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Updated: May 23, 2025
I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself.
Its function is to effect the necessary changes in beliefs as economically and usefully as possible. It is an evolving process which keeps pace with the evolution of reality and the changing situations of mortal life. It is not, however, entirely the reaction of science upon philosophy which has given birth to Pragmatism. Philosophy itself has been rent by internal convulsions.
I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system.
They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them.
It MAY be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula AND. They might even come and go without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view, of a world of ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule out from serious consideration.
See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, up their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, upon an erkenntnisstheoretische Ich, a God, a Kausalitaetsprinzip, a Design, a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and exalted above facts, see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into facts themselves.
To the neo-realists "the thing given" is alone reality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standard in favor of relativity.
It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism, whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a matter of emphasis or predilection.
There is also a native and majestic alliance between the idea of transcendence and doctrinal preaching and between the facts of the religious experience and the content of speculative philosophy. Not pragmatism but pure metaphysics is the native language of the mind when it moves in the spiritual world. But I am aware that already I have lost my reader's sympathy.
Up to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England.
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