Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/361

Rh The scattered state of the ideas which have been grouped together under the name pragmatism makes it impossible to find a thinker who is a pragmatist from head to foot. Some people are, even though unconsciously, pragmatical on some points or on certain sides, while they are not pragmatical, or are even anti-pragmatical, on other sides. This spirit of liberty, this freedom from rigidity which the pragmatists have discovered in the sciences exists also in their own doctrine.

In making this rapid survey of the differences between pragmatism and the philosophies, I have purposely left positivism on one side, because the question of its relation to pragmatism is far more complicated.

In fact, there are those who maintain—either through timidity or ignorance—that pragmatism is nothing but a version, or a trivial revision, of what is known as positivism, or agnosticism. Naturally there are those who say that it is a perfecting, others who say that it is a deterioration of positivism. Mario Calderoni, although he asserts that the name pragmatism expresses "really an advance upon the system of positivism," yet affirms the "fundamental identity" of the two doctrines. In fact, he sees nothing more in the struggle of Peirce against meaningless questions than a simple continuance of the strife of the positivists against metaphysics. Upon this point I do not agree with Calderoni, and I marvel that such a passionate lover of distinctions should not see what differences there are between the two doctrines.

There are two points in which they seem to agree: the importance of prevision, and the rejection of futile and absurd questions. But even concerning these two points there are differences, not to mention others which we shall examine later.

In fact, pragmatism does not consider prevision merely as opening the way to practical applications, or as an aid in verifying theories, but also as a means of definition and interpretation of the theories themselves. In this case, therefore, such prevision forms a completely new addition to the positivist's method.

Pragmatism, like positivism, condemns and discards the absurd and empty questions which form so large a part of metaphysics, but it does not discard them because they are insoluble. That is to say, nearly all the positivists are agnostics, and say that the human mind can not succeed in solving these problems. The pragmatists, on the contrary, are all anti-agnostics, and maintain that it is not true that those problems are too lofty for our intelligence, but too devoid of sense, too stupid, and that their unwillingness to busy themselves with