And as for positions in the great philosophers between which and some of the tendencies of Pragmatism there is more than a merely superficial agreement, we might instance, for example, the tendency of Hume[214] to reduce many of the leading categories of our thought to mere habits of mind, to be explained on an instinctive rather than a rationalistic basis; or Comte’s idea of the error of separating reason from instinct;[215] or the idea of de Maistre and Bain, and many others that “will” is implied in the notion of “exteriority”; or the idea of Descartes[216] that the senses teach us not so much “what is in reality in things,” as “what is beneficial[217] or hurtful to the composite whole of mind and body”; or the declaration of Kant that the chief end of metaphysic is God and immortality; or the idea of Spencer[218] that the belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason is a superstition of philosophers; or the idea of Plato in the Sophist[219] that reality is the capacity for acting or of being acted upon; and so on. As for such further confirmation of pragmatist teaching as is to be found in typical modern thinking and scholars, thought of almost at random, it would be easy to quote in this connexion from writers as diverse as Höffding, Fouillée, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Huxley, Hobhouse, and many others. It might be called a typically pragmatist idea, for example, on the part of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse to hold that “The higher conceptions by which idealism has so firmly held are not to be ‘scientifically’ treated in the sense of being explained away. What is genuinely higher we have ... good reason to think must also be truest,” and we “cannot permanently acquiesce in a way of thinking what would resolve it into what is lowest.”[220] These last words represent almost a commonplace of the thought of the day. It is held, for example, by men as different and as far apart in their work, and yet as typical of phases of our modern life, as Robert Browning and Sir Oliver Lodge. The close dependence again of the doctrines of any science upon the social life and the prevalent thought of the generation is also essentially a pragmatist idea. Its truth is recognized and insisted upon in the most explicit manner in the recent serviceable manifesto of Professors Geddes and Thomson upon “Evolution,”[221] and it obviously affects their whole philosophy of life and mind. It figures too quite prominently in the valuable short _Introduction to Science_ by Professor Thomson in the same series of manuals.