Apart from all this, however, or rather, in addition to it, it may be truly said that one of the striking things about recent British philosophical literature[102] is the stir and the activity that have been excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of the pragmatists and the “personal idealists,” and by the critics of these newer modes of thought. All this has led to many such re-statements of the problems of philosophy as are to be found in the books of men like Joachim,[103] Henry Jones,[104] A. E. Taylor,[105] Boyce-Gibson,[106] Henry H. Sturt,[107] S. H. Mellone,[108] J. H. B. Joseph,[109] and others, and even, say, in such a representative book as that of Professor Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato’s _Theory of Ideas_. In this work an attempt is made to interpret Plato’s “Ideas” in the light of pragmatist considerations as but “categories” or “points of view” which we find it convenient to use in dealing with our sense experience. CHAPTER III SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and America: (1) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism of both science and philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism in which philosophy itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important “dynamic” element in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter of first principles for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our instinctive “beliefs”; (4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the philosophy of “freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science, modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy, and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist tendencies may be said to rest.