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 440 W. CALDWELL : accordance with the tendency of the hour) he uses in speaking of the reality of any other alleged thing. Philosophy will be real to him if it can do something ! AVell ! it can. (7) To the enumeration of the consequences of his principle that are more or less clearly seen by Prof. James himself we may add still another consideration. It is easy to see how the principle of studying the nature of a thing through the conception of its consequences is a way of summing up that transition of human thought with which we are all now familiar the transition from the scholastic doctrine of Es- sence to the Dynamism of modern science with its notion of a few different modes of one fundamental energy. It used to be said a few years ago that evolutionists, instead of telling us what things are, had a way of invariably trying to show us how they had become what they are. We have now, it seems to me, so thoroughly assimilated this tendency into our thinking that we have taken the further step of main- taining that the practical utility of things (of " substances," " organisms," " species," " institutions," " ideas "), their subserviency to the process of universal evolution is their only raison d'etre the only reason for their continuing to be what they are. My point now is that this principle of Prag- matism by its very name, if by nothing else, brings home to the minds of students as a tendency of thought and method of looking at reality this very process of substituting what may be called Teleology and the doctrine of Functional Utility for what has been called Ontology and the doctrine of Essence and Quiddities. It may not be the only thing that is doing so, but it is at least doing so. II. The philosophical bases and affinities of these ideas may be more apparent if we think of some facts and ten- dencies revealed by the science and the criticism of this century with which they may naturally be associated. (1) There is, first of all, the fact so strongly emphasised and so completely exploited by recent psychology, 1 that all cognitive activity is at the same time volitional activity, and that con- sequently our "intellectual systems," our " sets of ideas "- just like religious beliefs and cults and social customs must 1 E.g., by Baldwin and Stout and others referred to by me in more detail in the July number of the International Journal of Ethics for 1898. The fact that intellectual development is a continual growth in motor accommodation and in practical inventiveness is, to my mind, brought out more fully by Baldwin (the two volumes on Mental Develop- ment) than by any one else. See an article on his Social and Ethical Interpretations by Prof. Dewey, in the New World, September, 1898, and one by me in the American Journal of Sociology, September, 1899.