Note 283 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

There is another important thing to think of in connexion with this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences” and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the Revue Philosophique (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,” pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras—that man is the measure of reality—for man.