Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/588

588 a still further explanation may be found in the fact that pragmatism undertook to act as a mediator and reconciler between the contending systems and, in consequence thereof, has suffered the proverbial fate of the peacemaker.

Whether or not I have been successful in pointing out the true causes which have induced the fierce onslaughts which have been made against the movement, it must be admitted that they have signally failed to check it, and that it is growing, in spite of all the hostile criticisms and gross misrepresentations. It would seem that it has come into the world to stay. It might well be that its critics would have fared better from the beginning if they had remembered that "good humor is a philosophic state of mind," even if it be not true "that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile." It undoubtedly would have been more in unison with the true philosophic spirit, and, perhaps, attended with better results, if they had set to work in good earnest to refute the arguments advanced by Professor James and the other leaders, instead of contenting themselves with giving pragmatism a bad name and bestowing upon it abuse and opprobrious epithets. If they were simply following the old maxim, "give a dog a bad name and it will hang him," they were on a false trail.

As I have said, entire harmony has not existed in pragmatist ranks, of which fact the critics have made the most. Even so, such differences furnish no justification for the failure of the professional philosophers to understand the lucid statements of Professor James, or of the other two leaders, Dr. Schiller and Professor Dewey, as some of them seem to have done. The points of divergence among them are easily discernible by those who really try to see and understand the movement.

However, pragmatism, being what its protagonist says it is, ought not to be expected to mean the same thing or to make a like appeal to different minds. Evidently, it was with deep design that Professor James began the first lecture in his "Pragmatism" with that paradoxical quotation from Mr. Chesterton's "Heretics," as to the most important thing about a man being his philosophy. It contains a greater modicum of truth than most paradoxes, for as a man's philosophy is, so will be "his view of the universe," and, as that view is, so will be his life. From this paradox our pragmatist proceeds to develop the thesis that "the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments," and to show us how temperament "loads the evidence" not only for philosophers, but for all of us. In this he follows Fichte, who has said somewhere, "what system of philosophy you hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are." So Dr. Schiller has said, "the fit of a man's philosophy is (and ought to be) as individual as the fit of his clothes." All this