Note 288 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which—is not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of H. S. R. Eliot, Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson. There is generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy—in this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and experience—the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.