A Hundred Years of British Philosophy by Metz Rudolf Rudolf;

Author:Metz, Rudolf, Rudolf;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1702213
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

II

PRAGMATISM

MODERN Pragmatism is like a surface painted in many iridescent colours, and it has manifested its influence upon many very diverse provinces of life and culture. It is a general tendency of thought as well as a special philosophical doctrine. As a tendency it penetrates wide tracts of our life, business, and thought in manifold forms with varying intensity. As such it lays stress upon sentiment rather than attempts to outline a definite doctrine; and so it almost eludes historical description. But as a philosophical doctrine it appeared first in a land where pragmatic sentiment is the key-note of life more than elsewhere—in America. There it grew up gradually from modest beginnings which can be traced back to the ’seventies of last century. C. S. Peirce is generally reckoned to-day as the spiritual ancestor and first announcer of modern Pragmatism; but it was the mighty prophet-voice of William James which gave it the whole momentum of his great and powerful personality and brought it from the thinker’s study into the world at large. James did not shape Pragmatism into an academic doctrine, but raised it to a spiritual power of the first rank. Because Pragmatism was the expression of a general sentiment it not only carried with it specifically philosophic thought, but became a potent force in the other provinces of intellectual life. In James’s life-time Pragmatism as a philosophy established a wide influence over American thought, though without conquering it completely. And to-day, in spite of many opposing influences and in spite of the powerful influx of European ideas, it is the basic philosophy of the New World.

In England Pragmatism has not evoked so hearty a response. About the end of last century it arose less through its own force than through dissatisfaction with dominant modes of thought and found its first utterance in a joint-volume edited by Henry Sturt in 1902 under the title of Personal Idealism. This was the joint work of eight young or middle-aged members of the University of Oxford who a few years earlier (in 1898) had formed the “Oxford Philosophical Society”. The contributors at that time were comparatively unknown men; and of them only three have since produced important contributions to philosophy, viz. Stout, Schiller, and Rashdall. Of the rest we need only mention the names: those of the editor, of W. R. Boyce Gibson (later the translator and popularizer of Eucken in England, the producer also of an English edition of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologi), of G. E. Underhill, of R. R. Marett (subsequently an eminent anthropologist), and of F. W. Bussell.The group cannot be called a philosophical school in the strict sense; nor did they profess a common allegiance to Pragmatism. They were united only in a common tendency of thought and action, manifesting only one positive purpose, the development and vindication of the principle of personality on the basis of experience and with an idealist view of the world. Indeed, the tie which united them was of a

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