Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever.
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