Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/587

Rh take the spirit rather than the letter "of what was said. In violation of every rule of interpretation, common-sense or legal, they have ignored the context and pounced upon single words and isolated sentences. Truly, in philosophy as elsewhere, "none are so blind as those who will not see." We are all familiar with "the proof-text method" of argument, much in vogue among theological disputants some years ago, but now happily fallen into a state of "innocuous desuetude." Surely it is not being revived in philosophy. The reasons for the attitude of this class of critics are plain. If the pragmatic method should prove to be true or valid, it would necessarily require "much restatement of traditional notions." If it should prevail, the existing systems of philosophy would be unsettled, if not overthrown, and many of the past, not to mention current, philosophical treatises would thereby become obsolete and subject to relegation to "that 'Museum of Curios' which Professor James has so delightfully instituted for the clumsy devices of an antiquated philosophy." Did not Demetrius, a silversmith, and his followers raise a great uproar at Ephesus against St. Paul for like reasons?

Our Harvard pragmatist has further said:

Yet once more:

All this affords some explanation of the flutter and consternation which pragmatism has caused in the philosophic dove-cotes and why it has even been productive of ruffled feelings and bad temper. Doubtless some felt deeply incensed that "proud Philosophy," that celestial goddess, long acclaimed "Scientia Scientiarum," should be dragged down from her emyprean heights into this work-a-day world, reduced to the menial position, so to speak, of a hewer of wood and drawer of water. Surely this was desecration, if not rank sacrilege. Perhaps,