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Pragmatism

By William James — New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907 — (Published 1907) · All William James books

Word Count ~52,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 2.9 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #5116

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #5116

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The opening of Lecture I

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called Heretics, Mr. Chesterton writes these words: “There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.”

I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the classroom sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title—flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood all that he said—yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.

I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew—they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free will or God’s omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy’s results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy’s queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity.

The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Lecture I, in which James borrows Chesterton’s remark that a landlady should ask a lodger about his philosophy as well as his income, says that everyone in the hall has a philosophy whether or not he has got it from books, confesses a tremor at the boldness of the undertaking, and recalls that the founder of pragmatism lectured in the same place.

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Further Reading

Read next: James on religious experience, and Nietzsche on the value of truth

Free edition

The Varieties of Religious Experience

By William James · James’s 1902 Gifford Lectures, the book he wrote before these lectures

Free edition

Beyond Good and Evil

By Friedrich Nietzsche · The 1886 book that had already put truth itself on the table

Pragmatism by William James: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

This page offers a summary and analysis of Pragmatism, with the eight lectures set out in reading order, the argument of each one described, and the terms James coins or borrows, the pragmatic method, the tender-minded and the tough-minded, the cash-value of an idea and the moral holiday, explained as they come up. William James published the book in 1907, and it carries the subtitle A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. The lectures were given at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December of 1906 and at Columbia University in New York in January 1907, and they are printed as delivered, without notes or later additions. The eight titles are the book’s own, and the summaries below follow them in order, so the page can be read beside a copy rather than instead of one.

Lecture I sets out the problem the whole book answers. James borrows Chesterton’s remark that a landlady should ask a lodger about his philosophy as well as his income, and then divides philosophers by temperament rather than by argument, into the tender-minded who want a rational and religious universe and the tough-minded who want the facts and nothing else. He names Haeckel and Spencer on one side, the Anglo-Hegelian idealists Green, Bosanquet and Royce on the other, and finds neither side able to give a fact-loving modern what he wants. Leibnitz arguing away the number of the damned and Morrison Swift’s newspaper cuttings of suicides mark the extremes, and a student’s comparison of philosophy to a marble temple on a hill marks the unreality James is complaining of.

Lecture II supplies the method. A quarrel about whether a man has gone round a squirrel is settled by asking what going round means in practice, and the same test is then applied to every metaphysical dispute: trace the practical consequences of each alternative, and where none can be traced the dispute is idle. James takes the term from the Greek word for action, credits Charles Peirce’s article of 1878 with the principle, and quotes Ostwald on a chemical controversy that no experiment could ever have settled. Papini’s figure of the corridor, with rooms opening off it and every guest obliged to pass through, is his account of what pragmatism is: a method and not a set of results. The text described here is the Standard Ebooks edition, and a complete reading text also sits at Project Gutenberg #5116.

Lectures VI and VII are the heart of the book, and they are where most of the controversy has stuck. Truth, James argues, is not a static relation between an idea and a ready-made reality but an event that happens to an idea when it is verified, when it leads us from one part of experience into another without breaking the run. Most of our truths, he admits, live on credit, like banknotes, and are never cashed; the point is that somewhere they must be. His summary sentence is that the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, as the right is the expedient in the way of our behaving. Lecture VII adds Schiller’s humanism, the claim that our truths are to an unascertainable extent man-made, and answers the charge of caprice. The religious side of the same argument is worked out at length in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James’s study of 1902, which is free here too.

Lecture VIII turns to religion, and it is the most personal in the book. James reads Walt Whitman’s To You aloud, gives the poem a monistic reading and a pluralistic one, and then asks what the word possible can mean when it is applied to the world’s salvation. Pessimism says that salvation is impossible, optimism says that it is inevitable, and meliorism, the position he adopts, says that it is a possibility that becomes more probable as the conditions of it are actually met. The world he offers his hearers is not certain to be saved, and he asks whether they would accept such a world if it were proposed to them. He ends with a God who is one helper among others. Readers who want the argument against him can take Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s book of 1886, and the rest of the Philosophy Classics shelf is free as well.

Historical Context

The lectures were given in two cities and printed almost as they were spoken. James delivered them at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December of 1906 and repeated them at Columbia University in New York in January of 1907, and the preface, dated from Harvard in April 1907, says that they appear without developments or notes. He confesses in it that he does not like the name pragmatism and thinks it too late to change it, and he insists that the doctrine he has lately called radical empiricism stands on its own feet and has no logical connection with what follows. The dedication is to the memory of John Stuart Mill, from whom, he says, he first learned the pragmatic openness of mind.

The book is also a piece of movement history. James dates the principle to Charles Peirce’s article How to Make Our Ideas Clear, published in the Popular Science Monthly in January 1878, and says that it lay unnoticed for twenty years until he brought it forward again in an address at the University of California in 1898. By 1907, he reports, the word spots the pages of the philosophic journals, and the movement has spokesmen in several countries: Schiller at Oxford, whose Studies in Humanism he recommends in the preface, Dewey at Chicago, whose instrumental view of truth he calls the foundation, Ostwald and Mach among the scientists, and Papini in Italy. He also notes that the new view of truth has been attacked ferociously, and expects it to pass through the usual three stages of a theory’s career.

The intellectual weather of the book is the argument between science and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. Darwin had displaced the argument from design, Spencer had turned the world’s history into a redistribution of matter and motion, and Haeckel was mocking the God of the theists as a gaseous vertebrate while offering a materialistic monism of his own. On the other side stood the Anglo-Hegelian idealism of Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet and Royce, and a more cautious theism represented by Martineau, Bowne and Ladd, which accepted the Darwinian facts and did nothing with them. James’s complaint is that the first leaves no room for the religious demand and the second no room for facts. His lectures are an attempt to hold both, and the hearer he has in mind is the philosophic amateur who wants science and a religion at once.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• The lecturer: William James in the hall, anecdotal and disarming. He begins with a tremor at the boldness of his own enterprise, argues from a camping trip, a student’s thesis and a letter in the morning post, and tells his audience near the end that their verdicts on philosophers will be simple adjectives of praise or dislike. The voice is the book’s most distinctive character.
• The tender-minded: The rationalist temper as James draws it: idealistic, optimistic, monistic, religious and dogmatic, wanting a universe of principles, closed systems and eternal answers. This mind finds the concrete muddle of the world a scandal and takes refuge in abstractions it can admire. James grants it dignity and comfort and denies it contact with facts.
• The tough-minded: The empiricist temper: materialistic, pluralistic, sceptical, patient with facts in their crude variety, and content to live without religion. James respects it, borrows its loyalty to fact for his own method, and says it leaves the ordinary person’s demand for a meaning in things unanswered. Haeckel and Spencer are its philosophers in the first lecture.
• The pragmatist: The mediator between the two temperaments, who turns his back on fixed principles and looks to consequences. He has no dogmas and no results, only a method, and he is willing to entertain any hypothesis whose working out makes a difference to conduct. Papini’s corridor, with every room opening off it, is the figure for him.
• The Absolute: The all-knower of the idealists, whose practical cash-value James reduces to a permission to take moral holidays, to let the world wag for a while and trust its issues to better hands. He refuses to call the notion sterile, since it affords real comfort, and refuses equally to let it close the argument. It reappears in the last lecture as the religion of self-surrender.
• The meliorist: Neither optimist nor pessimist, the believer who treats the world’s salvation as a possibility, and one that grows more probable as the conditions of it are met. James adopts this position in the last lecture, with a universe not certain to be saved, and makes it the type of the pluralistic religion he is willing to defend.

Core Arguments & Influence

• Temperament in philosophy: James begins by saying that the history of philosophy is to a great extent the history of a clash of human temperaments, and that the strongest of a philosopher’s premises is the one he never mentions. A system is reasoned out in detail, but when the labour is done the mind performs its summarizing act and the system stands over against us like a living thing, with the flavour of the man in it. Plato, Locke, Hegel and Spencer are his examples of temperamental thinkers. The practical consequence is a test of candour: since temperament loads the evidence one way or the other, a philosophy that pretends to have none is hiding the thing that matters most, and the reader’s reaction to a system is likely to be as simple and as final as his reaction to a person.
• The method and its cash-value: The pragmatic method is a way of settling disputes that would otherwise run forever. Ask what practical difference it would make if this notion rather than that were true; if no difference can be traced, the alternatives mean the same thing and the quarrel is empty. James applies the test to substance, to materialism, to design and to free will, and in each case the abstract term becomes a promise about the future rather than a description of the past. Theories become instruments, not answers to riddles. The image he borrows from Papini is the corridor of a hotel, with a dozen incompatible rooms opening off it, and the point of the image is that the corridor belongs to all of them and imposes its route on everyone who wants to get in or out.
• Truth made in the making: For James truth is not a property that an idea carries into the world but something that happens to it. An idea becomes true when it is verified, and verification means being led, through acts and through other ideas, into other parts of experience in a way that keeps going and does not break. Most of our truths are taken on credit, like banknotes, and would collapse if nothing were ever cashed. Truth grows out of previous truth, as a tree grows by a new layer, and the older stock controls the new fact far more than philosophers admit. His summary is that the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, and that the absolutely true is an ideal vanishing point rather than a possession.
• The one and the many: James calls the question of the one and the many the most central of philosophic problems, because knowing whether a man is a monist or a pluralist tells you more about the rest of his opinions than any other label. He refuses to treat oneness as a principle to be admired and asks instead what the world’s unity is known as: unity of discourse, of continuity, of kinds, of purpose, of story, or the single knower of the absolutists. His answer is that oneness and manyness are coordinate, that the world is one just so far as its parts hang together by definite connections and many just so far as those connections fail, and that the eternal all-knower and the irreducibly plural world must be treated as rival hypotheses until the facts decide.
• The unfinished universe: The last lecture gives the book its practical edge. James separates pessimism, which calls the world’s salvation impossible, from optimism, which calls it inevitable, and sets meliorism between them: salvation is a possibility, and it becomes more probable as the conditions of it are actually met. He asks his hearers to imagine the world’s author offering them a world not certain to be saved, whose perfection depends on each agent doing its level best, and he expects them to accept. What follows is a religion of losses as well as gains, in which some things are dropped and not preserved, and in which God is one helper among others rather than the whole. The epigram of the shipwrecked sailor, bidding the reader set sail, is his closing image of that faith.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Pragmatism?

The download is the whole book: the dedication to John Stuart Mill, the preface dated from Harvard in April 1907, and all eight lectures, from the Chesterton quotation that opens the first to the last paragraph on a melioristic theism. Nothing is cut, and no lecture is summarised in place of itself. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, and the eight lecture titles are printed as James gave them.

Around the text the page supplies what a book of lectures needs: one summary for each lecture, stopping where the lecture stops; six notes on the lecturer and the types he argues with; five themes that follow the argument across the eight; and a short account of the two cities, the two audiences and the philosophical quarrel the lectures were written into. The eight groups are the book’s own divisions, not ours, so a passage found here can be looked up in any edition that prints the titles.

The files come in three formats with the same text and the same lecture breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by USB or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited, so the files keep working long after the app you first opened them in is gone.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of Pragmatism is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, with the preface, the dedication and the eight lecture titles printed as James gave them.
• Complete text of all eight lectures Every lecture from The Present Dilemma in Philosophy to Pragmatism and Religion, with the preface and the dedication, and no passage abridged or replaced by a summary.
• One summary for each lecture Eight summaries in the order James printed them, each covering a whole lecture and stopping at its end, so that the page can be read beside the book without running ahead of it.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the lecture breaks and the lecture titles intact and no reader software to install beyond the one you already use.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · 1900s