One or two other important considerations should also be borne in mind. It goes without saying that there are in the United States and elsewhere any number of Americans who see beyond both contemporary Pragmatism and contemporary Americanism, and to whom it would be, therefore, but a partial estimate of Pragmatism to characterize it as “Americanism.” So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some things that have already been said in respect of the reception and the fate of Pragmatism in its own country. Again, it is one of the errors of the day to think of Americanism as in the main merely a belief in “practicality” and “efficiency.” To those who know it, Americanism is practical idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. The American belief in work is not really a belief in work for its own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possibilities open to intelligent energy with resources at its command. Lastly, it will here certainly not be necessary either to think or to speak (even if it were possible to do so) of _all_ American characteristics.[290] Among the American-like characteristics in Pragmatism that have already made themselves apparent in the foregoing chapters are its insistence upon “action” and upon the free creative effort of the individual, its insistence upon the man-made (or the merely human) character of most of our vaunted truths, its instrumentalism, its radicalism,[291] its empiricism (that is to say, its endless faith in experience), its democratic character, and its insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad, tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So, too, are its insistence upon the basal character of belief,[292] and upon the importance of a creed or a philosophy that really “works” in the lives of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, and even its _quasi_ “practical” interpretation of itself in the realms of philosophy and religion and ethics--its confession of itself as a “corridor-theory,” as a point of approach to all the different systems in the history of thought. In addition to these characteristics we shall attempt now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, of some of the characteristics of American university life of which Pragmatism may perhaps be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, and then after this, of such broadly-marked and such well-known American characteristics as the love of the concrete (in preference to the abstract), the love of experiment and experimentation, an intolerance of doctrinairism and of mere book-learning, the general democratic outlook on life and thought, the composite or amalgam-like character of the present culture of the United States, the sociological interest that characterizes its people, and so on. All these things are clearly to be seen in Pragmatism as a would-be philosophical system, or as a