Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/66

62 freedom and immortality"—belief in which he regards as essential to his peace of mind.

The answer which pragmatism makes to this objection of common sense is to admit its main contention. Concrete experience must, in the last analysis, be the test of the truth of ideas, and philosophy in the past has been out of touch with the interests of practical life. As Mr. Peirce and Professor James put it, there is no difference which does not make a difference. The test of theories must be found in practise. The pragmatic philosophy is a renewed emphasis of this truth. It is a philosophy of doing, and of knowing, only in relation to doing. It is a philosophy of work, of activity, of enterprise, of achievement. And for this reason it has taken up arms against all forms of transcendentalism and absolutism and dogmatism and apriorism in so far as these stand for intellectual interests which do not grow out of or minister to the needs of life.

But the pragmatic philosophy has one trenchent criticism to make on the attitude of the man of affairs—he stands in his own light, stands so close to his practise that he loses perspective, holding a nominal theory which does not correspond with the real theory of his practise. His attitude is essentially uncritical and primitive—naïve, total, implicit, rather than reflective, discriminating and definitive. In becoming practical, philosophy deals common sense a severe blow by showing its inconsistency and the' narrowness and vulgarity, often, of its empiricism—for, after all, theories, while not action in an overt sense, are yet themselves just refined forms of adjustment in a complicated environment.

Another type of person, impressed deeply by the so-called spiritual things of life, by the values as opposed to the facts, believes that the realities which are of most worth are apprehended through the feelings and by faith rather than by purely logical processes, and objects to philosophy on the score of its being artificial and arbitrary, substituting formulas for vital experience and abstract propositions for warm concrete appreciations of things. This is the essentially mystical attitude which includes, not only the religionist, but the artist and many others who distrust the purely intellectualist way of looking at the universe.

Here, again, pragmatism admits the main contention of the objector. Philosophy too often, as Mr. Bradley says, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, and a substitution of abstract impersonal laws for the living personal values of immediate experience. And this new philosophy called pragmatism is trying to so reconstruct the intellectual machinery as to meet the needs of this deeper emotional and volitional nature of man. In so far as pragmatism emphasizes the personal as opposed to the purely formal conditions of thinking, it may be described as mystical in the legitimate and good sense of the word.

This is the core of the humanism of Mr. Schiller. Faith underlies