ABSTRACT
Dewey is right about James’s crucial role in advancing the idea or ideas of pluralism and about the importance of The Will to Believe in that enterprise, but he couldn’t have known in 1901 that the term would appear in the title of one of James’s metaphysical works in the next decade, nor that it would enter deeply into James’s conception of pragmatism, which he frequently called “pluralistic pragmatism.” James published unsigned reviews and notices in magazines such as the Nation in the mid-1870s, and his first philosophical papers at the end of the decade. The possibility of such expanded vision is a presupposition of James’s call, in the concluding paragraph of the essay, for tolerance and openness to others. It is as if a command and a prohibition issues from the plurality of perspectives.
