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

Even if this contains only a half-truth, it behooves us to try to get our bearings, although philosophical orientation be fraught with all the difficulties that have been claimed. In any event, it is of the utmost importance to get the right point of beginning, so I have thought it advisable to set forth Professor James's exact words when he first announced the principle.

So far as I have been able to discover, the next time he announced it was in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," where he condensed it. I quote only one sentence:

To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true.

I should like you to note especially the added words, "immediate or remote." I would also call attention to the fact that none but a pragmatist could have written this truly delightful book. The eighteenth chapter, bearing the title "Philosophy," is simply a clearly wrought-out application of the principle in the philosophy of religion.

In Baldwin's "Dictionary of Philosophy," Professor James defines the principle as follows:

The doctrine that the whole "meaning" of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences, consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experience to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequences, then it must really be only the first conception under a different name. In methodology it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different definitions.

In an article entitled "Humanism and Truth," published in Mind for October, 1904, he says:

First, as to the word "pragmatism." I myself have only used the term to indicate a method of carrying on an abstract discussion. The serious meaning of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that "pragmatic" test, and you will escape vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which of two statements be true, then they are really one statement in two verbal forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning. In neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may save our breadth, and pass to more important things.

All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should have practical consequences. In England the word has been used more broadly to cover the notion that the truth of any statement consists in the consequences, and particularly in their being good consequences. Here we get beyond affairs of method altogether; and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different, and both are important enough to have different names, I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal to call the wider pragmatism by the name

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