matter is, for many reasons, something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation of the data of science and understanding supplied by Kant’s “Copernican” discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and organic nature into so many _planes_ or _grades_ of being expressive of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself. Equally little does the Newer Idealism question the legitimacy or the actual positive service of the “dialectic” of Hegel (as Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the “concept” of Socrates or the “apperception” of Kant) that has shown the world to be a _system_ in which everything is related to everything else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop short of the truths of personality and moral relationship are untrue and inadequate. To use the words of Professor Howison, of California, in the preface to the first edition of Professor Watson’s[205] latest volume (a book that connects the idealism of Glasgow and Oxford with the convictions of the youth of the “Pacific Coast”), the “_dominant tone_” of the militant and representative philosophy of to-day, is “affirmative and idealistic. The decided majority ... are animated by the conviction that human thought is able to solve the riddle of life positively; to solve it in accord with the ideal hopes and interests of human nature.” CHAPTER V CRITICAL Enough has perhaps now been said by way of an indication of some of the main characteristics of Pragmatism, and of the matter of its relations to ordinary and to philosophical thinking. Its complexity and some of its confusions and some of its difficulties have also been referred to. As for the affiliations and the associations of Pragmatism, it would seem that it rests not so much upon its own mere instrumentalism and practicalism as upon some of the many broader and deeper tendencies in ancient and modern thought that have aimed at a dynamic, instead of a static, interpretation of reality. We have suggested, too, that there are evidently things in traditional philosophy and in Rationalism of which it fails to take cognizance, although it has evidently many things to give to Rationalism in the way of a constructive philosophy of human life.