Note 4 — Chapter IV

Of course any one who wants to find out at first hand what pragmatism is will not bother with what I say but will turn to William James's "Pragmatism" or invest fifty cents in the briefer and more comprehensive survey of the movement in D. L. Murray's primer of "Pragmatism." A definition of pragmatism that is anything but monosyllabic may be found in the chapter on Dewey. The story is told of a college woman who was asked what Professor James's lecture on pragmatism was going to be about and replied that she thought it had something to do with the royal succession in Austria. Schiller's own definition is to be found in his "Studies in Humanism:"

Pragmatism is the doctrine (i) that truths are logical values; (2) that the "truth" of an assertion depends on its application; (3) that the meaning of a rule lies in its application; (4) that ultimately all meaning depends on purpose; (5) that all mental life is purposive. Pragmatism is (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, and it is (7) a conscious application to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic.