WHAT PRAGMATISM IS 581 



take the spirit rather than the letter" of what was said. In viola- 

 tion of every rule of interpretation, common-sense or legal, they have 

 ignored the context and pounced upon single words and isolated sen- 

 tences. Truly, in philosophy as elsewhere, " none are so blind as those 

 who will not see." We are all familiar with " the proof -text method " 

 of argument, much in vogue among theological disputants some years 

 ago, but now happily fallen into a state of " innocuous desuetude." 

 Surely it is not being revived in philosophy. The reasons for the 

 attitude of this class of critics are plain. If the pragmatic method 

 should prove to be true or valid, it would necessarily require "much 

 restatement of traditional notions." If it should prevail, the existing 

 systems of philosophy would be unsettled, if not overthrown, and many 

 of the past, not to mention current, philosophical treatises would 

 thereby become obsolete and subject to relegation to " that ' Museum of 

 Curios ' which Professor James has so delightfully instituted for the 

 clumsy devices of an antiquated philosophy." Did not Demetrius, a 

 silversmith, and his followers raise a great uproar at Ephesus against 

 St. Paul for like reasons? 



Our Harvard pragmatist has further said: 



A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of 

 inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from 

 abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, 

 from fixed principles, closed systems and pretended absolutes and origins. He 

 turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and 

 towards power. That means the empirical temper regnant and the rationalist 

 temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, 

 as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. At the 

 same time, it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. 

 But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in 

 what I called in my last lecture the " temperament of philosophy." Teachers 

 of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is 

 frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in 

 protestant lands. 



Yet once more: 



No particular results then so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is 

 what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first 

 things, principles, " categories," supposed necessities ; and of looking towards 

 last things, fruits, consequences, facts. 



All this affords some explanation of the flutter and consternation 

 which pragmatism has caused in the philosophic dove-cotes and why it 

 has even been productive of ruffled feelings and bad temper. Doubt- 

 less some felt deeply incensed that " proud Philosophy," that celestial 

 goddess, long acclaimed " Scientia Scientiarum," should be dragged 

 down from her emyprean heights into this work-a-day world, reduced 

 to the menial position, so to speak, of a hewer of wood and drawer of 

 water. Surely this was desecration, if not rank sacrilege. Perhaps, 



