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In the field of Ethics Pragmatism naturally demands to know what is the actual use of the ethical principles which are handed on from one text-book to another. But it speedily discovers that no answer is forthcoming. Next to nothing is known about the actual efficacy of ethical principles: Ethics is a dead tradition which has very little relation to the actual facts of moral sentiment. And the reason obviously is that there has not been a sufficient desire to know to lead to the proper researches. into the actual psychological nature and distribution of the moral sentiments. Hence there is implicit in Pragmatism a demand for an inquiry to ascertain the actual facts, and pending this inquiry, for a truce to the sterile polemic about ethical principles. In the end this seems not unlikely to result in a real revival of Ethics.

If finally we turn to a region which the vested interests of time-honoured organisations, the turbid complications of emotion, and a formalism that too often merges in hypocrisy, must always render hard of access to a sincere philosophy, and consider the attitude of Pragmatism towards the religious side of life, we shall find once more that it has a most important bearing. For in principle Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows on the one hand that 'Faith' must underlie all Reason' and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate of Faith. Without Faith, therefore, there can be no Reason, and initially the demands of 'Faith' must be as legitimate and essentially as reasonable as those of the 'Reason' they pervade. On the other hand, it enables us to draw the line between a genuine and a spurious 'Faith.' The spurious faith,' which too often is all theologians take courage to aspire to, is merely the

Ostwald is not a professional philosopher at all, but a chemist, and has very likely never heard of Pragmatism; but he sets forth the pragmatist procedure of the sciences in a perfectly masterly way.

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