438 W. CALDWELL : corollary a novel and useful rendering of Leibnitz's principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. And (3) another is that the " whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world- formula be the one which is true," it being Prof. James's opinion that all philosophy is but " words, words, words " unless the metaphysical alternatives under investigation can be shown to have alternative practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. I shall deal with this third point immediately in connexion with the sixth. (4) There is, again, the position that the meaning of such philosophical abstractions as the "one" and the "many," and " substance " and the rest of the " categories " becomes clearer when we think of what may be called their practical significance, their working value. " ' Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, Das Beharrliche, that which will be as it has been, because its being is essential and eternal." J This is something that the philosophy of to-day must learn anew, although it is substantially one of the things that Hegel teaches in his Logic, wherein he may be said to prove by his whole procedure the truth of his emphatic declaration that : " The only way to make good any growth and progress in knowledge is to hold results fast in their truth ". 2 (5) Prof. James, despite the modesty of his pretensions about his pamphlet and its tentative nature, makes little attempt to conceal the fact that with his torch of Pragmatism, with his principle of examining only hypotheses with " vital differ- ences " and " effective meanings," he has found his way to the vision splendid to the God and Freedom and Immor- tality, the Ideentrias, that lay in the depths of the forest of human experience and human knowledge all but totally concealed by the growths and overgrowths of Naturalism and Materialism. These things make life more worth living, consequently they are true and real. All the world now counts Prof. James on the side of Belief, just as it does M. Brunetiere or Mr. Balfour or M. Huysmanns or Mr. Kidd, and for very much the same reasons that both he and they 1 This illustration I take from the Will to Believe, p. 80. 2 I use Wallace's translation, p. 145. Readers of the Logic will remem- ber another place in which Hegel characteristically insists that even the highest things must be regarded as also the most useful. In Hartmann's Phiinomenologie des si-tt lichen Be.wusstseyns we can see how metaphys- ical method may very naturally become a study of theories in the light of their practical consequences. See two articles on Hartmann by the present writer (Philosophical Review, September and November, 1899).
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