phrase of Nietzsche, “Everything is permissible and nothing is true or binding.” Is not, then, this would-be ethical phase of Pragmatism just too modernistic, too merely practical, too merely illuminative and enlightening? And would it not be better for the youth of America (for Dewey’s book is in the _American Science Series_) and other countries to learn that _not_ everything “practical” and “formative” and “liberative” and “socializing” is _moral_ in the strict sense of the term?[250] In saying this I am, of course, giving but a very imperfect idea of the contents of a book which is, in many respects, both epoch-marking and epoch-making. It is, however, unfortunately, in some respects, only too much in touch with “present facts and tendencies,” with the regrettable tendency of the hour, for example, to justify as right any conduct that momentarily “improves the situation,” or that “liberates the activities” of the parties concerned in it. It is not enough, in other words (and this is all, I am inclined to think, that Pragmatism can do in morals), to set up a somewhat suggestive picture of the “life of the moral man in our present transitional” and would-be “constructive” age. A moral man does not merely, in common parlance, “keep up with the procession,” going in for its endless “formations” and “re-formations.” He seeks to “lead” it, and this _leading_ of men, this setting up of a standard of the legitimacy or of the illegitimacy of certain social experiments is just what Pragmatism cannot do in morals. It is otherwise, doubtless, with a true humanism, or with the humanism that Pragmatism is endeavouring to become. CHAPTER VI PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM In spite of the objections that have been brought in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism that it is tending to become is the position that it virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the personal factors that enter into all our notions about final truth. To Pragmatism the importance of these factors in this connexion is apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest truism that by final truth we cannot mean “truth” existing on its own account, but rather the truth of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes. For so much it stands by its very letter as well as by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation for this attitude in some of the concessions of the rationalists that have been previously mentioned, so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.