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PARTISAN REVIEW
James's response to this visit included the speculative comment that
the new energy and vitality of this strange society of immigrants would
soon make its way into the mainstream of English-speaking theater,
thought, and letters. Henry James could not refrain from expressing his
concern about the future sounds and accent of the English language,
once this happy event will have taken place.
After a number of "elder brother" remonstrations against Henry
James's excessively mannered style, despite the acknowledged "para–
doxical success" of his later novels, William James moves on to the
communicative point of the letter about his own forthcoming work,
Pragmatism:
I have just finished the proofs of a little book called
Pragmatism,
which even you may enjoy reading. It is a very "sincere" and, from
the point of view of ordinary philosophy-professorial manners, a
very unconventional utterance, not particularly original at anyone
point, yet, in the midst of the literature of the way of thinking
which it represents, with just that amount of squeak or shrillness of
the voice that enables one book to tell. . .. I shouldn't be surprised
if ten years hence it should be rated as "epoch-making," for of the
definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain
no doubt whatever. I believe it to be something quite like the
protestant reformation.
If
we replace the European reference
to
the "Reformation" with the
more American idiom that Dewey introduced of a "Reconstruction" in
philosophy, then james's prophecy seems to have been vindicated. This
reconstruction was hailed as marking a new philosophical beginning
after the dead end of the main fin-de-siecle philosophical tendencies of
Materialism and Idealism.
.
Pragmatism was to provide a thoroughgoing reconstruction in major
areas of philosophical thought, and Sidney Hook, like William James,
was confident of the "definitive triumph of that general way of think–
ing." More specifically, Hook supported Pragmatism in four significant
areas: an interpretation of metaphysics; a methodology that placed great
value on scientific method; an epistemology that stressed the instru–
mental role of knowledge in reshaping the human environment; and a
moral theory that required the application of critical intelligence to
"problematic situations."
Sidney Hook's doctoral dissertation was on the "metaphysics of
Pragmatism" and examined various Pragmatic theses about the most
