I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness
to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves
itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows
here the example of the sister-sciences, interpreting the unobserved
by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It
converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of
'correspondence' (what that may mean we must ask later) between our
minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that
anyone may follow in detail and understand) between particular
thoughts of ours, and the great universe of other experiences in
which they play their parts and have their uses.
But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say must
be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the
claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy
harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious
demands of human beings.
Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may
remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the
small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day
fashion of idealism offers them.
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