ABSTRACT
Modern Pragmatism is like a surface painted in many iridescent colours, and it has manifested its influence upon many very diverse provinces of life and culture. It is a general tendency of thought as well as a special philosophical doctrine. As a tendency it penetrates wide tracts of our life, business, and thought in manifold forms with varying intensity. As such it lays stress upon sentiment rather than attempts to outline a definite doctrine; and so it almost eludes historical description. But as a philosophical doctrine it appeared first in a land where pragmatic sentiment is the key-note of life more than elsewhere—in America. There it grew up gradually from modest beginnings which can be traced back to the 'seventies of last century. C. S. Peirce is generally reckoned to-day as the spiritual ancestor and first announcer of modern Pragmatism; but it was the mighty prophet-voice of William James which gave it the whole momentum of his great and powerful personality and brought it from the thinker's study into the world at large. James did not shape Pragmatism into an academic doctrine, but raised it to a spiritual power of the first rank. Because Pragmatism was the expression of a general sentiment it not only carried with it specifically philosophic thought, but became a potent force in the other provinces of intellectual life. In James's life-time Pragmatism as a philosophy established a wide influence over American thought, though without conquering it completely. And to-day, in spite of many opposing influences and in spite of the powerful influx of European ideas, it is the basic philosophy of the New World.
