Second misunderstanding:  Pragmatism is primarily an appeal to action.

The name ‘pragmatism,’ with its suggestions of action, has been an unfortunate choice, I have to admit, and has played into the hands of this mistake.  But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature of the inquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of ideas ‘working’ well, the only thing they think of is their immediate workings in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money, or gain some similar ‘practical’ advantage.  Ideas do work thus, of course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside of the mental world also.  Not crediting us with this rudimentary insight, our critics treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers, doctors, financiers, and men of action generally, who need some sort of a rough and ready weltanschauung, but have no time or wit to study genuine philosophy.  It is usually described as a characteristically American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately.

It is quite true that, when the refined theoretic question that pragmatism begins with is once answered, secondary corollaries of a practical sort follow.  Investigation shows that, in the function called truth, previous realities are not the only independent variables.  To a certain extent our ideas, being realities, are also independent variables, and, just as they follow other reality and fit it, so, in a measure, does other reality follow and fit them.  When they add themselves to being, they partly redetermine the existent, so that reality as a whole appears incompletely definable unless ideas also are kept account of.  This pragmatist doctrine, exhibiting our ideas as complemental factors of reality, throws open (since our ideas are instigators of our action) a wide window upon human action, as well as a wide license to originality in thought.  But few things could be sillier than to ignore the prior epistemological edifice in which the window is built, or to talk as if pragmatism began and ended at the window.  This, nevertheless, is what our critics do almost without exception.  They ignore our primary step and its motive, and make the relation to action, which is our secondary achievement, primary.

Third misunderstanding:  Pragmatists cut themselves off from the right to believe in ejective realities.