us association of
the word pragmatic with practical. They have assumed that the intent is
to limit all knowledge, philosophic included, to promoting "action,"
understanding by action either just any bodily movement, or those bodily
movements which conduce to the preservation and grosser well-being of
the body. James' statement, that general conceptions must "cash in" has
been taken (especially by European critics) to mean that the end and
measure of intelligence lies in the narrow and coarse utilities which it
produces. Even an acute American thinker, after first criticizing
pragmatism as a kind of idealistic epistemology, goes on to treat it as
a doctrine which regards intelligence as a lubricating oil facilitating
the workings of the body.

One source of the misunderstanding is suggested by the fact that
"cashing in" to James meant that a general idea must always be capable
of verification in specific existential cases. The notion of "cashing
in" says nothing about the breadth or depth of the specific
consequences. As an empirical doctrine, it could not say anything about
them in general; the specific cases must speak for themselves. If one
conception is verified in terms of eating beefsteak, and another in
terms of a favorable credit balance in the bank, that is not because of
anything in the theory, but because of the specific nature of the
conceptions in question, and because there exist particular events like
hunger and trade. If there are also existences in which the most liberal
esthetic ideas and the most generous moral conceptions can be verified
by specific embodiment, assuredly so much the better. The fact that a
strictly empirical philosophy was taken by so many critics to imply an
_a priori_ dogma about the kind of consequences capable of existence is
evidence, I think, of the inability of many philosophers to think in
concretely empirical terms. Since the critics were themselves accustomed
to get results by manipulating the concepts of "consequences" and of
"practice," they assumed that even a would-be empiricist must be doing
the same sort of thing. It will, I suppose, remain for a long time
incredible to some that a philosopher should really intend to go to
specific experiences to determine of what scope and depth practice
admits, and what sort of consequences the world permits to come into
being. Concepts are so clear; it takes so little time to develop their
implications; experiences are so confused,