A dozen years ago I happened upon the word "pragmatism", as it was printed, rather inappropriately,[1] upon the slip cover of Santayana's "Life of Reason." Being a queer looking word and unknown to me, I started to find out what it meant and that led me on a long chase. The farther I went the more interested I became, for I soon discovered that I had been a pragmatist all my life without knowing it. I was as delighted as M. Jourdain when he was told that he had been unconsciously talking prose all his life. I felt as relieved as Huxley when he invented "agnostic" as a tag for himself.
I had come by my pragmatism honestly enough, for I had got my training as a journalist through the study of chemistry, and in science the pragmatic mode of thinking is universal and unquestioned. So when I went to writing about other things,—politics, law, ethics, history, religion, and the like,—I naturally used my brains in the same way as in science, that is, I persisted in the valuation of all acts by their consequences instead of their causes and in the validation of all truths by practicality instead of precedent. But when I found how this way of thinking shocked, annoyed, or amused people I began to fear that I should have to drop it as I had other evidences of my buried past, such as the habit of using words like "catalysis" and "parachlorbenzamidine" in casual conversation.
But when I heard of the pragmatists I knew that I was no longer alone in the world. There were others, it seemed, even men of standing in philosophical circles, whose minds ran in this way and who were not ashamed to own it. I got their names and started to find them wherever they might be. I ran down Dewey in the Adirondacks and Bergson in the Alps. Poincaré I unearthed in a Paris flat, James I heard in a Columbia lecture room; Ostwald I found in a Saxon village; Schiller I caught in an Oxford quad. I was thinking of going to China to see Wang Yang-ming, but fortunately before I had bought my steamer ticket or learned Chinese I discovered that he had been dead for three centuries.[2]
Some who have read or tried to read what I said about Bergson and Poincaré[3] have complained that I used too many big words, and one man wrote me to say that if I would define pragmatism in words of one syllable perhaps he might understand what I was talking about. I could not guarantee that, of course, but I had no hesitation about complying with his request. Confucius wrote his immortal works in words of one syllable, and I would not be beaten by a Chinaman. Even Herbert Spencer once condescended to translate his famous definition of evolution into Anglo-Saxon. Since I am obliged to use the word "pragmatism" more than once in this book I may forestall criticism by putting here my
Monosyllabic Definition of Pragmatism
The one way to find out if a thing is true is to try it and see how it works. If it works well for a long time and for all folks, it must have some truth in it. If it works wrong it is false, at least in part. If there is no way to test it, then it has no sense. It means naught to us when we cannot tell what odds it makes if we hold to it or not. A creed is just a guide to life. We must live to learn. If a man would know what is right he must try to do what is right. Then he can find out. Prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. The will to have faith in a thing oft makes the faith come true. So it can be said in a way that we make truth for our own use. What we think must be of use to us in some way, else why should we think it? The truth is what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that turn out wrong in the end. Thought is a tool, a means to an end. Man has to act, and so he must think. In this way he asks the world what it means to him. The need for thought first comes when man asks "Why?" or "Which?" so that he may know what to do to gain his end. The mind as it thinks makes such facts as it can to best serve its use. Out of the facts so come by is made a law, and this law in turn serves as a rule to guide one's acts.
But the reader should be warned that no two pragmatists can be got to agree upon any definition of pragmatism, and that the opponents of pragmatism differ still more widely in their conception of it. Schiller says that the most serious drawback in the name is that "it condemns every exponent of pragmatism to consume at least half an hour of his limited time in explaining the word." Schiller himself employs the term "humanism" instead which being less novel is less disturbing to 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.[4]
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 at the gate of Corpus Christi College. Otherwise I might have missed him, for he is as alert and agile physically as he is mentally. He usually spends his summers mountain climbing in the Alps, though I suppose he has suspended this pastime during the last three years while the Tyrolean Alps are being used for other purposes than tourism.
Mr. Schiller wears the pointed beard that was the distinguishing mark of the radical of the nineties. He has a Shakespearean-shaped forehead, but wears un-Shakespearean glasses. He is as interesting to converse with as he is to read, which is more than you can say of many authors. He talks best while in motion, a real peripatetic philosopher. I wondered why he did not take his students out of the old gloomy lecture room and walk with them as he did with me, up and down the lawn between the trees and the ivy-clad walls of the college garden. Curious turf it was, close-cut and springy; I never felt anything like it under my feet except an asphalt pavement on a hot summer day.
But I suppose it would be against the Oxford customs to adopt the Greek method in teaching Greek philosophy. At any rate when I went to Mr. Schiller's lecture on logic I found it as conventional in form as it was revolutionary in spirit. One would have thought that printing had never been invented, nor even the mimeograph. The lecture was delivered slowly, and necessarily without feeling, clause by clause, with frequent repetitions, so every word could be taken down. It was really a brilliant lecture as I discovered afterwards when I read over my notes, but at the time it sounded as dull as proof-reading, for the lecturer dictated even the punctuation marks, as he went along: "colon", "Italics", "inverted commas", etc. The English leave out the punctuation marks in legal documents where they are needed and put them into lectures where they do not belong.