SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
the conventional mind but on the other hand has the serious disadvantage of having been applied to a very different thing, namely, the spirit of the Renaissance. Since C. S. Peirce who invented the term "pragmatism" and William James who popularized it are both dead, the word finds few defenders, although the mode of reasoning it tried to stand for is obviously permeating all fields of thought. Like many other things pragmatism seems likely to conquer the world incognito.[1]
A man in the act of dismounting from a bicycle is temporarily incapacitated from the effective use of either mode of locomotion, and it was at this psychological moment that I caught Doctor Schiller
- ↑ Of course any one who wants to find out at first hand what pragmatism is will not bother with what I say but will turn to William James's "Pragmatism" or invest fifty cents in the briefer and more comprehensive survey of the movement in D. L. Murray's primer of "Pragmatism." A definition of pragmatism that is anything but monosyllabic may be found in the chapter on Dewey. The story is told of a college woman who was asked what Professor James's lecture on pragmatism was going to be about and replied that she thought it had something to do with the royal succession in Austria. Schiller's own definition is to be found in his "Studies in Humanism:"
Pragmatism is the doctrine (1) that truths are logical values; (2) that the "truth" of an assertion depends on its application; (3) that the meaning of a rule lies in its application; (4) that ultimately all meaning depends on purpose; (5) that all mental life is purposive. Pragmatism is (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, and it is (7) a conscious application to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic.
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