Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/589

Rh must naturally follow if we agree with Mr. E. B. Marett, who has said:

Our "great student of the human soul" has said, this particular difference in temperament "has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy." He should have added religion, for in no other department of life has temperament played a most important rôle, as he himself has superbly exemplified in his "Varieties." This furnishes the key to the explanation of why "God has two families of children on this earth, the once-born and the twice-born," to use Francis W. Newman's significant phrase. There is no escaping it. By shaping our faith for us it largely "divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility men" and explains why "each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place," thereby each making for himself the world in which he lives. We have certain rules by which we can calculate with approximate correctness the variation of the magnetic needle from the true North and South line, but, most unfortunately, we have no rule for computing temperamental variation.

Pragmatism, therefore, being primarily a method of thought, "an attitude of orientation," neither designates nor leads to any "specific philosophic creed"; and is not a system or a metaphysic. Dr. Schiller has cogently said that it is "an epistemological method which really describes the facts of actual knowing." That it should somewhat definitely point to a metaphysic and also prove to be "a genetic theory of what is meant by truth" should prove no surprise to us, but, as important as all this is, it must be considered as secondary. One of its chief beauties and attractions is that it leaves each one of us perfectly free to develop his own particular "ideals and over-beliefs, the most interesting and valuable things about a man." Thus it has led Professor James to "radical empiricism," Mr. Peirce to "pragmaticism," Professor Dewey to "instrumentalism" or "immediate empiricism," Dr. Schiller to "humanism," and others to "the thirteen pragmatisms," of which we have been hearing so much of late. All this is as it should be and is greatly to its credit. But these different terms should not be confounded with each other, used interchangeably as though they were synonymous, or identified with pragmatism, as has been done by some friends and many foes of the movement. At all hazards, the pragmatic method must not be permitted to become identified with any one of them. That would be only the first step towards its crystallization into a creed or petrifaction into a dogma. That would be but to follow blindly in the footsteps of those teachers who