Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/470

 456 W. CALDWELL : of the Ideas (as reinterpreted by Aristotle and the Meta- physic of Evolution l ) to give it form and reality. It is not the one method of philosophy any more than the testing of hypotheses is the one work of science or of philosophy. In other words it is susceptible of a strong defence not as a method of philosophy but as a would-be theory of reality, as an attempt at an ontology through the door of a teleology as an attempt at a theory of the real through a theory of end and purpose and "consequences". Prof. James is trying to show us how reasonable it is to regard things as we are compelled to assume them to be : he ought rather to take the ground that the manner in which we are compelled (by genuine practical and moral necessity) to assume things to be disposed is the only possible theory of their reality. This perhaps would be the true Pragmatism. 1 With Plato the Ideas represent so many eternal and unchanging types or forms of being. That is, with Plato, e.g., the Idea of a species is absolutely fixed and determined to all eternity. This is not so, to be sure, in evolutionary philosophy when species are regarded as variable. The notion of the Ideas may be therefore retained in philosophy as denoting not so much an infinite number of distinct groups or types of things as rather the different grades of being (see supra) that seem to be constituted by the different manifestations of the cosmic energy or will in which we believe reality to consist. Gf. my Schopenhauer's Si/xti j i, etc., pp. 108, 115.