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James, William, 1842-1910

"Pragmatism"

It must be an absolute correspondence of our
thoughts with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we OUGHT
to think, unconditionally. The conditioned ways in which we DO think
are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with
psychology, up with logic, in all this question!
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist
clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in
particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-
name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the
rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which
we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just
WHY we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the
concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of
DENYING truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why
people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-
abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal,
he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes
were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than
the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.


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