on men" is, according to pragmatic principles, an enormous
piece of evidence in its favour. The further fact that all the great "a
priori" metaphysical systems have been driven by their pure logic
to discredit the "substantiality" of the soul, just as they have been
driven to discredit the personality of God, ought, one would think,
where "radical empiricism" is concerned, to be a still stronger
piece of evidence on the soul's side.

James has told us that he has found it necessary to throw away
"pure reason" and to assume an inherent "irrationality" in the
system of things. Why then, when it comes to this particular axiom
of irrational common-sense, does he balk and sheer off?

One cannot resist the temptation of thinking that just here the great
Pragmatist has been led astray by that very philosophical pride he
condemns in the metaphysicians. One cannot help suspecting that
it is nothing less than the fact of the soul's appeal to ordinary
common-sense that has prejudiced this philosopher of common-sense
so profoundly against it.

What James does not seem to see is that his pseudo-scientific
reduction of the integral soul-monad into a wavering and fitful
series of compounded vortex-consciousness is really a falling back
from the empirical data of human reality into the thin abstracted
air of conceptual truth. The concrete substantial soul, just because
it is the permanent basis of personality and the only basis of
personality which common sense can apprehend, is precisely one
of those obstinate original particular "data" of consciousness
which it is the proud role of conceptual and intellectual logic to
explain away, and to explain away in favour of attenuated
rationalistic theories which are themselves "abstracted" or, shall
we say, pruned and shaved off from the very thing they are
supposed to explain.

All these "flowing streams," and "pulses of consciousness" and
multiple "compoundings of consciousness" and overlappings of
sub-consciousness are in reality, for all their pseudo-scientific air,
nothing more or less than the old-fashioned metaphysical
conceptions, such as "being" and "becoming," under a new name.

Nor is the new "irrational reason" by which the pragmatist arrives
at these plausible theories really in the least different from the
imaginative personal vision which, as James himself clearly
shows, was at the back of all that old-fashioned dialectic.

The human mind has not changed its inherent te