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The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs consciousness so much as what is not quite given.
I have never been able to discover whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the whole series of these apprehensions.
The notion of such final realities, knowledge of which would be absolute truth, is an outgrowth of our cognitive experience from which neither pragmatists nor anti-pragmatists escape. They form an inevitable regulative postulate in every one's thinking. Our notion of them is the most abundantly suggested and satisfied of all our beliefs, the last to suffer doubt.
The aim of science is to determine the laws which prevail in the physical universe; and its motive is that purely disinterested curiosity which is such an embarrassing phenomenon to pragmatists.
A third point, perhaps not quite so certain as our previous two, is that the truth of memory cannot be wholly practical, as pragmatists wish all truth to be. The definition of truth as the correspondence between beliefs and facts seems peculiarly evident in the case of memory, as against not only the pragmatist definition but also the idealist definition by means of coherence.
They found our beliefs; our beliefs are in realities; if no realities are there, the beliefs are false but if realities are there, how they can even be KNOWN without first being BELIEVED; or how BELIEVED except by our first having ideas of them that work satisfactorily, pragmatists find it impossible to imagine.
These qualities have, we think and think truly, been often wanting in the Latin nations, which pride themselves on lucidity of intellect and logical consistency in obedience to general principles. Recent philosophy has encouraged these advocates of common sense, who have long been "pragmatists" without knowing it, to profess their faith without shame.
Among the pragmatists the worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living.
They are quick to see the strategic possibilities of a theory which separates faith and knowledge, and declares that truths of faith can never come into collision with truths of fact, because they 'belong to different orders. It suits them to follow the pragmatists in talking about 'freely chosen beliefs, and 'voluntary certainty ; Mr.
This thought has been taken up by others and given a development which Mr. Peirce regards with some suspicion. He refers especially to the development it has received at the hands of Professor William James, in his two essays, "The Will to Believe" and "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." Professor James is often regarded as foremost among the pragmatists.
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