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'God's in his heaven; all's right with the world! THAT'S the heart of your theology, and for that you need no rationalist definitions. Why shouldn't we all of us, rationalists as well as pragmatists, confess this? Pragmatism, so far from keeping her eyes bent on the immediate practical foreground, as she is accused of doing, dwells just as much upon the world's remotest perspectives.
The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as "Weary Willie," and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Ralph Hawtrey, who seems also to serve under the banner of abstractionist logic, convicts us pragmatists of absurdity by arguments similar to Mr. 'When therefore, he writes, 'I say it is correct to say that Caesar is dead, I mean "Caesar is dead." This must be regarded as the definition of correctness. And Mr. Hawtrey then goes on to demolish me by the conflict of the definitions.
Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls 'Relativismus. I cannot discuss his text here. Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's rationality. Lecture VII Pragmatism and Humanism
The Italian metaphysician Aliotta has lately brought together in one survey the numerous leaders in the great "reaction against science," and they are a formidable band. Pragmatists, voluntarists, activists, subjective idealists, emotional mystics, and religious conservatives, have all joined in assaulting the fortress of science which half a century ago seemed impregnable.
The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is pragmatism either.
They accuse relativists and we pragmatists are typical relativists of being debarred by their self-adopted principles, not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and absolute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in the pragmatic sense, of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree, and which no man should ever wish to change.
"I must say I can't see the force of this fellow's reasoning. What's that?" "I thought I heard baby crying." "You didn't. It was the cat. You must learn the difference, my dear. Don't you see that these pragmatists are putting the cart before the horse? Conduct is one of the things to be explained. How can you take it, then, as the ground of the explanation?" "I don't," said Mrs. Gardner.
Russell, are not felt by pragmatists to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations, they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects, and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch contingent fact at all.
One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period did her more harm than good.
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