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It almost reconciles one to being no logician that one thereby escapes so much abstractionism. Abstractionism of the worst sort dogs Mr. Russell in his own trials to tell positively what the word 'truth' means.
For what else is the content of the idea of freedom? Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species.
It is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most apparent. The antipragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, refuses to give any account of what the words may mean. For him they form a self-explanatory term. The pragmatist, on the contrary, articulately defines their meaning.
Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I am only trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some of the doctrine's assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both of re-direction and of continuation.
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