(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the many illustrations and references that have already been given in respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the “teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend[156] in human civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with Bergson[157]), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to define, in the main, only negatively--by means of its polemic against the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same connexion.