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to philosophy. His recognized identity as a public philosopher was made
evident by the size of his university audience-more than a thousand
people.
It
was, he acknowledged, "certainly the high tide" of his exis–
tence so far as
"energizing,
and being 'recognized' were concerned."
He hoped to impart to his audience some news of a "new dawn" in
philosophy. There was a conflict between rationalists and empiricists in
philosophy, which he symbolized by the difference between "tender-foot
Bostonians" and "Rocky Mountain toughs." James located Pragmatism
in the empiricist philosophical tradition (hence his dedication of the
book to John Stuart Mill), but he presented it at first not as a meta–
physics but as a method for turning theories into instruments for mov–
ing our inquiries forward.
It
had no dogmas or doctrines of its own. In
this respect it was the method of modern experimental science, and the
idea of truth that follows from it is functional: new truth "marries old
opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum
of continuity."
He knew that rationalists of all kinds, seeking absolute principles and
eternal truths, would find this sort of empiricism ignoble and coarse. To
them he made a characteristically Jamesian response: "The prince of
darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God
of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman . His menial ser–
vices are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dig–
nity is needed in the empyrean ." James's claim that Pragmatism was
only a method for clarifying the meaning of ideas turned out to be some–
what disingenuous for it is clear that he thought it should "turn its back
on absolute monism, and follow pluralism's more empirical path" in
which things are partly joined and partly disjoined. Moreover, for "plu–
ralistic pragmatism" truth is profoundly humanistic: "all 'homes' are in
finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside
of the flux secures the issue of it.
It
can hope salvation only from its own
intrinsic promises and potencies." This eloquent Jamesian respect for
finitude is, [ think, the most modern and radical aspect of his philoso–
phizing, but he drew back, nevertheless, from the tough-minded in their
"rejection of the whole notion of a world beyond our finite experience."
The lectures were only in part technically philosophical; they also
returned to James's own religious questionings and to the argument he
had long ago had with his father's monism in contrast to a more plu–
ralistic moralism, a point of view that James had turned to when he was
struggling as a young man to overcome his tendency to depression and
despair. James recognized a conflict between religion as "self-surrender"
and moralism as "self-sufficingness" (what Emerson would have called
