To the Memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today....

The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, with...

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 imp...

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel⁠—a...

I am now to make the pragmatic method more familiar by giving you some illustrations of its application to particular problems. I will begin with what is driest, and the first thing I shall take will ...

We saw in the last lecture that the pragmatic method, in its dealings with certain concepts, instead of ending with admiring contemplation, plunges forward into the river of experience with them and p...

In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe’s oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the un...

When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrup...

What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate an...

At the close of the last lecture I reminded you of the first one, in which I had opposed tough-mindedness to tender-mindedness and recommended pragmatism as their mediator. Tough-mindedness positively...

Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission, Part Second, Philadelphia, Liberty Press, 1905, pp. 4⁠–⁠10. ↩ Translated in the Revue Philosophique for January, 1879 (vol. VII). ↩ “Theorie und Praxis,” Zeitsch. ...