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PRAGMATISM. II.; science may be said to afford a certain confirmation of the basis of Pragmatism. " The truth at which scientific thought arrives," says Clifford, 1 "is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear ; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human pro but human progress itself." Or Dr. Carstanjen of Zurich in an article 2 upon the philosophy of Avenarius, "The pre- supposition of every science . . . must not only be theoret- ically correct in itself, it must also agree both in itself and in the consequences to be deduced from it, with practical life " words that only too truly express the principle upon which Avenarius works out his conception of the nature of philo- sophy by determining its relation to human effort. Or, as Mr. Peirce 3 puts it : " The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate it is what we mean by the truth." This sentence if conceived in its broadest possible significance, if writ "in large letters" as a Platonist would say, would be true of even philosophy itself, for philosophy must certainly be able to make a synthesis of the truth of science with the realities and tendencies of human action. 4 Metaphysic, we might say, is nothing if not practical ; it is the one science that goes to work without any presupposi- tions, the one science that endeavours to find out what things really are as distinct from what they appear to be from particular or prescribed points of view. It would somehow always seem to be part of the duty of the metaphysician to insist, as does Simmel 5 in a recent article, that the separation connexion between the " vermiculate discussions " of the Schoolmen and practical needs. 1 Lectures and Essays ("Aims of Scientific Thought"), p. 109 (italics mine). '-MIND, October, 1897, p. 453. 3 Pop. Scien. Monthly, 1878, vol. xii., p. 300. J This is obviously Prof. Sidgwick's idea of the work of philosophy, as expressed in a recent article ("The Relation of Ethics to Sociology") in the International Journal of Ethics (October, 1899;. Philosophy he therein describes as a contemplation of the " whole of human thought whether concerned with ideals [' of what ought to be '] or empirical facia" ["about the actual relations of men regarded as members of societies"]. And Prof. Ladd's when he says (Theory of AW/7;;, p. 21), " What is true of the sciences which deal with things is equally true of the sciences which deal with minds, or with both minds and things. They all both assume and demonstrate the truthfulness of certain con- ceptions, in their application to the concrete realities with which they have to deal." 6 "Uber eine Beziehnng der Selectionslehre zur Erkenntnisstheorie," Archiv sys. Phil., Bd. i., Heft. 1, p. 34.