Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/103

Rh the scientific method to problems of conduct which is known as pragmatism.

Pragmatism distinguishes itself at once from the synthetic philosophy in that it is non-systematic. Instead of an interest in a formulated body of knowledge it appears to possess an insatiable desire to determine practical choices. Given a problem of conduct, the solution unknown; what shall be the line of action? Here one perceives a strictly scientific situation that emphasizes the practical value of the hypothesis. The problem is to find a satisfactory path into a new region. And the answer that pragmatism gives is, trust to luck and your past experience. The truth, says James, is the hypothesis that will work. The truth, says Dewey, if I rightly apprehend him, is the hypothesis that you can work with. There is a suggestion of permanency, of stability, of future significance in the latter phrase that makes it, to my mind, more felicitous. But I do not care to dwell upon that point. What comes closer to my purpose is to point out that here is no faith in final causes, here is no suspicion even of that innocuous phantom, the unknowable. Here is no. distinction between science and philosophy—if indeed pragmatists are philosophers, in spite of the fact that, in one form or other, they fill several of the chairs of philosophy now in our universities. Here is a faith that facts will tell their tale—will inevitably condition the movement of ideas, that one's imagination content is derivable from one's effective experience. Here is a philosophy that is working a transformation on the thought of the day. How? By abandoning the search for lofty peaks of final causation, from which to triangulate the universe according to logical necessity; by emphasizing ideas that shall not only square with the facts as we find them, but shall create others.

Such I conceive to be the most significant effects of modern scientific thought upon philosophy. They are characteristic tendencies of the present day. How one may evaluate them, however, is a problem which, for the purposes of this discussion, I have already promised to avoid.