Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/359

Rh theories; with those which serve as the best instruments for the most important ends of life; with conciseness, with economy of thought, etc.

Naturally he will have an antipathy for all forms of monism; for all universal phrases which signify nothing or too much; for obscure babblings about absurd and inconceivable questions. He will distrust, I say, the pretended evidence and intuitiveness of principles; the faith in a sole and changeless truth; all agnostic theories which make what lies beyond sense a synonym of the unknowable. He will reject all that refuses to change or to adapt itself, all that claims to rule in the name of the divine right of the absolute. He will show no respect or subservience to the famous "reality" of the ordinary man and to the terre à terre of the empiricist.

That is to say, the pragmatist scorns those doctrines which pretend to explain the world by means of three or four mysterious phrases in the name of some unique principle. The pragmatist has an equal contempt for those doctrines that humbly cling to brute facts, as experience gives them to us, without trying to extend them into theory (the narrow empiricism and utilitarianism of so-called common sense), or into practise (the ethical evolutionism of "resignation to the laws of nature"). Instead we see the pragmatist kindled by a certain spirit of enthusiasm for all that shows the complexity and multiplicity of things; for whatever increases our power to act upon the world; for all that is most closely bound up with practise, activity, life.

Now if all these characteristics fail to define with sufficient fullness and precision what pragmatism is, yet they may give some idea of its tendencies.

But I can do something more to give precision to these ideas: that is, I can show in what points pragmatism does not resemble preceding systems of philosophy.

Pragmatism differs above all from other philosophies through the simple fact that it is not a philosophy, if by philosophy you mean a system of metaphysics, a system of the universe, a Weltanschauung or any such matter. The pragmatist, in so far as he is a pragmatist, does not profess idealism rather than materialism, does not believe in the doctrine of creation rather than in that of emanation. For him, comprehensible metaphysical theories (and they are not many), can only give rise to moral consequences that differ—for the practical and experimental expectations are the same for all. This implies that the most rampant idealist and the timorous materialist would avoid in Just the same way an automobile which was about to throw them down; while the beliefs of the former would favor certain moral ideals,