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 Supplementary Essay

THE PRAGMATISM OF PEIRCE

BY

The term pragmatism was introduced into literature in the opening sentences of Professor James's California Union address in 1898. The sentences run as follows: "The principle of pragmatism, as we may call it, may be expressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple. In the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, Mr. Charles S. Peirce introduces it as follows:" etc. The readers who have turned to the volume referred to have not, however, found the word there. From other sources we know that the name as well as the idea was furnished by Mr. Peirce. The latter has told us that both the word and the idea were suggested to him by a reading of Kant, the idea by the Critique of Pure Reason, the term by the "Critique of Practical Reason." The article in the Monist gives such a good statement of both the idea and the reason for selecting the term that it may be quoted in extenso. Peirce sets out by saying that with men who work in laboratories, the habit of mind is molded by experimental work much more than they are themselves aware. "Whatever statement you may make to him, he [the experimentalist] will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say." Having himself the experimental mind and being interested in methods of thinking, "he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies