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 450 w. CALDWELL: assimilated 1 to the type of reflex action. "We 2 seem," in fact, " driven to infer a ... rigid determination of the psychical concomitants [of our actions], to admit with Hux- ley, ' the banishment from all regions of human thought and activity of what we call spirit and spontaneity'." Thus our " last state," our response to ideas and theories that bid fair to emancipate us from the " bondage " to which we have " all time been subject " as creatures of a purely naturalistic evolution in a purely physical universe, turns out to be " worse than the first " state of an at least possible choice between " hypotheses with different practical consequences ". The moral life is seen to be but a fugitive dream in the brain of unconscious nature and our spiritual house is left unto us absolutely "desolate" an edifice all but too light to be dragged to earth by the force of universal gravitation, etTrare r]i, ^a/u,at Tre'cre Sat'SaXo? avd. IV. It might seem at first sight impossible to supply the theory of reality with which the method of Pragmatism must be associated in order to become part of a true philo- sophy, without laying down, at least in outline, a whole scheme of constructive philosophy. It is however unneces- sary to think of anything so vast and so difficult. No one who studied modern psychology to any purpose has much diffi- culty in perceiving and grasping the truth of the proposition that from the psychological standpoint reality means simply that which is in verifiable relation to our active and sensitive life. 3 Similarly, any one who has persistently studied and reflected upon the "Mechanical Theory" as a doctrine of reality has become convinced that (in the language of Prof. Jas. Ward): "It is far truer to say that the universe is a life than to say that it is a mechanism ". And, as for biology and the evolution theory, an examination of their logic and philosophy, an examination even of their elementary con- ceptions (cell, e.g., and organism and reflex action and the formation of nuclei, and differentiation, etc.), will convince any fair-minded person of the impossibility of proceeding far in their domain without the help of teleological assumptions, i,e., without the help of theories about the relation of facts and processes to their consequences, or the relation of elements 1 Prof. James represents this assimilation in the essay (in the Will to Believe) on " Reflex Action and Theism ". 2 Prof. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii., p. 6. 3 One of the most convincing expositions of this truth has always seemed to me to be the chapter on the " Perception of Reality " in the second volume of Prof. James's Principles of Psychology.