Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used
in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of TRUTH. I
mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after
first paving the way, so I can be very brief now. But brevity is
hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter
of an hour. If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in
the later lectures.
One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in
our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the
conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this
subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws
of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by
mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first
mathematical, logical and natural uniformities, the first LAWS, were
discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and
simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have
deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His
mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought
in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized
like Euclid. He made Kepler's laws for the planets to follow; he
made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies;
he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he
established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and
animals, and fixed the distances between them.
Pages:
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60