The whole function of
philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will
make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-
formula or that world-formula be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates
was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley
and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.
Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they
are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in
fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it
generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission,
pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I
hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy,
the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me,
both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has
ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once
for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional
philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from
verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles,
closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.
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