310 J. S. MACKENZIE : been attained. But in recent years this harmony has been rudely disturbed by two new antagonists, more formidable than many of those that went before them Pragmatism, on the one hand, and a new type of Realism, on the other. The former of these has been distinctly the more noisy, and has attracted the larger share of attention ; but the latter is perhaps intrinsically the more interesting and important and is gradually making its way to the front. The one takes up a more purely subjective attitude than that of idealism, and indeed opposes a pure subjectivism against all attempts at an objective construction. The other is more objective than idealism, and opposes an adamantine rock of objectivity against all attempts at idealistic interpre- tation. Pragmatism says to put it broadly that our world is what we arbitrarily make it for ourselves. It is a variant on the homo mensura of Protagoras, a new form of scepticism, differing from the old through its being based on a recogni- tion of the volitional character of the human consciousness, rather than on a recognition of its sensational character. The new Realism, on the other hand, maintains that our world is simply made for us and presented to us that it is not a construction, but a datum. Both views seem to me, I may as well say at once, to err the one by not sufficiently recognising the objective conditions of human choice, the other by over-emphasising the objective conditions to which we are subject. But it, is only with one of these points that I am directly concerned in the present paper. Pragmatism has been a good deal discussed within the last year or two ; and, though I am far from thinking that its interest is exhausted, yet I am inclined to believe that just at present the walls of Jericho as Mr. Bradley has called them are in less danger from the blasts of that particular horn than from the steady undermining of the other party. Moreover, I believe that idealists have really more to learn from the new Realism than they have from Pragmatism. Pragmatism, as it seems to me, does little more than repeat, with one-sided exaggeration, a point that was on the whole sufficiently brought out by Kant, and that most idealists have learnt from him/ Personally, at any rate, I think I have never failed to acknowledge what seems to me to be the small element of truth in their main contention viz., that we could never make any progress in life or thought if we did not believe before we are able to prove ; and that in some important matters the proof must always be very incomplete and tentative. The new Realists are also in the main, like the Pragmatists, empha-
