Note 59 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. Schiller’s review in Mind, July 1911) the acquaintance of the important work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon Action.