tever, and books about it may be
committed to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown,
James Mill, John Mill, and Professor Bain, have followed more or less
consistently the same method; and Shadworth Hodgson has used the
principle with full explicitness. When all is said and done, it was
English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who introduced "the critical
method" into philosophy, the one method fitted to make philosophy a
study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain
in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an
appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if
all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should
agree to call true or which false?

An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders
Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the
particulars of its application the principle by which these men were
instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving
to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of PRAGMATISM, and he
defends it somewhat as follows:[297]--

[297] In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular
Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.

Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment
of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject
has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and
safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole
function of thinking is but one step in the production of active
habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in
the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no proper
element of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's meaning
we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce;
that conduct is for us its sole significance; and the tangible fact at
the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of
them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of
practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we
need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are
conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case
the object should be true. Our conception of these practical
consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object, so
far as that conce