ABSTRACT
Darwinians seemed poised to complete the Galilean scientific picture of the universe, revealing it as a vast, soulless mechanism that just happens to exist and operate for no particular reason. James makes it clear that he is offering an empirical psychology of truth when he imagines a rationalist critic in the second lecture of Pragmatism. James compares truth with language and the law:Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Darwin’s The Origin of Species is, of course, a natural history of life on earth. Static abstract species or archetypes play no observable role in that story. James says that there is no more reason to believe in any sublime, unchanging, ideal Truth than there is to believe in purely abstract and ideal Health or Wealth. Physiology and economics are not pure formal sciences.
