PREFACE

Mr. Murray’s youthful modesty insists that his study of Pragmatism needs a sponsor; this is not at all my own opinion, but I may take the opportunity of pointing out how singularly qualified he is to give a good account of it.

In the first place he is young, and youth is an almost indispensable qualification for the appreciation of novelty; for the mind works more and more stiffly as it grows older, and becomes less and less capable of absorbing what is new.  Hence, if our ‘great authorities’ lived for ever, they would become complete Struldbrugs.  This is the justification of death from the standpoint of social progress.  And as there is no subject in which Struldbruggery is more rampant than in philosophy, a youthful and nimble mind is here particularly needed.  It has given Mr. Murray an eye also to the varieties of Pragmatism and to their connections.

Secondly, Mr. Murray has (like myself) enjoyed the advantage of a severely intellectualistic training in the classical philosophy of Oxford University, and in its premier college, Balliol.  The aim of this training is to instil into the best minds the country produces an adamantine conviction that philosophy has made no progress since Aristotle.  It costs about L50,000 a year, but on the whole it is singularly successful.  Its effect upon capable minds possessed of common sense is to produce that contempt for pure intellect which distinguishes the British nation from all others, and ensures the practical success of administrators selected by an examination so gloriously irrelevant to their future duties that, since the lamentable demise of the Chinese system, it may boast to be the most antiquated in the world.  In minds, however, which are more prone to theorizing, but at the same time clear-headed, this training produces a keenness of insight into the defects of intellectualism and a perception of the intellectual necessity of Pragmatism which can probably be reached in no other way.  Mr. Murray, therefore, is quite right in emphasizing, above all, the services of Pragmatism as a rigorously critical theory of knowledge, and in refuting the amiable delusion of many pedants that Pragmatism is merely an emotional revolt against the rigors of Logic.  It is essentially a reform of Logic, which protests against a Logic that has become so formal as to abstract from meaning altogether.

Thirdly, an elementary introduction to Pragmatism was greatly needed, less because the subject is inherently difficult than because it has become so deeply involved in philosophic controversy.  Intrinsically it should be as easy to make philosophy intelligible as any other subject.  The exposition of a truth is difficult only to those who have not understood it, or do not desire to reveal it.  But British philosophy had long become almost as open as German to the (German) gibe that ’philosophy is nothing but the systematic misuse of a terminology invented expressly for this purpose,’ and Pragmatism, too, could obtain a hearing only by showing that it could parley with its foes in the technical language of Kant and Hegel.