PRAGMATISM. 4H9 attempt to prove by some philosophy or other the legitimacy of affirming as real the objects of certain practical needs after having shown the unsatisfactoriness of the ignorance or the negations of mere science. As to all this, I have but a single remark. It is no proof of the reality of God and Immortality to say that we will these things to be real, unless we can prove 1 by an appeal to fact and to reason that what we will is real, or that by reality we do mean and can only mean volitional experience and whatever is organically related to this. (6) There is Prof. James's claim that, if Pragmatism be true, it is after all "English " philosophy and not German philosophy that represents the true critical method, inas- much as it is the English speaking philosophers who first introduced the idea of interpreting the meaning of concep- tions by asking what difference they make for life. This however is a thing that has long been maintained by such penetrating students of English philosophy as Prof. Campbell Fraser, 2 and that was substantiated anew with much ingenu- ity and discernment by his successor Prof. Andrew Seth 3 in regard to the Scottish criticism of David Hume, but it is none the less valuable to have it so incorporated into our conception of philosophy as to seem a natural admission of a true philosophical attitude. It ought to need no supremely profound insight into British philosophy to see that there, as well as everywhere else in the history of philosophical thought, men have been essentially engaged upon nothing but the one problem of investigating the real meaning for our human experience of alleged ideas and facts and principles and beliefs. It is to me but another version of this truth to maintain, as does point number three, 4 that the proper func- tion of philosophy is the study of the differences to us of the truth or untruth of different world-formulas. I should prefer to say (as I have indicated) that the business of philosophy is to study reality and to reduce it to its fundamental terms, but then it is nothing against the pragmatic view of philosophy and of reality (for I shall below insist upon this addition to James's thought) to say that it gives the average man, or the practical man, a view of the function of philosophy that commends itself to his judgment in the same terms that (in 1 1 shall try below to indicate how this may be and has in a manner been proved. 2 See his Britaniiica article upon Locke, and also his edition of the Essay, and the life of fMcke in Blackwood's " Classics ". 3 See Scottish Philosophy. 4 Cf. supra.
