“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”

Pragmatism is a 1907 collection of lectures given by William James, the psychologist and philosopher, on the subject of Pragmatism as a philosophy of life. He positions it as a middle ground between rationalism, a philosophy based on abstract principles, and empiricism, which trusts only observable facts. Pragmatism, he argues, takes the best of both worlds; it believes only what has practical consequences. To take his own words, Pragmatism is to “try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences…If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then then alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”

Having defined his theory, he then applies it widely, to free will, the existence of God, the nature of truth and salvation, and other ideas. God, for example, he argues we should believe in; religion has no practical consequences except to give us hope and happiness, and so by pragmatism it is true (pragmatic truth is only distantly related to matching some sort of concrete external fact). He’s a gifted writer, and clearly brilliant, but the lectures themselves can be somewhat opaque, particularly his discussion on the nature of truth. Still, few of us today, I think, wrestle enough with problems of free will, whether the universe is one or many, or the existence of God. Yet, these are profound questions that occupied our greatest minds for much of history.

Apart from the main thesis, there are also some great tangents. Reflecting on modernity, for example, he worries that:

 “The BEING of man may be crushed by its own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasing tremendous functions, almost divine create functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.”

Or on the subject of God;

“I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of this fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.”

William James is, I think, an underread one of the Wise – plus, his books are free on kindle!