Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V CRITICAL Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to. As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality. We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life. Now it would be easily possible to continue our study of Pragmatism along some or all of those different lines and points of view. In the matter,for example, of the affiliations and associations of Pragmatism, we could show that, in addition to such things as the nominalism and the utilitarianism, and the positivism, and the
voluntarism and the philosophy of hypotheses, and the
anti-intellectualism already referred to, Pragmatism has an affinity with things as far apart and as different as the Scottish Philosophy of Common-sense, the sociological philosophy of Comte and his followers, the philosophy of Fichte with its great idea of the world as the
sensualized sphere
of our duty, the
experience
philosophy of Bacon and of the entire modern era, and so on. There is even a romantic element in Pragmatism, and it has, in fact, been called
romantic utilitarianism. 1 We can understand this if we …