Philosophical Pragmatism

inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler’s laws for the planets to follow; he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.
[From A Pluralistic Universe, New York, 1909, pp. 321-4 and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking [1907], New York, l909, pp. 52-61]

James was divergent to complete metaphysical systems and disputed against monism, a principle that preserves that reality is a combined, monolithic total. In Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), he disputed for a pluralistic universe, refutingh that the world can be clarified in terms of an complete strength or system that decides the connections of things and events. He maintained that the connections, whether they

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11