The movement is still in
a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
their master.
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