g.

III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
rather than a George III."

A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
far from clear, a