Note 206 — Chapter V · CRITICAL

And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which I speak, in the next chapter, as necessary to convert Pragmatism into the Humanism it would like to become, Pragmatism is really a kind of romanticism, the reaction of a personal enthusiasm against the abstractions of a classical rationalism in philosophy. There is an element of this romanticism in James’s heroic philosophy of life, although I would prefer to be the last man in the world to talk against this heroic romanticism in any one. It is the great want of our time, and it is the thing that is prized most in some of the men whom this ephemeral age of ours still delights to honour. It was exhibited both in Browning and in George Meredith, for example. Of the former Mr. Chesterton writes in his trenchant, clean-sweeping little book on The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 175: “What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme.” The same thing could be said about James’s “Will to Believe” Philosophy. Meredith, although far less of an idealist than Browning, was also an optimist by temperament rather than by knowledge or by conviction—hence the elevation of his tone and style in spite of his belated naturalism.