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these essays. The practical advantages of the pragmatist method are so signal, the field to be covered is so immense, and the reforms to be effected are so sweeping, that I would fain hasten the acceptance of so salutary a philosophy, even at the risk of prematurely flinging these informal essays, as forlorn hopes, against the strongholds of inveterate prejudice. It is in the hope therefore that I may encourage others to co-operate and to cultivate a soil which promises such rich returns of novel truth, that I will indicate a number of important problems which seem to me urgently to demand treatment by pragmatic methods.
I will put first the reform of Logic. Logic hitherto has attempted to be a pseudo-science of a non-existent and impossible process called pure thought. Or at least we have been ordered in its name to expunge from our thinking every trace of feeling, interest, desire, and emotion, as the most pernicious sources of error.
It has not been thought worthy of consideration that these influences are the sources equally of all truth and all-pervasive in our thinking. The result has been that logic has been rendered nothing but a systematic misrepresentation of our actual thinking. It has been made abstract and wantonly difficult, an inexhaustible source of mental bewilderment, but impotent to train the mind, by being assiduously kept apart from the psychology of concrete thinking. And yet a reverent study of the actual procedures of the mind might have been a most precious aid to the self-knowledge of the intellect. To justify in full detail these grave strictures (from which a few only of modern logicians, notably Professors Sigwart and Wundt, and Mr. Alfred Sidgwick,[1] can be or less exempted) would be a long and arduous
- ↑ Whose writings, by reason perhaps of the case of their style, have not received from the experts the attention they deserve.