70 Logic, vol. ii. p. 17. English translation by Miss Dendy. In this same section of his work, Lotze talks of the demands of our thought as “postulates” whose claims rest in the end upon our will—auf unserm Wollen.
71 To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,” and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the will philosopher par excellence. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance.
72 As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon General Biology (p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage. We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of knowledge.”
73 Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s Pragmatism into German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism. His Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Professor Sanders, Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).
74 Author of a work on Philosophy and Social Economy (Philosophie und Wirthschaft), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy must lead human life and not merely follow it. My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.
75 It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (Philosophie und Leben, Wille und Erkenntniss, Der Geist der neuern Philosophie). He speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the Spirit of the New Philosophy) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling” that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes (also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity—an idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of Blondel.
76 In the Phil. Rev. (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to “come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological processes”—a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.
77 Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work upon the Philosophy of Money, and this at the same time with all his university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient and modern philosophy.
78 Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of Christianity. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p. 8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion itself—a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole History of Dogma.
79 I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says (in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception of religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry” applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for the purpose of finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion” (The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to human motive.
80 See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.
81 I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his Grundzüge and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on).
82 The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous book upon Plato’s Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
83 See the instructive reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the 1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as “a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,” as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see the recent work of Driesch upon the Science and Philosophy of the Organism) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Positivism.
84 We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal Logos, an international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the same movement.
85 See Chapter VII. upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”
86 See an article in the Critical Review (edited by the late Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
88 Without pretending to anything like a representative or an exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,” and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number of the Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques.
89 That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
90 P. 144.
92 See Chapter VI., p. 149, upon the doctrine and the fact of “Meaning.”
93 Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism? (Macmillan & Co., 1909); H. H. Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism, a Philosophical Interpretation of Experience, Boston, 1910 (a useful book presenting what may be called a “phenomenological” account of Pragmatism); Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics.
94 In Pragmatism and Its Critics (Univ. of Chicago Press).
95 The manifesto has now become a book. The New Realism (Macmillan). For a useful account of the New Realism and the Old see Professor Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Part V.
96 The following are my reasons for saying that the “New Realism” was already to some extent lurking in the “radical empiricism” of James. (1) Although teaching unmistakably the “activity” of mind, James seemed to think this activity “selective” rather than “creative” (falling in this idea behind his much-admired Bergson). (2) Despite this belief in the activity of the mind, he had the way of regarding consciousness as (to some extent) the mind’s “content”—an attitude common to all empirical psychologists since Hume and the English associationists. And from this position (legitimate so far from the psychological point of view) he went on to the idea (expressed in a troublesome form in the article, “Does Consciousness exist?”) that consciousness is not an entity or substance—of course it is not in the ordinary sense of “entity.” (3) Then from this he seemed to develop the idea that the various “elements” that enter into consciousness to be transformed into various “relationships” do not suffer any substantial change in this quasi-subjective “activity.” Therefore, as Professor Perry puts it (Present Tendencies, p. 353), “the elements or terms which enter into consciousness and become its content may now be regarded as the same elements which, in so far as otherwise related, compose physical nature [italics mine]. The elements themselves, the ‘materia prima,’ or stuff of pure experience, are neither psychical nor physical.” It is in this last absurd sentence [simply a piece of quasi-scientific analysis, the error of which Critical Idealism would expose in a moment] that the roots, I think, of “new realism” are to be found—a doctrine whose unmitigated externalism is the negation of all philosophy.
98 I refer to his Aberdeen “Gifford Lectures” on “The World and The Individual,” and to a well-known address of his upon “The Eternal and the Practical” in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. In this latter pamphlet he shows that Pragmatism and the philosophy of Consequences are impossible without “the Eternal” and without Idealism.
99 The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from memory) Green’s well-known admission in respect of Hegelianism, that it would have “to be done all over again”; Mr. Bradley’s admission that he is “not a Hegelian” and (recently) that he has “seen too much of metaphysics” to place any serious weight upon its reasonings; Jowett’s complaint (in the “life” by Campbell) that the Oxford Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance upon “words” and “concepts” in the place of facts and things; Dr. Bosanquet’s admission (many years ago) that, of course, “gods and men” were more than “bloodless categories”; Professor Pringle Pattison’s criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality; Professor Baillie’s criticisms at the end of his Logic of Hegel; Mr. Sturt’s criticism of Neo-Hegelianism in his Idola Theatri, etc.
100 See the following, for example, from Professor Stout: “Every agreeable or disagreeable sensation has a conative or quasi-conative aspect” (Manual of Psychology, p. 233). Also: “Perception is never merely cognitive” (ibid. p. 242); it has a “conative character and a feeling tone,” etc.
101 A. Sidgwick’s “Applied Axioms” (Mind, N.S. xiv. p. 42). This is extremely useful, connecting the recent pragmatist movement with the work of the English logicians. See in the same connexion the articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review (April 1909) on “Pragmatism.”
102 During the last ten years Mind has contained articles on the pragmatist controversy by nearly all our prominent academic authorities: Dr. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Professor Taylor, Professor Hoernle, Dr. Schiller, Dr. Mellone, Dr. Boyce-Gibson, Mr. Hobhouse, and so on.
103 Particularly in his valuable book on Truth in which the weakness of the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views.
104 In Idealism as a Practical Creed, in his Browning as a Religious and Philosophical Teacher, and elsewhere.
105 In his Elements of Metaphysic, and in many of his recent reviews; in his review, for example, of Professor Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, in the Review of Theology and Philosophy, and in his Mind (July 1912) review of Professor Ward’s Realm of Ends.
106 In his book upon the Philosophy of Eucken, in God With Us, and elsewhere.
107 In Idola Theatri (an important criticism of Neo-Hegelian writers), and elsewhere.
108 In Essays in Philosophical Construction, and in his book upon Logic.
109 In his Introduction to Logic.
111 “If God has this perfect authority and perfect knowledge, His authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human thing; just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our knowledge know anything which is divine; so by parity of reason they, being gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men” (Parmenides, 134, Jowett’s Plato, vol. iv.).
112 This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the Mind (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.” His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the Hibbert Journal, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,” but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.” Readers of Green’s Prolegomena are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge—in relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals.
113 There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent booklet upon The Problems of Philosophy with the following inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and philosophy.
114 In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s “Pragmatism” in the Journ. of Philos., 1908.
115 See p. 203 (the note), and p. 263, where I suggest that no philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without assumptions of one kind or another.
117 In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (Timaeus, Jowett’s translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming” than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality.
118 Cf. p. 159.
119 From Dr. Schiller’s Humanism.
120 Pragmatism, p. 207.
121 It is this dissatisfaction at once with the abstractions of science and of rationalism and with the contradictions that seem to exist between them all and the facts of life and experience as we feel them that constitutes the great dualism, or the great opposition of modern times. I do not wish to emphasize this dualism, nor do I wish to set forth faith or belief in opposition to reason when I extract from both Pragmatism and Idealism the position that it is belief rather than knowledge that is our fundamental estimate of reality. I do not believe, as I indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature, or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the whole of our experience. That the opposition, however, between reason and faith still exists in many quarters, and that it is and has been the opposition of modern times, and that the great want of our times is a rational faith that shall recall the world of to-day out of its endless “distraction” (the word is Dr. Bosanquet’s), I am certainly inclined to maintain. In proof of this statement it is enough to recall things like the words of Goethe about the conflict of belief and unbelief as the unique theme of the history of the world, or the “ethical headache which was literally a splitting headache,” that Mr. Chesterton finds in the minds of many of our great Victorian writers. I shall take leave of it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the “Free Man’s Worship”) between the “world which science presents for our belief” and the “lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.” The second shall be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot’s book upon Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the “deepest forms of happiness.” The third shall be the declaration of Professor Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that “one of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the conceptions on which they rest.”
124 From Pragmatism and its Misunderstanders.
126 “You will be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen up against them. In influential quarters, Mr. Schiller in particular has been treated like an impudent school-boy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this but for the fact that it throws so much light upon that rationalist temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism. Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame, second-rate makeshift article of truth” (James, Pragmatism, pp. 66–67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.
127 See p. 235 in the Bergson chapter where it is suggested that perception is limited to what interests us for vital or for practical purposes.
128 Cf. p. 92.
132 From “Truth and Copying,” Mind, No. 62.
133 From “Truth and Practice,” in Mind. Cf. “This denial of transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his own experience of “metaphysics,” and of other things besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense (who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract, formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. If Pragmatism means this, I am a pragmatist” (from an article in Mind on the “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”—italics mine). “We may reject the limitation of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satisfaction. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35.
134 Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of philosophers.”
136 “Truth and Practice,” Mind, No. 51.
137 It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.
138 Elements of Metaphysics, p. 411.
139 Ibid. p. 414.
140 Cf. p. 14.
141 See the well-known volume Personal Idealism, edited by Mr. Sturt.
142 Cf. pp. 147 and 193.
143 By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon The Nature of Truth, where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”—the “relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio intellectus et rei), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another” (Essay, iv. 5. 2). How can things “agree” or “disagree” with one another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a “judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations” of two “things.”
144 “The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang. The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many failures; but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such, according to James, are all its operations” (Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,” said James in the “lectures” embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of ‘correspondence’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses” (p. 68; italics mine).