Now, confidence in our ability to tell what we have made from what we have found once shaken, there is no saying how far our questioning mind may carry us. No saying, I mean, in the case of any individual man--for it is easy enough to tell the general history of this doubt and uncertainty. It reaches all the way from those who think that back of all apparent creating by finite beings there is a Nature with its laws that was never made, but can only little by little be made out. Let us call those who think in this way “Realists.” Historic uncertainty then reaches all the way from the realists to those who think that heaven, the earth, and all that in them is, have no reality save as they are the thought and work of finite minds. We will call these thinkers “Idealists.” From realist to idealist and back again, through all intermediate phases, the dialectic of history swings; but it does not merely mark time therefore, it also measures progress. It is of one moment--I think a rather interesting moment--of this progress that I would speak in due order. Let this, then, be my prologue--and so to the tale. * * * * * In 1907, William James wrote of the philosophy to which he had devoted the last ten or twelve years: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist view,” so he called this philosophy, “run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters.” Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James’s prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James’s now famous little essay on “The Will to Believe”--the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read; but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.