Note 82 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous book upon Plato’s Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.