As for the book itself, it is in any case beyond a critic's praise or blame. It is more likely to take place as a philosophical classic than any other writing of our day. A critic who should attempt to appraise it would probably give one more illustration of the sterility of criticism compared with the productiveness of creative genius. Even those who dislike pragmatism can hardly fail to find much of profit in the exhibition of Mr. James's instinct for concrete facts, the breadth of his sympathies, and his illuminating insights. Unreserved frankness, lucid imagination, varied contacts with life digested into summary and trenchant conclusions, keen perceptions of human nature in the concrete, a constant sense of the subordination of philosophy to life, capacity to put things into an English which projects ideas as if bodily into space till they are solid things to walk around and survey from different sides--these things are not so common in philosophy that they may not smell sweet even by the name of pragmatism. FOOTNOTES: [69] William James, _Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking._ (Popular Lectures on Philosophy.) New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1907. Pp. xiii[+]309. [70] Certain aspects of the doctrine are here purposely omitted, and will meet us later. [71] Vol. IV, p. 547. [72] Only those who have already lost in the idealistic confusion of existence and meaning will take this to mean that the object is those changes in our reactions. [73] I assume that the reader is sufficiently familiar with Mr. James's book not to be misled by the text into thinking that Mr. James himself discriminates as I have done these three types of problems from one another. He does not; but, none the less, the three formulae for the three situations are there. [74] The idea of immortality, or the traditional theistic idea of God, for example, may produce its good consequences, not in virtue of the idea as idea, but from the character of the person who entertains the belief; or it may be the idea of the supreme value of ideal considerations, rather than that of their temporal duration, which works. [75] "Eternal truth" is one of the most ambiguous phrases that philosophers trip over. It may mean eternally in existence; or that a statement which is ever true is always true (if it is true a fly is buzzing, it is eternally true that just now a fly buzzed); or it may mean that some truths, _in so far as wholly conceptual_, are irrelevant to any particular time determination, since they are non-existential in import--e.g., the truth of geometry dialectically taken--that is, without asking whether any particular existence exemplifies them.