Popular Science Monthly/Volume 73/July 1908/The New Philosophy Called Pragmatism
| THE NEW PHILOSOPHY CALLED PRAGMATISM |
By Professor H. HEATH BAWDEN
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
PRAGMATISM is a recent movement of thought which is seeking to do justice to the neglected claims of common sense, of religious faith and of science, in determining a true philosophy of life. It is as Professor James says, simply a new name for some old ways of thinking, yet in its scope and depth of significance it promises to rank among the important and characteristic products of our Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Pragmatism originated as a logical principle of method, first formulated by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878 in an article published in The Popular Science Monthly. Twenty years later, Professor James, in an address before the Philosophical Club of the University of California, brought Peirce's principle to the attention of the philosophical world, since which time those sympathetic with the general point of view have been rallying about it as an organizing center.
At the present time pragmatism is connected with the names of three men, in this country and in England, each being associated with a distinct phase of the movement. Professor William Jantes, of Harvard University, emphasizes the practical meaning of philosophy for every-day life. Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, of Oxford University, England, defends the rights of religious faith and feeling in determining our beliefs. Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, is the champion of a scientific empirical method in philosophy. Professor James uses the words pragmatism and radical empiricism to describe his point of view. Mr. Schiller prefers the term humanism and his philosophy has much in common with what in other quarters has come to be called personalism. Professor Dewey's method is quite generally known as instrumentalism, but in a recent article is described by Professor Dewey himself as immediate empiricism.
These three leading exponents of pragmatism may be regarded as meeting the objections urged, respectively, by the man of affairs, by the mystical religious man, and by the man of science.
The man of affairs has objected to philosophy in the past on the ground of its being abstruse and theoretical, impractical and dreary. He is unable to convert the speculations of the metaphysician into market values, on the one hand—it doesn't "bake any bread"—while, on the other hand, it unsettles his faith in the spiritual verities—"God, freedom and immortality"—belief in which he regards as essential to his peace of mind.
The answer which pragmatism makes to this objection of common sense is to admit its main contention. Concrete experience must, in the last analysis, be the test of the truth of ideas, and philosophy in the past has been out of touch with the interests of practical life. As Mr. Peirce and Professor James put it, there is no difference which does not make a difference. The test of theories must be found in practise. The pragmatic philosophy is a renewed emphasis of this truth. It is a philosophy of doing, and of knowing, only in relation to doing. It is a philosophy of work, of activity, of enterprise, of achievement. And for this reason it has taken up arms against all forms of transcendentalism and absolutism and dogmatism and apriorism in so far as these stand for intellectual interests which do not grow out of or minister to the needs of life.
But the pragmatic philosophy has one trenchent criticism to make on the attitude of the man of affairs—he stands in his own light, stands so close to his practise that he loses perspective, holding a nominal theory which does not correspond with the real theory of his practise. His attitude is essentially uncritical and primitive—naïve, total, implicit, rather than reflective, discriminating and definitive. In becoming practical, philosophy deals common sense a severe blow by showing its inconsistency and the' narrowness and vulgarity, often, of its empiricism—for, after all, theories, while not action in an overt sense, are yet themselves just refined forms of adjustment in a complicated environment.
Another type of person, impressed deeply by the so-called spiritual things of life, by the values as opposed to the facts, believes that the realities which are of most worth are apprehended through the feelings and by faith rather than by purely logical processes, and objects to philosophy on the score of its being artificial and arbitrary, substituting formulas for vital experience and abstract propositions for warm concrete appreciations of things. This is the essentially mystical attitude which includes, not only the religionist, but the artist and many others who distrust the purely intellectualist way of looking at the universe.
Here, again, pragmatism admits the main contention of the objector. Philosophy too often, as Mr. Bradley says, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, and a substitution of abstract impersonal laws for the living personal values of immediate experience. And this new philosophy called pragmatism is trying to so reconstruct the intellectual machinery as to meet the needs of this deeper emotional and volitional nature of man. In so far as pragmatism emphasizes the personal as opposed to the purely formal conditions of thinking, it may be described as mystical in the legitimate and good sense of the word.
This is the core of the humanism of Mr. Schiller. Faith underlies the hypothesis of scientific method as truly as the act of obedience in religion—not, however, in the sense of the child Mr. Schiller quotes, who says that faith is believing what you know isn't true, but in the sense rather of a legitimate speculation where all the factors are uncertain, in the sense of a prudent gambling or betting on your partial knowledge. If faith lies at the basis of our credit system in business and is the only sanction of the inductive leap in scientific generalization, why should it not be legitimate to take the risk of there being a God or a future life? For all we know, the wish and the will to believe may be a factor in determining the reality—as he who thinketh his friend to be true maketh him true.
Pragmatism, in this respect, is a protest against the cold intellectualism of the philosophy and science of the age. In mastering the means of living we have forgotten the ends of life. We confuse money with wealth, the church with religion, politics with government, the school with education, leisure with culture. But he fails in the having who spendeth his days in the getting. The values of life, as Hume long since taught us, lie in the alogical forces of the soul. Eeason and the ratiocinative processes find their only justification in serving at once to satisfy and to modify the feelings and desires which underlie all other aspects of personality.
But still a third objection is frequently raised to philosophy by the man of science, and the pragmatic reply to this is contained in the new instrumental or functional theory of knowledge of Professor Dewey and his school. The man of science criticizes philosophy for being too theoretical in the sense of speculative. "not sticking to the facts." The metaphysician is prone, he says, to spin a universe out of his own inner consciousness, and tries to make the facts fit this ideal system. Once again, pragmatism meets the objector by admitting the force of his objection so far as past systems of philosophy are concerned, and seeks to win the cooperation of the scientist in constructing a philosophy which will be scientific in its method.
But the pragmatist reminds the man of science that he is not free from speculation in his own enterprise, that indeed hypothesis is one of the leading instruments of scientific research, while his whole procedure is shot through and through with metaphysical presuppositions which are the more prejudicial because unsuspected. The aim of a pragmatic philosophy is to bring metaphysical speculation to the test of scientific exactness, on the one hand, and, on the other, to help the scientist to bring to clear self-consciousness his own logical assumptions. This involves, not only a new conception of philosophy, but a new conception of science in relation to philosophy.
The wings of metaphysical speculation are clipped, but philosophy no longer is relegated to the left-overs. Its subject-matter as ordinarily conceived is the methodological scrap-heap of the scientist. All the residual problems which science shoves aside as unimportant or irrelevant are turned over to philosophy, which, as the various sciences successively split off from the parent-stem, has to be satisfied with the vague chaos of general opinions which have not yet come under scientific scrutiny. On such a view philosophy, of course, never can hope to occupy a position of dignity in the intellectual world, for as soon as the human intellect takes up seriously one of these remaining problems and subjects it to careful experimental study, it ceases to be called philosophy and is scored to the credit of science. The result is that the field of philosophy becomes more and more restricted until finally science occupies the whole field and philosophy has only a historical significance.
The name, to be sure, is unimportant—whether it be called philosophy or science—but the fact is that as science gradually encroaches upon the field of the so-called philosophical subject-matter, her method has been becoming more and more philosophic: that is to say, with the progress of science it becomes increasingly necessary to go beyond the confines of any particular science in order to explain any one of its facts. Hence the appearance of the hyphen-sciences and of the comparative method, which have grown up in the interstices between the sciences as formerly classified. Now, in so far as an explanatory law extends beyond the province of the particular science, it is what, in the history of thought, has been called a philosophical principle, and inasmuch as science to-day is increasingly comparative in its method, it follows that it is becoming increasingly philosophic. Instead of philosophy being condemned to the unclassified residuum, it is becoming the very methodology of science. Each scientist is perforce becoming philosophic in order to understand the implications of his own procedure. It behooves the man of science to realize this, and it behooves the old-fashioned metaphysician, who supposes that his method is distinct from that of science, to realize that the only fruitful philosopizing that is going on at the present time is at the hands of the philosophic scientists and the scientific philosophers.
One of the main contributions to this new conception of the relation of philosophy to science is contained in the instrumentalism of Professor Dewey. The main contention of this theory is that ideas are instrumental to action: they are secondary, derived from action, and they are teleological, dynamogenic, point forward to action; or, in so far as they win a permanent place for themselves as ideas, it is because they are more delicate types of action-systems. The reflective or mediating modes of experience are instrumental to the immediate forms of feeling and conduct.
It follows that the formal logic which was elaborated out of relation to the emotional and volitional needs of life, and is consequently correct only in so far as it remains abstract, and valid only in as much as it refers to nothing in particular in the world of concrete values—it follows that this logic will not meet the requirements of a scientific method which is seeking to explain the actual world of phenomena conditioned by human interests and purposes.
Instrumentalism, in other words, is an attempt at once to make philosophy scientific and science philosophic, and pragmatism means instrumentalism in this sense. In seeking to work out this relation in detail, pragmatism has become a general theory of experience, and, interpreted in terms of existing schools of thought, may be described as presenting both an empiricistic and an idealistic phase of its methodology.
In the first place, pragmatism is empiricistic. If philosophy is to be practical and personal and instrumental it must begin with concrete experience, not with an assumed reality beyond nor with an abstracted aspect. It must begin with the full tide of life as we live it and try to understand it from within, not seek to leap out of experience to some transcendental vantage-ground from which the procession might be watched from without. Nor will philosophy begin with such partial aspects as mind and matter nor with such terminal problems as origin and destiny, but will endeavor by a patient study of the way in which experience goes on in the present moment of consciousness to construct the law of the process by which it goes on in other moments. This is the empircal principle of pragmatism. As Professor Dewey puts it, Reality is what it is experienced as. Or as Hegel long since phrased it, "the laws of thought are the laws of things."
This empirical point of view has several important implications. It implies, for one thing, that the distinction between experience and reality is not an absolute one, not an ontological distinction, as the metaphysicians say, but only a methodological or functional one. It no more represents a distinctness in existence than does the distinction of the how and the what of anything, or the distinction of process and content. Experience regarded from the point of view of what it is, its content, its filling of objects and events, we call reality. Reality, regarded from the point of view of how it goes on or the way in which it occurs in consciousness, that is, viewed as a process of evolution here and now, we call experience. A moment of consciousness is a sample of how reality evolves. An object in space or an event in time is a sample of the content of this evolving process. Reality viewed in longitudinal section as a process gives us what we call experience. Experience taken in cross-section yields a content which we call reality.
In the second place, mind or consciousness is what it seems to be—a transformation-phase of experience, not a separate entity. The distinction of mind and body and their alleged disparateness and supposed parallelism is a pseudo-problem created by the methodological inutilities of a prejudiced metaphysics. Just as the hypostatizing of the distinction of reality and experience gave rise to the tedious detour of the epistemological problem, so the erection of the practical distinction between the psychical and the physical into an ontological chasm has produced the paradox of mind and matter in metaphysics. Aristotle's doctrine of entelechy was nearer the truth, which sought to define what a thing is in terms of what it does, in terms of its behavior and functions, and in terms of how it came to be what it is, its genesis and growth. Consciousness, the mind, the soul, is to be defined as a physical object is defined in science: a molecule or an atom is defined in modern physics as the sum of its attributes, the synthesis of the relations in which it stands. Consciousness no longer may be regarded as an entity, nor as the attribute of epiphenomenal manifestation of an entity; it must be defined, as everything else in modern science, as a relation or system of relationships. Reality, Lotze said, means standing-in-relations, a thing is where it acts, being is doing. If this is true, then consciousness is what it seems to be—a transition phase of the contents of experience under certain conditions in which they are undergoing reconstruction into something else. It is not a different kind of reality nor a permanent parallel aspect of material existence, but a mode of experience in the phase of metamorphosis into further experience.
A third implication of this pragmatic empiricism concerns our relation to the making of reality. There is a sense in which reality is given and a sense in which it is made. As Mr. Schiller says, you may "find yourself in love" or you may "make love." You may wish for a chair and find one or have one given to you, or you may wish for a chair and invent one, make one. Is reality discovered or created by knowledge? Are the objects which form the content of experience revealed or constituted by consciousness? This is one of the age-old problems of philosophy which have divided thinkers into transcendentalists and empiricists, nativists and evolutionists. Taking the two terms of the distinction abstractly, it seems that in the final analysis something must be absolutely given, on the one hand, yet, on the other, that something is absolutely created. It appears that there is nothing new under the sun, and yet that everything changes. If all is given, then the apparent progress and freshness of our feelings is an illusion, and if any single part of experience is absolutely given, the whole must be given, as the absolute idealists have been logical enough to see. On the other hand, if all is created, what is to save us from solipsism? The answer is, that neither term of the distinction is to be taken abstractly. Given means taken as given for the situation, while made or created means produced anew relative to some interest or need, not created ex nihilo. Our givings and takings, our acquiescences and imperatives, are not ultimate and abstract, but relative in the sense of relevant to the proximate needs of concrete issues. Taken abstractly, these complementary principles have significance only as limiting concepts, like the infinite and the infinitesimal in mathematics; they are signs of operations to be performed, not absolute realities blocking progress. There is no experience in general or in the abstract, no absolute experience; experience is always in specific centers of concrete interest and value. Hence questions of the absolute origin or absolute givenness of reality are unintelligible because irrelevant. We participate in the evolution of reality by every moment of conscious experience. The truth hasn't all happened yet, as Professor James says. Kant was right in a sense when he said that the understanding creates the world. But it is equally true that for any particular individual and for any particular moment of conscious experience, the high-lights of attentional consciousness are set over against a background of what, for the situation, must be taken as given—and this is the truth the metaphysical realists have built into a wall of separation between a subjective and an objective world.
These are some of the implications of the pragmatic philosophy as a doctrine of empiricism. But we maintained that it likewise represents a form of idealism, and that this is not only consistent with, but absolutely indispensable to the integrity of the empirical side of its method.
The pragmatic philosophy, by virtue of the fact that it purports to be a philosophy, is a form of idealism. All philosophies are idealistic in the deepest sense of the word—they are simply developed ideas of the universe. Pragmatic idealism is only a closer-knit synthesis of practise and theory than other forms of philosophy. If we define idealism as any philosophy which finds the key to the nature of reality in ideas, then pragmatism is a form of idealism, since it is itself a theory, an idea, a conception, a philosophy of experience. There is no necessary antagonism between pragmatism and idealism, since there is no necessary conflict between practise and theory. Pragmatism is not opposed to theory, but only to bad theory; it is not opposed to ideas, but only to ideas that do not work in practise; it is not opposed to ideals, but only to ideals that do not stand in organic relation to life.
The idealistic phase of pragmatism is to be found in its theory of knowledge, in its doctrine of the relation of ideas to action. Thinking, it holds, is action in process of transformation into more adequate action; the pragmatic philosophy is only human action or practise passing into the idea or theory phase for the sake of evolving a more adequate practise. Whether pragmatism is idealistic in either of the other two historically important senses of the word, which hold respectively that ultimate reality is mental (metaphysical idealism) and that the objective world has no existence independent of a knowing subject (epistemological idealism), is easily answered: it is not. These forms of idealism, as Mr. Schiller and Professor James and Professor Dewey in their different ways have shown us, are simply methodological circumlocutions produced by the interposition of false issues by an aprioristic preconception.
As long as men stop their practise now and again to think, they will be idealists. As long as the process of experience is more than a mere blind rule-of-thumb accidental fumbling or slow learning by the method of trial and error, as long as human progress takes place by experiment and invention as well as by repetition and imitation, the philosophy of experience must in the deepest sense of the word be idealistic. Ideas are not copies of realities beyond experience, but are certain contents which, because of their inadequacy, are undergoing revision in that mode of consciousness which we call knowledge: and consciousness and cognition are simply names for reality when thus undergoing reorganization from within. Ideas, as Professor Dewey says, looked at negatively and in relation to the practise which is breaking down, are simply facts which have come under suspicion. Thus we say that the sun-going-around-the-earth is a mere idea because it has become doubted: we call it an illusion. Looked at positively, in relation to further practise, an idea is a plan of action; it is one part of experience used as a means of getting further experience. There is no chasm between the world of things and the world of thoughts; the world of thoughts is the world of things viewed in process of becoming something different from what they have been in relation to the needs of former practise. From this point of view there is no need for a timeless, processless, inscrutable absolute to guarantee the integrity of a subjective-objective, mind-matter, ego-alter world: the only absolute required is the concrete process of experience itself. There is no absolutely absolute absolute just as there is no absolutely relative relative. Absolute idealism and absolute scepticism are self-contradictory limiting conceptions, neither of which is true, taken by itself, but each of which is useful in refuting the other by throwing it back upon the concrete process whence it was derived and where alone it is significant.
Quite the most delightful humor of the present philosophical situation is the way in which the pragmatists in practise repudiate pragmatism as a theory, while on the other hand the pragmatic theorists fail to see their own incorrigible idealism. Rotund in the complacency with which they regard their abstract ideals, which they sentimentally revere, but never use, the actual pragmatist looks with contempt upon the theory of his own practise when some ingenuous idealist seeks to formulate it for him. For what is pragmatic theory to him who is a pragmatist in conduct? It is heresy, blasphemy, anarchy—destruction of established ideals which must be protected at all hazards from any pollution by the "given case." He does not realize that he is destroying the only theoretically sound basis of his own practise, that his so-called ideals are simply masks to conceal the irregularity and irrationality of his practise.
But the full humor of the situation does not appear until we turn to the supposed teachers of pragmatism—the pragmatists in theory. They are not really pragmatists, most of them, but idealists. They have developed pragmatism simply as a means of realizing a new idea in philosophy which seems more valuable to them than any of the old ideals. The fact that the new ideal is not consciously present or clearly worked out, does not alter the case. The function of the philosophical pragmatist of the day is not to supplant the various forms of idealism which have held sway, but to make their ideals operative as forces in the world of actual conditions and causes. It brings ideals down to earth; it does not destroy them. The positive mission of the pragmatic theorist is to show men how to use ideals as genuine dynamic functional realities instead of sentimentally worshipping them in their inviolable isolation. Pragmatism means, not the opportunism or expediency philosophy which too often is the only working theory of the man of affairs; it finds the ideal in the conditions, cultivates and guides its growth within the given case, and formulates it by reading off the "law of the process" by which those very conditions have given rise to the given case.
Men can not get along, and remain civilized, without ideals. It is not only the lover, idolizing the object of his affection, who is actuated by ideals: the successful statesman, scientist or man of business is always an idealist. He has an insight and an outlook—a point of view—which transforms the world of facts in the midst of which he lives, from a brute mass of obstruction and baffling perplexity into a systematic scheme or plan for bringing things to pass. His scheme may be false in certain particulars, but he can no more get along without some centralizing intellectual machinery than a complex organism can get along without a central nervous system or a complex civilization without its methods of communication.
Ideals are simply codes, customs, institutions, habits undergoing reconstruction in the medium of the direct emotional appreciation and rational insight of individuals. A philosophy must at bottom be an idealism because it is a theory of human progress—it seeks to deal in idea methodically with all the conditions by which man evolves an increasingly enriched experience. But experience is not thus mediated when certain standards, relevant in some past situation, are carried over bodily and unrevised into new conditions. This is the fallacy of most of the rationalistic and absolutistic forms of idealism which have held sway. Accepted types of thought and action are imposed on a new situation, and where the new conditions do not fit the rigid framework of the old standard, effort is made to force them into conformity with it. This is the obstructive aspect of absolutism against which pragmatism has raised its timely protest and its demand that all the factors of a situation must be represented constructively in the result.
The pragmatic philosophy, in other words, is a functional idealism: its method is at once intrinsic or immanent and functional or organic. By saying that its method is immanent, we mean that experience must be interpreted from within. We can not jump out of our skins, as Professor James says; we can not pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience and may define what it is only by working back and forth within the current. "We don't know where we're going but we're on the way." If it be asked, Where does this "concrete" experience come from? the question, as Professor Dewey replies, is irrelevant. Experience does not "come from" and where. It is here. We begin with it as the reality-here-and-now. To pursue the question of the origin of experience in an absolute sense, is to seek to run out on an abstraction as if it were a tight-rope, when it has no support at the other end. "How experience became we shall never find out," writes Professor Dewey, "for the reason that experience always is. We shall never account for it by referring it to something else, for 'something else' is only for and in experience." Or, as Professor James has put it, "Though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be conceived, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing."
By organic or functional is meant that all distinctions in theory are true only in relation to the specific situation within which they are set up. There is no truth in general or in the abstract: there are only truths. It further means that in the case of all the dualisms of reflective thought which have occasioned so much controversy in the history of philosophy, each abstract member of the dichotomous distinction is true only in relation to the other. Does a man walk more with his left or with his right leg? asks Professor James. If he is lost in the forest in the northern hemisphere, he may be said perhaps to walk more with his right leg when he goes around in a circle to the left, but more important than the fact of inequality is the fact that he must use them both and that they must cooperate to a common end, if he is to be said to walk at all. When I follow the squirrel around the tree, do I or do I not go around the squirrel? As Professor James here, too, has pointed out, I do, and I do not, go around the squirrel according to which situation of "going around" is under discussion. As he continues, it is not particularly illuminating when you ask what o'clock it is, to be told, as the traditional metaphysician tells us, that he lives in Kensington Place.
Only by a functional interpretation of the time-honored antinomies of reflective thought is it possible to put any practical meaning into the dualisms of actual and ideal, finite and infinite, one and the many, subject and object, mind and matter, ego and alter, reason and faith, good and evil, right and wrong, experience and reality, and the host of other antitheses which the dialectical ingenuity of sapient man has teased out of the intricate meshwork and living tissue of concrete experience.
In conclusion it should be said that, just because pragmatism is idealistic, it is not egoistic, as it has been falsely charged with being, in either the social or the ethical sense.
One of the main contentions of the pragmatists who have been quoted in the foregoing paragraphs, especially of Professor Dewey, who is its most consistent exponent on this side, is the social conditioning of consciousness and of the knowledge process by which reality is constituted in experience. This is not the place to expand upon it, but it is important to note that for the pragmatic idealist, consciousness is essentially social in its content, individuals are functions of each other, selfhood is achieved only through interaction of selves; and cognition, which is ordinarily conceived as a mental process going on in the head of some so-called individual, is a process which includes the object as well as the subject in its activity. As Professor Eoyce has so ably set forth, the external world is the communicable world, is socially constructed, and it may with truth be said, as a recent writer expresses it, that it is as proper to call ultimate reality a society-ofselves as to call it the absolute.
The pragmatic ethics is currently described as the art of making one's self comfortable in the long run, or, in its more cynical form, if you can't have what you want, don't want it. The reply to the implied criticism in the first formulation is that egoism is not incompatible with altruism. It is true, not only that what is good for society is good for the individual, but that what is good for the individual must in the long run be good for society. Egoism or individualism in a functional sense, which recognizes the relationship of the self to the social whole, is the very essence of progress. Egoism and altruism, like other abstractions, when taken in isolation, confute each other. An altruism which is only an excuse for trying to manage other people's affairs is not different from a self-centered egoism; while an egoism which conceives of the self so widely and so generously that it can not find happiness save through the happiness of others, is a very genuine kind of altruism. And the alternative suggested in the second formulation of the pragmatic morality is not the only one: another would be: If you can't have what you want, want it more vitally, more organically, until you get it. A pragmatic ethics refuses to believe that any craving or impulse of human nature is bad as such. There is no absolute evil. Error and evil, like truth and good, are matters of relationship; and, just as the truth is not attained until all the so-called errors are seen in relation to each other and to the whole as partial truths, so all the so-called evil impulses of man must be represented constructively in that outcome of the moral struggle which we call the good. "Nothing succeeds like success," "It's true if it works," are phrases which are capable of an idealistic interpretation in relation to social progress as well as of an egoistic and ethically materialistic interpretation which results in anarchy.
Life is a game of skill, and pragmatism is an attempt to "play the game" as well as possible, since perforce we must play it. It is a philosophy of work, of practise, of labor, of the strenuous life; but it is not simply that. Since, as we have seen, it is not mere practise, but likewise a theory of practise, this brings in the other side which we have called its idealistic aspect. But pragmatism is more than either an empiricism or an idealism: it is an immediatism or mysticism in the good sense of the word—it is a philosophy of play and a branch of fine art. It provides for moral holidays; it is a philosophy of that culture which in its leisure is not idle; it finds a place for the feelings and values and ends of life as well as for conduct and ideas and the means of living. The simple life is as truly its goal as the strenuous life! The simple life!—the "last refuge of complexity!" How much effort people put forth in the endeavor to lead the simple life! It is not getting away from complexity, but controlling complexity in relation to the attainment of the values of life, that pragmatism recommends—not the simple life, but the simplified life. And among other means of the control of cultured living, a true philosophy finds its place: first, as a balance-wheel to the tangential tendencies of lopsided common sense with its uncommon stupidities and rigidities and foreshortening of view; second, as a clearing-house for balancing up the credit and debit accounts of science in relation to this great problem of the control of the conditions of living; and third, as an enhancement of the appreciation of the values of life in emotional and personal terms, by seeing all knowledge and conduct in their widest cosmic and deepest spiritual implications, and feeling with Kant and Tennyson the relation of the flower in the crannied wall of one's own door-yard to the stars above and the moral law within. This is pragmatism and this is a philosophy which must recommend itself to men and women of to-day.