the real objects, and never
those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
practice.

[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]

Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
"objective spirit," tha