MS 317-318 (1907) - Pragmatism - Notes and Drafts

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Prag 3. with the philosophical constitution. I refer to the habit of cherishing contempt for the close study of logic. So much for the past. The ancestry of pragmatism is respectable enough; but the more conscious adoption of it as lanterna pedibus in the discussion of dark questions, and the elobration of it into a method in aid of philosophic inquiry came, in the first instances, from the humbles soûche imaginable. It was in the earliest seventies that a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge, calling ourselves, half ironically, half-defiantly, 'The Metaphysical Club', - for agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics, - used to meet, somtimes in my study, sometimes int hat of William James. It may be that some of our old-time confederates would today not care to have such wild-oats-sowings made public, though there was nothing but boiled oats, milk and sugar in

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Prag 4

the mess Mr Justice Holmes, however, will not, I believe, take it ill that we are proud to remembering his membership; nor will Joseph Warner & Nicholas St John Green was one the most interested fellows, a skillful lawyer and a learned one, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham. His extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas was what attracted attention even where, in particular, he often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act". From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. Chancey Wright, something of a philosophical celebrity in those days, was never absent from our meetings. I was about to call him our corypheus; but he will better be described as our boxing master whom we, I, particularly, used to face to be severely pummeled. He had abandoned ;

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