Note 184 — Chapter IV · PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY

It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very reality of “action” that science and philosophy come together. That all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics. Professor M’Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions or the “behaviour” of human beings and animals. And it is surely not difficult to see that—as I try to indicate—it is in human behaviour that philosophy and science come together. Another consideration in respect of the philosophy of action that has long impressed me is this. If there is one realm in which, more than anywhere else, our traditional rationalism and our traditional empiricism really came together in England, it is the realm of social philosophy, the realm of human activity. It was the breaking down of the entire philosophy of sensations in the matter of the proof of utilitarianism that caused John Stuart Mill to take up the “social philosophy” in respect to which the followers of positivism joined hands with the idealists.