There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method.  Socrates was an adept at it.  Aristotle used it methodically.  Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.  Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are ‘known-as.’  But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments:  they were preluders only.  Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny.  I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed.  A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers.  He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.  He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.  That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up.  It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.

At the same time it does not stand for any special results.  It is a method only.  But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ‘temperament’ of philosophy.  Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands.  Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand.

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest.  You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, words have always played.  If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be.  Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will.  So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name.  That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself.  ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names.  You can rest when you have them.  You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest.  You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.  It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.