Turning now to the matter of American characteristics that are broader and deeper than the merely academic, we may find an illustration, for example, of the American practicality and the love of the concrete (instead of the abstract or the merely general) in the following declaration of Professor James that “the whole originality of Pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the _concrete_ way of seeing. It begins with _concreteness_ and returns and ends with it.” Of the American love of novelty and of interest we may find an illustration in the determination of Pragmatism “never to discuss a question that has absolutely no interest and no meaning to any one.” Of Pragmatism as an exemplification of the American love of experiment, and of experimentation, with a view to definite and appreciable “returns,” we may give the following: “If you fully believe the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word, _i.e._ ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘The Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ and such ‘solving’ names, as closing your quest. You must bring out in each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution then than as a programme for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities _may be changed_.” Of the American intolerance for mere scholarship and book-learning, and of the American inability to leave any discovery or any finished product alone without some attempt to “improve” upon it or to put it to some new use, we may cite the following: “When may a truth go into cold storage in the encyclopaedias, and when shall it come out for battle?” Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, or kind of compound solution, of such a variety of things as the affirmations of religion, the hypothetical method of science, realism, romanticism, idealism, utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds us only too forcibly of the endless number of social groups and traditions, the endless number of interests and activities and projects to be seen and felt in any large American city.