< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

responsible for some of the current misunderstandings. But it is too late now to rectify this most unfortunate selection of a name. It has been married to the movement for so many years that they must be taken together "for better for worse." As Dr. Schiller has well said:

The name in this case does even less than usual to explain the meaning.

Elsewhere he has said:

In the end we never find out "what a thing really is" by asking "what it was in the beginning.". . . The true nature of a thing is to be found in its validity, which, however, must be connected rather than contrasted with its origin. "What a thing really is" appears from what it does, and so we must study its whole career. We study its past to foretell its future, and to find out what it is really "driving at."

The first person to use the word pragmatism in print was Professor James, in his California address in 1898, wherein he sets forth the principle as follows, with the prefatory statement that

it may be expressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple: The soul and meaning of thought can never be made to direct itself towards anything but the production of belief, belief being the demicadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. Thought in movement has thus for its only possible motive the attainment of thought at rest. But when our thought about an object has found its rest in belief, then our action on the subject can firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action; and the whole function in thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance. Thus the same thought may be clad in different words; but if the different words suggest no different conduct, they are mere outer accretions, and have part in the thought's meaning. If, however, they determine conduct differently, they are essential elements of the significance. "Please open the door," and "veuillez ouvrir la porte," in French, mean just the same thing; but "D—n you, open the door," although in English, means something very different. Thus to develop a thought's meaning we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practise. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.

He goes on to say:

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. I think myself that it should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it. The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. But it inspires that conduct because it first foretells some particular turn to our experience which shall call for just that conduct from us. And I should prefer for our purposes this evening to express Peirce's principle by saying that the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether
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