Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/95

V. DISCUSSIONS. TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. MR. SCHILLER'S paper in MIND, N. S., No. 54, contains, I find, one or two references to myself which seem to call for a word or two of reply. This word or two I shall try to make as concise and as clear as I can, though I fear I shall not be able to be as brief in the matter as I could wish. For polemics against particular con- temporaries, I confess, I have in general little leisure and less in- clination, being altogether of the opinion that it is more profitable to attempt to understand one's critics than to wrangle with them, and that a student of philosophy has no truer friends than those opponents who succeed in showing him his mistakes. Yet I see that in his first allusion to myself (loc. cit., p. 236), Mr. Schiller contrives to insinuate censure of my supposed polemical ardour. After complaining in the text of his paper that ' Peirce's principle ' should have been denied by certain "over-zealous controver- sialists," Mr. Schiller explains in a footnote that I, and only I, am the over-zealous person of whom he is thinking. Now, as I say, I hold that I, or almost any other man, for the matter of that, may fairly protest against such a description as coming from the author of Humanism. I do not think that Mr. Schiller is justified in censuring many of his brother-students whether on the score of the amount of controversial matter to be found in their productions or on that of the tone and temper in which their controversies are conducted. For my own part, the rule I propose to myself has always been, never to criticise views from which I dissent unless it seems impossible to make my own attitude clear in any other way except at the cost of intolerable discursiveness. And in the case of Mr. Schiller's own philosophical master, the eminence and deserved reputation of Prof. James are so great that I should think myself wanting in respect if I did not, in dissenting strongly from some of his characteristic views, do my best to make my reasons for dis- agreement manifest. 1 1 Mr. Schiller professes, in a sentence which seems in part at least to be addressed to myself, indignation at the ' blindness ' of persons who admit the eminence of Prof. James as a psychologist but deny the coherence of his philosophic views. To me it seems that those of us who take this line might reasonably plead against Mr. Schiller's indigna- tion the example of Prof. James's own treatment of a no less eminent I