574 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



responsible for some of the current misunderstandings. But it is too 

 late now to rectify this most unfortunate selection of a name. It has 

 been married to the movement for so many years that they must be 

 taken together " for better for worse." As Dr. Schiller has well said : 



The name in this case does even less than usual to explain the meaning. 



Elsewhere he has said: 



In the end we never find out " what a thing really is " by asking " what it 

 was in the beginning." . . . The true nature of a thing is to be found in its 

 validity, which, however, must be connected rather than contrasted with its 

 origin. " What a thing really is " appears from what it does, and so we must 

 study its whole career. We study its past to foretell its future, and to find out 

 what it is really " driving at." 



The first person to use the word pragmatism in print was Professor 

 James, in his California address in 1898, wherein he sets forth the 

 principle as follows, with the prefatory statement that 

 it may be expressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple: The 

 soul and meaning of thought can never be made to direct itself towards any- 

 thing but the production of belief, belief being the demicadence which closes 

 a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. Thought in 

 movement has thus for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at 

 rest. But when our thought about an object has found its rest in belief, 

 then our action on the subject can firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, 

 are really rules for action; and the whole function in thinking is but one step 

 in the production of habits of action. If there were any part of a thought 

 that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part 

 would be no proper element of the thought's significance. Thus the same 

 thought may be clad in different words; but if the different words suggest no 

 different conduct, they are mere outer accretions, and have part in the 

 thought's meaning. If, however, they determine conduct differently, they 

 are essential elements of the significance. " Please open the door," and 

 " veuillez ouvrir la porte," in French, mean just the same thing; but "D — n 

 you, open the door," although in English, means something very different. 

 Thus to develop a thought's meaning we need only determine what conduct it is 

 fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible 

 fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there 

 is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of 

 practise. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we 

 need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may 

 involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we 

 must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our 

 conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all. 



He goes on to say: 

 This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. I think myself that 

 it should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it. The ultimate 

 test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. 

 But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to 

 our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. And I should 

 prefer for our purposes this evening to express Peirce's principle by saying 

 that the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought 

 down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether 



