re comforted, that a famous professor should take them so
seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,
or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less
beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus
William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,
half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry
individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,
their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he
made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world
has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and
interests of these people.

Yet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in
William James. There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and
Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for
practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.
Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds
and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the
pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that
must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.
To