PRAGMATISM AND PSEUDO-PRAGMATISM. 383 wl " autobiographical remark of mine about my feelings towards Prof. James's critics had any reference to himself. The time referred to was considerably anterior to the date of any of Prof. Taylor's publications. It is a mistake again to read ' disapproval ' into my suggestion that on one occasion Prof. Taylor may have been ' overzealous ' irn controversy. If I had intended that, I should justly have exposed myself to Prof. Taylor's rebukes. But I can assure him that I have no sort of objection to controversy. Far from it. I like it. And I do hope Prof. Taylor will not stop on my account. Truth, moreover has nothing to fear from controversy. It introduces a human element into science, which is always stimulating and often enlightening and efficacious in clearing up confusions and misconceptions. Indeed I feel sure that if, when the new issues were first raised, they had been honestly argued with instead of being met first with attempts to burke them and then deprecated in quid-me-alta-silentia-cogis-rumpere tones, we should all under- stand both them and each other much better, and be on much pleasanter terms to boot. No ; what I was really remarking on was simply the fact that Prof. Taylor had neglected to back up a very sweeping assertion by illustrations. I feared that he had been carried away in the heat of the argument and asserted more than he could substantiate. But now that he has given me three beautiful examples of what he means by assertions which differ as proved truth and demon- strable contradiction while their practical consequences are indis- tinguishable, I apologise for my suspicion. It will appear later whether by thus repairing his omission Prof. Taylor has also Iped his cause. Lastly Prof. Taylor misses a very simple point when he rebukes me for taking him for an extreme intellectualist. So far from thinking him that, I was disposed to question rather whether both he and his master ought not to be far more intellectualistic in order to be safe in their intellectualism. 1 Nay, Prof. Taylor's seemed to me so shaky that I even thought it possible that he might be on the verge of giving it up altogether. The point of my criticism therefore was that the place he gave to emotion, etc., was inconsist- ent with his intellectualism. And I am astonished that he does not see this to be the plain meaning also of the passage he com- plains of. It was a comment merely on the (to me) incongruous combination of emotional interests and desires to know with an insistence on a belief in ' pure ' thought. Prof. Taylor's manifest failure to see this difficulty moves me therefore to ask him point blank what he takes ' pure thought ' to mean and to be ' pure ' from, if not from emotional and volitional contaminations ? Have a ' disinterested ' interest and a ' pure * thought dependent on emotion never struck him as paradoxes? my view of Mr. Bradley in this respect, cp. N.S., 52, p. 525.
