Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/364

358 of sentiments which are to be found hidden in the souls of the pragmatists. The first group is that of our vital sentiments, that is, of our instinctive desires for a larger and richer life, for more extended power. Our love of the concrete, of real and particular things, comes in here, as well as our fondness for dreams that "come true"; also our hatred of useless words, and of dreams foisted upon reality, that neither let us contentedly accept it, nor enable us to alter it.

The second group may be called the pessimistic sentiments. These are shown in the tendency to wish to change all existing things, facts and theories. Another manifestation of this is a certain aversion to anything that comes to us claiming to be already complete, and forces itself upon our acceptance, whether it call itself scientific hypothesis or law of nature.

The third group, on the contrary, is optimistic in its character. It consists in sentiments of pride. These are shown in our honorable reluctance to accept things ready-made, instead of making them for ourselves; in our unwillingness to receive our intellectual inheritance without right of appeal or revision. They are also shown l)y the dislike of submission to what men call the inevitable, the unchangeable, the eternal, and by the proud hope of being able to change existing things by means of simple spiritual force.

To come down from this hypothetical psychology to a more exact forecast, I believe, in general, that all those who think in order to act, who prefer provisional truths that work to over-abstract terms, however intoxicating, may be in sympathy with pragmatism.

Excluded beforehand, consequently, are all pedants devoted to fixed formulae, all systematizers who see the world under the despotism of a symbol: all lovers of immutable truth, of ]n;re reason, of transcendental conceptions, in a word, all conservatives of a rationalistic complexion. But there are, in particular, two classes of minds that seem to me destined to form the bulk of the pragmatist army. I mean practical men and Utopians. The first, because they find in pragmatism the theoretical explanation of their scorn for questions that have no sense or practical import, and of their sympathy with all that is clear, potent and unencumbered. The second, because they find in pragmatism suggestive points of view that encourage them to imagine and to hope extraordinary things. The ideas of pragmatism about absurd hypotheses, about imaginary sciences, about the influence of the will upon belief, and of belief upon reality, seem made on purpose to stimulate the poets and dreamers of the world of thought. Thus pragmatism, in this sole point resembling the Hegelian dialectic, succeeds at last in reconciling opposites.