Note 144 — Chapter III · SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS

“The mind is not a ‘mirror’ which passively reflects what it chances to come upon. It initiates and tries; and its correspondence with the ‘outer world’ means that its effort successfully meets the environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang. The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many failures; but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure of interest, and doomed to success or failure in some hour of trial when it meets and engages the environment. Such is mind, and such, according to James, are all its operations” (Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 351). Or the following: “I hope that,” said James in the “lectures” embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ... “the concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism ... may be what approves itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of ‘correspondence’ between our minds and reality, into that of a rich and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and understand) between particular thoughts of ours and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses” (p. 68; italics mine).