said Professor James, “but I wasn’t considering that side of the matter; I was thinking of our idea.”  The choice of the subjective point of view, then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.  And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent, while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless and unattainable.  The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr. Russell’s, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.  Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic practice.

[Footnote 7:  Pragmatism, p. 101.]

Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up.  It is one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they have turned their back upon, and mean to disown.  It is destined to play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism.  This ultimate result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of realism.  This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the school and its young-American temper.  Nor is the transformation very hard to effect.  The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an independent reality.  But this problem is precisely the one that pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation (which at first were called feelings, experiences, or “truths”) know or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit.  The spiritual act which was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into