like Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with the merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his associates. Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is eminently an American[85] doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United States with it.[86] It encountered there, even at the outset, at least something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of James as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality.[87] What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature[88] in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the California address, and in connexion (according to the generous testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.” Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of “ideas as instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences” (“theoretical” or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be “tested,” was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of knowledge,” and as a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of the whole preliminary discussion was (1) the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the “approach” to philosophy, would probably soon “dissolve itself” back again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen,[89] and (2) the discovery that all that this early “methodological” pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. We shall again take occasion[90] to refer to this comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of propositions. Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of secondary importance in comparison with the great lesson[91] to be drawn from its idea that there can be for man no objective truth about the universe, apart from the idea of its meaning[92] or significance to his experience and to his conscious activity.