "conse- 

 quences" must be interpreted, and there- 



