< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
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581
WHAT PRAGMATISM IS

take the spirit rather than the letter "of what was said. In violation of every rule of interpretation, common-sense or legal, they have ignored the context and pounced upon single words and isolated sentences. Truly, in philosophy as elsewhere, "none are so blind as those who will not see." We are all familiar with "the proof-text method" of argument, much in vogue among theological disputants some years ago, but now happily fallen into a state of "innocuous desuetude." Surely it is not being revived in philosophy. The reasons for the attitude of this class of critics are plain. If the pragmatic method should prove to be true or valid, it would necessarily require "much restatement of traditional notions." If it should prevail, the existing systems of philosophy would be unsettled, if not overthrown, and many of the past, not to mention current, philosophical treatises would thereby become obsolete and subject to relegation to "that 'Museum of Curios' which Professor James has so delightfully instituted for the clumsy devices of an antiquated philosophy." Did not Demetrius, a silversmith, and his followers raise a great uproar at Ephesus against St. Paul for like reasons?

Our Harvard pragmatist has further said:

A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empirical temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. At the same time, it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the "temperament of philosophy." Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands.

Yet once more:

No particular results then so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, "categories," supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

All this affords some explanation of the flutter and consternation which pragmatism has caused in the philosophic dove-cotes and why it has even been productive of ruffled feelings and bad temper. Doubtless some felt deeply incensed that "proud Philosophy," that celestial goddess, long acclaimed "Scientia Scientiarum," should be dragged down from her emyprean heights into this work-a-day world, reduced to the menial position, so to speak, of a hewer of wood and drawer of water. Surely this was desecration, if not rank sacrilege. Perhaps,

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