Note 66 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae; nay, the state of matters is even worse than this; it becomes a meretrix theologorum.” This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this work in Mind (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge, out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.