Theories thus become instruments, not answers to ENIGMAS, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.  Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.  Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies.  It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions.

All these, you see, are anti-intellectualist tendencies.  Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant.  But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results.  It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.  As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.  Innumerable chambers open out of it.  In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties.  In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.  But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means.  The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, Fruits, consequences, facts.

So much for the pragmatic method!  You may say that I have been praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some familiar problems.  Meanwhile the word pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a certain theory of truth.  I mean to give a whole lecture to the statement of that theory, after first paving the way, so I can be very brief now.  But brevity is hard to follow, so I ask for your redoubled attention for a quarter of an hour.  If much remains obscure, I hope to make it clearer in the later lectures.