3.  It is not, however, entirely the reaction of science upon philosophy which has given birth to Pragmatism.  Philosophy itself has been rent by internal convulsions.  These have been emphasized in the work of Dr. F.C.S.  Schiller, who has shown that already in the days of Plato the distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘error’ was baffling philosophy, that Plato’s Theaetetus has failed to establish it, and that the famous dictum of Protagoras, ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ distinctly foreshadows the ‘Pragmatic,’ or, as he calls it, the ‘Humanist,’ solution of the difficulty.

Elsewhere Dr. Schiller has commented on the controversies raised by Hume’s criticism of dogmatism.  He has shown that Kant failed to answer Hume because he accepted Hume’s psychology, and that no a priori philosophers have since been able to devise any consistent and tenable doctrine.  The idealistic theories of the ‘Absolute’ reveal their futility by their want of application to the genuine problems of life, and by the theoretic agnosticism from which they cannot escape.  Hence the need for a new Theory of Knowledge and a thorough reform of Logic.

4.  At this point he joins forces with Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, who has long been urging a radical criticism of the procedures of Formal Logic, and shown the gulf between them and the processes of concrete thought.  Sidgwick has demonstrated that the belief in formal truth renders Logic merely verbal, and that the actual meaning of assertions completely escapes it.

5.  The most sensational approach to Pragmatism, however, is that from the side of religion.  The Pragmatic method of deciding religious problems, which asserts the legitimacy of a ‘Faith’ that precedes knowledge, has always been, more or less consciously, practised by the religious.  It is brilliantly advocated in the Thoughts of Pascal, and clearly and forcibly defended in that most remarkable essay in unprofessional philosophy, Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent.  This line of reasoning, however, is most familiarly associated with the name of William James; he first illustrated the Pragmatic Method by a famous paper (for a theological audience) on The Will to Believe, and founded the psychological study of religious experience in his Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience.

6.  This brings us to the last, and historically the most fertile, of the sources of Pragmatism, Psychology.  The publication in 1890 of James’s great Principles of Psychology opened a new era in the history of that science.  More than that, it was destined in the long run to work a transformation in philosophy as a whole, by introducing into it those biological and voluntaristic principles to which he afterwards applied the generic name of Pragmatism, or philosophy of action.  We must pass, then, to consider the New Psychology of William James.

CHAPTER II