efficient. The meanings "the air is stuffy" and "stuffy air is unwholesome" may determine, for example, the opening of the window. Accordingly on the ethical side, "the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals. . .; in other words, becomes, through action an embodiment of rational purports or habits generalized as widely as possible."[1]
The passages quoted should be compared with what Peirce has to say in the Baldwin Dictionary article. There he says that James's doctrine seems to commit us to the belief "that the end of man is action—a stoical maxim which does not commend itself as forcibly to the present writer at the age of sixty as it did at thirty. If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that the end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself . . . would direct us toward something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas. . . . The only ultimate good which the practical facts to which the maxim directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness. . . . Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness. This is first shown to be true with mathematical exactitude in the field of logic, and is thence inferred to hold good metaphysically. It is not opposed to pragmaticism . . . but includes that procedure as a step."
Here again we have the doctrine of pragmaticism as a doctrine that meaning or rational purport resides in the setting up of habits or generalized methods, a doctrine passing over into
- ↑ It is probably fair to see here an empirical rendering of the Kantian generality of moral action, while the distinction and connection of "rational purport" and "sensible particular" have also obvious Kantian associations.
