With the real sceptic, then, with David Hume, we may indeed be “diffident” of our “doubts” and at the same time absolutely “free” and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them, but so many more or less successful attempts to state and explain, in terms appreciable by the understanding and the reason, the character and the reality of the infinite life with which we are in contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our aspirations. Of the _reality_ of that life we can never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know in that “world of inter-subjective” intercourse that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, is implied even in sense-perception and in our daily experience. CHAPTER VII PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading of this chapter the writer feels that he has laid himself open to criticism from several different points of view. What has philosophy as the universal science to do with nationalism or with any form of national characteristics? Then even if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent “Americanism” in the realm of thought, is this finding, or criticism, a piece of appreciation or a piece of depreciation? And again, is it possible for any individual to grasp, and to understand, and to describe such a living and such a far-reaching force as the Americanism of to-day? The following things may be said by way of a partial answer to these reflections: (1) There are American characteristics in Pragmatism, and some of them may profitably be studied by way of an attempt to get all the light we can upon its essential nature. Their presence therein has been detected and recognized by critics, both American and foreign, and reference has already been made to some of them in this book. (2) There is no universal reason in philosophy apart from its manifestation in the thoughts and the activities of peoples who have made or who are making their mark upon human history. It may well be that the common reason of mankind has as much to learn from Americanism in the department of theory as it has already been obliged to learn from this same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) One of the most important phases of our entire subject is precisely this very matter of the application of philosophy to “practice,” of the inseparability, to put it directly, of “theory” and “practice.” It would surely, therefore, be the strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it still exist here and there)[289] to debar philosophy from the study of such a practical thing as the Americanism of to-day. To connect the two with any degree of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire life and thought of mankind.