Flowers in the Desert: F. C. S. Schiller’s [Unpublished] Pragmatism Lecture

Mark J. Porrovecchio

“I’m not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
but I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime.”

—Big Country, “In a Big Country.”

The history of philosophy is not rich in new ideas. I once set myself to enumerate them, and could not find more than nine that could be called new and important. You will find them in Chapter Eight of Must Philosophers Disagree?.⁷ The last among them and the only one to take birth in America, and specifically in California, is that which now usually goes under the name of Pragmatism. Its first appearance as such can be definitely traced to the lecture on Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results given by William James of Harvard at the University of California Berkeley in 1898. In this lecture James professed himself indebted for the name, and [a great part] of the idea to his somewhat older friend Charles Sanders Peirce. The latter had invented the name, and expounded the idea long before in a series of articles on How to Make our Ideas in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877. He had not however used the word Pragmatism. So it was new when James revealed it.

    The naming of a new idea in philosophy is not however an easy matter. You can’t, when you’ve got hold of an idea which seems to you good and new, simply go ahead and give it the name which seems best to you. You have to get others to adopt it, and particularly your enemies. And if you give your idea too good a name . . . they’ll want to use your name themselves for some nefarious . . . purposes of their own. So you find that you can’t keep your name in the sense you gave it. Its sense gets blurred and confused and ambiguous by the use of it by those who were really enemies of its original meaning. I’m speaking from painful personal experience. For when in 1903 I tried to turn the word ‘Humanism’ into a technical term of philosophy and to use it to describe the particular sort of Pragmatism I favored, I soon found that I could not keep it. It was at once snapped up by those who were most antithetical to the sense I had given to Humanism, and the misuse of this . . . word went on until, when last I counted its senses about two years ago, there were no less than six distinct and largely incompatible senses of the word which it was necessary to distinguish. So you see we must not only be aware of giving your dog such a bad name that he is hanged for it, but also of giving him such a good one that it is stolen from him.

     Clearly then in the baptizing of a new philosophy, not only its friends but also its enemies have a say. In fact, they may have rather more say than its authors. If you try to give it a good and attractive name they will try to appropriate it, and it is only if it is bad obscure and unattractive that they will let you keep it . . .

     The history of the term ‘Pragmatism’ then is merely another case of a very general principle. Pragmatism was a bad term and a heavy handicap to start with; if a philosopher with a good literary sense like William James or Whitehead or Bertrand Russell had had to do the naming, instead of Peirce who had the pedant’s foible of loving technical terms for their own sake, they would assuredly have given the poor dog a much better name. But very likely the better names would not have stuck. Pragmatism was at once adopted by its enemies because it was a bad name and therefore a good name for their purposes, while its friends were not allowed to drop it.

     But why is ‘Pragmatism’ a bad name? It is (1) obscure and (2) badly formed. (1) It suggests no clue as to its meaning at first sight, or nothing that it is not misleading, and needs a good deal of explanation. A good half-hour is quite a moderate estimation of the time required for a thorough account of the world ‘Pragmatism’; so its choice is truly a very severe handicap.

     (2) When I say that ‘Pragmatism’ is badly formed, I mean that in Peirce’s usage it would seem to be intended to hint at a direct connection with practice. It comes from the Greek word ‘pragma’; but this too comes from the same root as ‘praxis’ which means a thing, or a thing done, rather than an act. In this it is like the German world for fact ‘Tatsache’, literally a ‘deed-thing’. ‘Fact’ we may properly remind ourselves originally meant ‘thing made,’ so that ordinary language has very distinctly pragmatic implications . . .

     Now of course all this soon became clear to James. Nevertheless when I proposed, in 1903, a much better word ‘Humanism’, which suggests both humaneness and humanness, he would not adopt the change. He said the term ‘pragmatism’ had already been taken up and become current. Of course it had been taken up most avidly by the opponents of pragmatism, who realized how bad a term it was. According to Mrs. James, James afterwards regretted his action; but I had to content myself with using ‘humanism’ for my own variety of pragmatism—which points out how close it was to James’s own use. Peirce, after awhile disavowed James and called his own sort of pragmatism ‘pragmaticism’, which was “ugly enough to save it from kidnappers.” But he never succeeded in explaining either how his ‘pragmaticism’ differed from ‘pragmatism’ nor why he was so displeased with James and the other pragmatists when they proceeded to put his original formula to work. The truth was that over twenty years had elapsed between its original formulations and its popularization by James, and Peirce meanwhile had lost his interest in Scientific Method and got interested in other things, mostly Symbolic Logic. When James got him to give six lectures on Pragmatism at Harvard he talked about anything but his nominal duty, and James could only describe his lectures as “flashes of brilliance lit upon a background of Cimmerian dark.”

     We should always therefore be willing to study the ancient history of every novelty, and to learn that the idea had often occurred before. But in this study we must not expect to get much help from the standard histories of philosophy which are earlier than the effective appearance of the novelty we are investigating. Even the best of these histories will fail us when we really want to use them. For, like all historians, we shall find that they had to select. And among the things they have omitted will always be the first obscure beginnings of the new idea we are tracing. The historian is not to blame for this. For he knows that he can’t dump all his materials on his reader. He must omit what he deems unimportant. And he must justify importance from the standpoint either of the past or the present; he can’t foresee what little hints or details will become significant thereafter.

     So whenever an important novelty crops up, the whole history has to be rewritten and revalued.

     Hence there are good reasons for going a little into those histories of Pragmatism. We shall find that the history of philosophy is full of anticipation of Pragmatism, and that there are . . . a good many more that have not been discovered. For we shall not find them in the old History of Philosophy.

     The earliest . . . traces of Pragmatism do not go quite so far back as Anaximander, but like so many of the brightest and best ideas in Greek Philosophy, they go back before Plato and have been preserved to us by his polemic against them. They go back to Protagoras, an elder contemporary of Socrates born either in 500 or 480 B.C., and dimmed in 411 when he fled from Athens to escape the wrath of the oligarchs and government of the 400 . . . because they recognized the democratic tendencies of his philosophy. According to Plato, an obviously hostile witness, Protagoras was one of the first and most impressive of the Sophists. Now, speaking broadly, Sophists were all humanists or pragmatists, in the sense that they were all practical philosophers concerned with human affairs; their business was to teach the young men who could afford to pay them, i.e., the young men of the well to do, the art of public speaking, in order that they might be able to defend themselves against the informers who preyed upon the rich, the ‘sycophants’. Their teaching was practical . . . and they could not prosper unless the knowledge they retailed was useful, humanly valuable and related to the needs of human learning.

     So Protagoras united humanism in the conduct of learning and the problems of the individual agent. He proclaimed that ‘man was the measure of all things’. What did he mean by this? We can’t say exactly because we’ve no record of the context of his dictum, and of the line of thought which led up to it. Still we can see that this was clearly relativistic + probable individualism. But it was not skepticism as his opponents tried hard to believe. For to say that every man can know and just know by his own standard is no way of denying the possibility of knowing. It only seems so to intolerant bigots who wish to prescribe their own opinions to everyone.¹¹

     Similarly we can extract from another brief saying of Protagoras that ‘concerning all matters there are two sides which can be argued’ a perception that thinking is dependent on . . . probability and is [accompanied] by the slimmest of doubt; a point which has in modern thinking been stressed by John Dewey and Alfred Sidgwick. Indeed there is no more direct way to the heart of pragmatism than the perception that men think only when they have to, that their judgments are always answers to questions, and that their precise meaning depends on the context in which they arise.

     The importance of recapturing Protagoras as the forefather of Pragmatism does not lie merely in his antiquity. True, he gives Pragmatism a respectable pedigree. But . . . still more importantly he enables us to go behind Plato and to clear our eyes of the distortions and sophistry which that great master has introduced into our mental vision, and to see philosophic problems as they would be if we could take them naturally and without bias. Let there be no mistake about this. It is not the Sophists who have been the sophisticators of mankind, but the philosophers who’ve followed in the Platonic teaching.

     If we take psychology as the descriptive science of mental or psychic life we soon find that there are many ways of describing psychic life and of arranging its manifestations in a scientific and symbolic order. Likewise there are many aims we can get ourselves in describing mental life, and these aims will affect the descriptions we prefer. Hence there are, and will probably continue to be, a large number of psychologies, each of them representing the facts in its own way. They are comparable to the different languages we can use to express our ideas.

     But whatever psychology we prefer, to some psychology we must have recourse. Whenever we try to describe how we act and think, and to form symbols of logic and ethics there is a psychological side to ethics and action which we need to know and accounts of these activities which ignore this are merely abstractions, and dangerous and false abstractions at that.

     Moreover for both reasons the living organism must react upon stimulation as a whole. It can’t let its heart run away with, while its head remains unmoved. It can’t really be broken up into a number of ‘faculties’ which function independently. It must use them all and use them together in order to survive in the struggle for existence.

     Hence all the ‘analytic’ psychologies, convenient as their descriptive psychologies may be, are biologically built on fictions. We are entitled to look with suspicion upon theories which interpret human thinking in terms of pure reason, disinterested, dispassionate, and depersonalized; we should refuse to exclude from our accounts even of the knowing process the influence of aims, emotions, desires and ideals, and shall admit they always actuate our thinking. We shall grow skeptical of the intellectualist [rationalizations] which rule out consideration of any thinking . . . . Instead we shall trace the influence of various purposes, perceptions, prejudices, emotions and desires . . . . It will therefore become hard to believe that pure theory has any relation to practice, that what we do and how we live has no effect on what we think and what we believe. Rather we shall hold that our theories spring out of our life and are intended to bear upon them; while our life invariably and properly reacts upon our beliefs. Thus the attempt to separate ethics and action, theory and practice, absolutely is a fabrication which is sure to fail in the end.

     The moment however we get ourselves to uphold the final unity of mind and to champion the integrity of mental life against the absolutism of intellectualism on psychological grounds, we get into conflict with inveterate traditions of philosophy. These are all intellectualistic; they offer explanations of our actions and our knowledge only in terms of intellect or cognitive processes, and they ignore all the other factors in our mental outfit. The traditional philosopher has prided himself for over 2000 years on having a monopoly on pure reason . . . . So far the psychologist has not succeeded in breaking him of this habit. It still seems almost sacrilegious to him to suggest that the motives and procedures of philosophers are not that different from those of other folk and that their reasonings also are subject to human frailties when their passions are aroused or their prejudices flouted. Nothing has made Pragmatism more unpopular among the ordinary run of philosophy . . . than the implication that philosophers are really like other people.

     Yet no better proof of this contention could be found than the way the pragmatic philosophy was taken by the philosophers of the intellectualistic tradition. They did not discover it so long as it was labeled psychology. James’s Principles of Psychology were welcomed as an epoch-making work. But its philosophic doctrines were overlooked. It wasn’t until James called them philosophy and pragmatism that the uproar began. Yet the champions of Pure Reason did not use it [this wonderful faculty] to [comprehend] Pragmatism. They just shouted and hooted. Perhaps they realized that when there is an unanswerable case against you the worst thing you can do is to try to answer it. That policy only draws attention to the badness of your case. What they did was to denounce the pragmatists as low vulgar fellows . . . or as irrational idiots who believed in whatever they wanted. In short they acted in the panic of the barrister who found his brief marked ‘No case, abuse the plaintiff’s attorney!’

     As a matter of fact, even abstractly, the pragmatic philosophy was just as feasible and legitimate as the rationalist. It is just as easy to represent the human mind as action, as seeking the achievement of ends, as postulating, as choosing, selecting and rejecting . . . as it is to represent it as passive, as merely receptive of ‘impressions’, and as [fissured] by insuperable chasms between its various ‘faculties’. And as soon as you took into account the functions the mind was required to perform, you could see at once how much better the active . . . description of the mind was to the intellectualist. . . . For it is only an active mind which is stimulated by the needs of living, and is willing to use its body to operate on the [world] in order to improve the conditions of living, that can either have been served in the struggle for existence or can serve us now. It is also manifestly the sort of mind all of us have. The purely theoretical mind, that is truly . . . not interested in personal affairs at all, is a figment. Something resembling it can only arise in rather abnormal mediums when a society finds a use for it and makes it worthwhile for a few professors of pure [method] to cultivate a peculiar sort of mind. Similarly, a well-established and endowed religion alone can afford to grow theology and monks that lead purely ‘contemplative’ lives. It is only a large and well endowed mind which can afford to appoint proponents of pure mathematics and the like, to pursue researches which seem at first sight utterly useless. But those institutions would not appoint them if they believed this. They may indeed admit that for ordinary purposes their uses are remote, but they will flatter themselves that their work is of a higher order; moreover they will take an interest in it which is often intense.

     Interest in short is the psychological stimulus which all must evoke if it is to seem valuable, and to be persisted in, alike by the individual and by society. It’s the great common measure for the activities of the human soul, and without it nothing can be done or thought or felt. But interest is not itself an intellectual process. It belongs to the active and personal side of mind, according to the traditional classification. May we not conclude that the intellectualist psychologies are false and that a psychology is needed which brings out the role of interest and purpose in mental life? In short it is no accident that the beginnings of modern Pragmatism are closely connected with James’s epoch making Principles of Psychology (1890), and that the last chapter of that great work already contained James’s contribution to Pragmatism in substantially completed form. It was the source also of John Dewey’s instrumentalism.

     Into religious controversy Pragmatism, in this case represented primarily by William James, has imported two important novelties. (1) It has introduced the study of religious psychology and raised the psychology of religion almost to the dignity of a new science. The first and greatest textbook of this science is James’s Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). (2) It has drawn the attention of writers, not only on religious but also on logic and all social topics, to the existence of the Will to Believe. Both these novelties were of first class importance.

     The psychology of religion made it clear that an appeal to faith underlay the principles of science as well as religion, and that faith must everywhere be justified by working. It thereby shifted the field of debate in religious matters from logic-chopping about theological dogmas to a consideration of the basic human needs that render man a religious animal. This broadening of the religious issue was an enormous help both in humanizing religion and in rendering it intelligible and rational.

     Not that, of course, it means an end to all disputes and a settling of all questions. It still remained possible to differ upon the psychological facts . . . . It still remained possible to differ about the true value of the admitted psychological facts. This comes out very clearly in the modern discussion of e.g. mysticism. There is no longer any dispute practically about the reality of the mystical experience. It is admitted to be a psychological fact. But what does it prove? Does it prove that the human mind can rise to contact with something more and diviner, or does it only prove that it can cherish this delusion? Or, perhaps, that it sometimes does one thing and sometimes the other? All these views of mysticism have been taken, and the question is still under discussion. It is clear therefore that the psychology of religion doesn’t provide a short cut to religious truth; but it’s equally clear that a new way of discussing such questions has been provided. For we can now test all these theories by their consequence, i.e. pragmatically. And in due course we may hope to settle in this way not only the theories . . . but also the disputes about what consequences of a theory shall be considered to be relevant to its truth-value.

     The doctrine of the Will to believe by James and its selection as the title of his volume of essays is 1896 was one of the great steps in the development of Pragmatism, and caused enormous controversy. James himself often regretted that he had called his doctrine the Will to Believe, originally in order to render its essential character to the theological audience he was to address. He thought he should have called it the Right to Believe and that he would then have escaped misconstruction. In this he was too sanguine. For no one who launches such a soul stirring novelty upon a somnolent world has a right to hope to escape misconstruction. Besides the Right to Believe was not the right title either. James meant more than could be compressed into a short title. His religious message portended a revolution not only in theology and religion, but in psychology, logic, and philosophy of knowledge, a revolution that was bound to affect all human relations. More fully stated James’s Will to Believe meant (1) that there was to be found in all, as a psychological fact, a disposition to accept, or to reject, any given belief . . . . Thus no mind was ever a tabula rasa, amiably indifferent to the beliefs it encountered. No study of mind therefore could be adequate which overlooked this bias and failed to ascertain it. Psychologists therefore were summoned to allow for the psychological Will to or [not to] believe, in their accounts of the workings of the mind.

     (2) James held that in certain cases it was possible to argue from this psychological fact of bias, not merely de facto, but also de jure. Under certain conditions and with proper precautions the psychological Will to believe could acquire logical value. There could be based on it a Right to believe. And James set himself to lay down the conditions under which a Will to believe could be held to acquire a logical nature and to create a Right to believe. The conditions which he stipulated were that a belief which appealed to the Will to believe should be acted on, should admit of alternatives . . . and above all that the empirical consequences of acting on the belief should be allowed to react on the truth-claim of the belief, in its claim for acceptance. In other words, the original Will to believe was to be tested pragmatically by working.

     It was a sad revelation of the prevalence of prejudice among philosophers, though at the same time a proof of the correctness of James’s contention about the nature of bias that hardly any attention was paid to the restrictions which James had imposed on the Will to believe before extracting a Right to believe from the active character of human belief. Some of his best [followers] like Charles Augustus Strong and Dickinson S. Miller misunderstood him; while the contrary herd of critics shouted, all with one voice, that James had granted to everyone an unlimited right to believe whatever he pleased, and to call truth anything that made him feel good.

     Dogmatic philosophers seem to believe with the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland that truth can be created by representation, so these [misconceptions] are still largely current. But . . . James had made it clear from the first that he distrusted believing the psychological facts which generated a belief and the logical consequences which established it. In the establishment of any belief the Will to believe is only the first step. It means only the willingness to consider it . . . . Until James this first and [easiest] step in the growth of beliefs had been completely overlooked. In fact logicians had always talked as if beliefs grew up automatically in a soil of pure indifference, and without aid and the intervention of a mind; they had never gone into the question of how in the sciences subjects of investigation are selected, or why a scientist interested himself in one more than another. Pure Reason was supposed to need no will, scientific method was supposed to need no purpose. . . .

     In short the right meaning of the doctrine of the Will to believe was simply empiricism, the molding by experience of all our beliefs. It was however a new, and as James pointed out, a more radical empiricism, tied to no dogmas and free from the unwarranted assumption that the mind must be represented as purely passive in its dealings with experience, as merely receptive of impressions, without any will or aim of its own.

     When you hear that Pragmatism claims to be primarily a method and find that this method can apparently conduct different parts to a considerable variety of doctrines you may be disposed to regard this as a serious drawback to the value of Pragmatism. But methods are in reality very important things, much more important than people think. In the long run they are more important than doctrines. For doctrines are . . . constantly changing. The more rapidly they change the more progressive the science in which they occur can claim to be. Methods are enduring, they’re not changing so long as they work and yield results of value. Also they are widely applicable and may be used upon a variety of objects. In fact it is becoming more and more probable that the ways by which they are reached are truly valuable and lasting elements in scientific truths, and that science is essentially method, while the actual doctrines of the sciences and the entities they concern may be merely concessions to our human weakness for attaching our knowledge to imaginary propositions.

     Viewed as a method then, Pragmatism declares that the truth of any doctrine depends on its consequences. That seems a very surprising statement; but there is a good deal of meaning wrapped up in it. It means in the first place 1) a denial that its truth is prior to experience or a priori in most of its senses; it means empiricism. 2) It means that truth is not self-proving; so getting rid of the tricky notion of self-evidence. The self-evidential has long been one of the scandals of logic. It proclaims its truth but gives no reasons. Why then should it be accepted? Self-evidence primarily appears to be a fact of individual psychology. It is self-evident to someone, in some context. But need it therefore be self-evident to others or in another context? There is no reason to think so. Even if something were self-evident to all, it might yet be a universal delusion. In short, before self-evidence can be used logically, logical self-evidence must somehow be distinguished from psychology. For the latter may always prove illusory. It means 3) an initial claim to truth must be carefully kept distinct from its status when it has been adequately verified. Logically the truth claim and the verified truth are not the same, though both may use the same form of words. 4) It is to be admitted that every proposition claims truth, that every bonafide judgment in psychology is believed to be true by its maker when he makes it. But this is not reason enough for treating it as final truth. For the maker of the judgment may have been mistaken, and its verification may have been insufficient. Hence 5) every assertion has to be tested further if required, by the consequence said to follow from it. 6) How far this is to be carried is not specified; it is left to the guiding sense of judgment of each inquirer. In theory verification may go on forever; in practice we stop whenever we feel we’ve had enough and are satisfied. 7) Hence a sort of satisfaction is in a way made a test of truth; but we are not explicitly told what sort. The difference appears to be left open how far the consequences used to test a truth-claim are logical or incapable of being distinguished from individual caprice. This solution undoubtedly gives color to the charge that pragmatists are enabled to call truth whatever they please, but they incur this charge because they are so scrupulous not to slur over the transition from psychology to logic, from what in fact men do to what in philosophy they claim they do. Now here it is a fact that truth seeking must and does hold out prospects of satisfaction as a motive for embarking on it; it is psychologically quite untrue that truth must be compulsory and that the mind has to be coerced to seek it [as logicians have so long maintained].

Truth is attractive and satisfactory. But it is by no means always easy to define which of the satisfactions which occur in truth-seeking are logically good, which of the consequences used to test a truth-claim are related to its truth and properly its consequence, and which are merely accepted on account of their [emotional] and psychological appeal. On this point, there may plainly be considerable differences of opinion among pragmatists as among other folks, at any rate at first. Ultimately no doubt the pragmatic test of the consequences will discover these difficulties and reveal which of the satisfactions of the truth-seekers were good and logical and which merely psychological and treacherous.

Notes

¹ The renewed focus on Schiller during this time was largely the result of four philosophers. The interest was started with Reuben Abel’s The Pragmatic Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller (King’s Crown Press, 1955) and his collection of Schiller’s essays, Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F. C. S. Schiller (Free Press, 1966). Additionally, there was Kenneth Winetrout’s F. C. S. Schiller and the Dimensions of Pragmatism (Ohio State University Press, 1967) and half a dozen additional journal articles. Herbert L. Searles and Allan Shields A Bibliography of F. C. S. Schiller (San Diego State College Press, 1969) provided the first attempt to document Schiller’s voluminous assortment of essays, reviews, books, and other published material.

² Beyond the occasional journal article, reference to Schiller’s work ebbed until the mid-1990s. This renewed interest was fueled by Professor of English Steven Mailloux. His edited volume Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism (Cambridge UP, 1995) and stand alone Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Cornell UP, 1998) directed readers to Schiller’s novel merger of Sophistry (in the use of the exemplar Protagoras), pragmatism, and rhetoric. In this century, Philosopher John Robert Shook has been the most consistent in bring attention to Schiller. His website, The Pragmatism Cybrary, carries a revised version of Searles’ and Shields’ bibliography. His research center, The Pragmatism Archive, contains most if not all of Schiller’s publications. As editor of The Early Defenders of Pragmatism series (Thoemmes, 2001), Shook featured Schiller prominently. His “Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott (1864-1937)” article in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers (Thoemmes, 2002), reprinted in the Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers (Thoemmes, 2005) also presented a general overview of Schiller’s philosophical work. Most recently, Shook has authored “F. C. S. Schiller and European Pragmatism,” in A Companion to Pragmatism, (Blackwell, 2006) and co-edited (with Hugh McDonald) F. C. S. Schiller on Pragmatism and Humanism: Selected Writings, 1891–1939 (forthcoming from Humanity Books in 2008). This list is by no means exhaustive. But it is—strikingly so, given Schiller’s intimate connection to the foundation of pragmatism—more than representative.

³ Details related to the courses Schiller taught at USC are based on: Finding Aid for the F. C. S. Schiller Papers (Collection 191), 1968, Department of Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 25-6.

⁴ Readers will note two items which point to this conclusion: (1) the title of this manuscript is “Pragmatism 1934²” with no accompanying note, and (2) in the manuscript marginalia there are dated notations ranging from “’33” to “’35.” It is also clear that this was a working draft and not merely a previous version of the course to which Schiller added minor additions. Towards the end of the first (introductory) chapter Schiller commented: “. . . there are many approaches to Pragmatism, at least for those who have the pragmatic temper. I propose to study these approaches next and to distinguish them as the biological (ch ii), the psychological (ch. 3), the logical (ch. 4), and the scientific (ch. 5), the ethical (ch. 6) and the religious (ch. 7).” But the text that follows goes on to include three additional chapters: Pragmatism As Method, Pragmatic Theory Of Truth, Pragmatism And Metaphysics. And these additional chapters cover many of the same ideas found in: “The Personalistic Implications of Humanism, I. Humanisms and Humanism,” Personalist 18, no. 4 (October 1937): 352-68; “The Personalistic Implications of Humanism, II. Logic: A Game, or an Agent of Value,” Personalist 19, no. 1 (January 1938): 16-31; “The Personalistic Implications of Humanism, III. Ethics, Casuistry and Life,” Personalist 19, no. 2 (April 1938): 164-78; and “The Personalistic Implications of Humanism, IV. The Relativity of Metaphysics,” Personalist 19, no. 3 (July 1938): 241-54.

The dating of the manuscript is also made easier by what appears on its reverse side. The back of the 90 page lecture manuscript contains handwritten drafts of two of Schiller’s essays (the 1934 lecture “Fascism and Dictators” that also appeared in the posthumous Our Human Truths [1939]; and “Burning Questions,” Personalist 16.3 [July 1935]: 199-215). All references to the lecture herein are based on a transcription of the lecture as found in: F. C. S. Schiller, Pragmatism 1934, [1935], Courses, Box Ten, F. C. S. Schiller Papers (Collection 191), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Finally, a word about this transcription: All notations, symbols, and formatting choices within the text of the lecture are Schiller’s. Parenthetical comments by Schiller have, in the main, been removed. Bracketing is meant to indicate the transcription of words and phrases that were in doubt or illegible. Ellipses found within the text of the transcription are meant to indicate the points at which the text has been truncated and are made at the author’s discretion.

⁵ Susan Haack, Review of Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand, New Criterion 16, no. 3 (November 1997): 69.

⁶ F. C. S. Schiller, preface to Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan and Company, 1912), xi-xxix.

⁷ The chapter he is referring to originally appeared, with the same title, as F. C. S. Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” Personalist 8, no. 2 (April 1927): 81-93.

⁸ Readers are directed to F. C. S. Schiller, review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1: Principles of Philosophy, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 13, no. 2 (April 1932): 142-3; review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2: Elements of Logic, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 14, no. 2 (April 1933): 140-1; review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 3: Exact Logic, eds.Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 15, no. 2 (April 1934): 174-7; review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 4: The Simplest Mathematics, eds.Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 16, no. 1 (January 1935): 78-80; review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, eds.Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 16, no. 2 (April 1935): 169-73; review of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6: Scientific Metaphysics, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Personalist 17, no. 2 (April 1936): 196-202. Schiller’s view of Peirce wasn’t always as critical. As a younger scholar, Schiller was at times gracious in his brief correspondence with Peirce over the meaning of the concept pragmatism. For the substance of the letters between Schiller and Peirce, refer to Frederick J. Down Scott, “Peirce and Schiller and Their Correspondence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11, no. 3 (July 1973): 363-86.

⁹ William James, Cambridge, MA, to F. C. S. Schiller, 17 January 1908, The Correspondence of William James, vol. 11, eds. Ignas K. Skrupkelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003), 522 (the original copy of this and subsequent letters is housed in Educators and Librarians Collection, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford).

¹⁰ William James, Cambridge, to F. C. S. Schiller, 26 Jan 1908, The Correspondence, vol. 11, 527.

¹¹ As with other comments, Schiller here is obscuring a bit of his bluster. Though he critiques Plato far earlier, his first sustained comparison of Plato and Protagoras occurs in F. C. S. Schiller, “Plato and His Predecessors,” Quarterly Review 204, no. 406 (January 1906): 62-88; revised and included in Studies in Humanism (1907) as “From Plato to Protagoras.” He elaborates on his theory of Protagoras-as-Pragmatist in the pamphlet F. C. S. Schiller, Plato or Protagoras? (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1908). This tract attracted a good deal of criticism; most notably, from the Greek Scholar John Burnet.

¹² F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (London: Macmillan, 1907), xiv-xv.

¹³ An instructive example is Dewey’s tribute to Schiller after his death. Brief and generally positive, it contains the slight that Schiller’s “dominantly psychological” approach was path-clearing rather than ground-breaking (John Dewey, “F. C. S. Schiller: An Unpublished Memorial by John Dewey,” [28 November 1937] ed. Allan Shields, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3 [1967]: 52).

¹⁴ Interested readers will catch the gist of this debate in: Lizzie Susan Stebbing, “Pragmatism and the Dictum ‘All Truths Work,'” Mind 21, no. 83 (July 1912): 471-2, and “The ‘Working’ of ‘Truths,'” Mind 22, no. 86 (April 1913): 250-3; F. C. S. Schiller, “Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910-1911): 144-65, “The ‘Working’ of ‘Truths,’” Mind 21, no. 84 (October 1912): 532-5, and “The ‘Working’ of Truths and Their ‘Criterion,’” Mind 22, no. 88 (October 1913): 532-8. Later in life, Schiller railed against Symbolic Logic, seeing it as just an updated attempt at Formal Logic. He attempted, through journal editor and USC Department Chair Ralph Tyler Flewelling, to goad Stebbing into another debate. This time, however, she remained silent (see F. C. S. Schiller, “The Sacrifice of Barbara,” Personalist 12, no. 4 [October 1931]: 233-43).

¹⁵ F. C. S. Schiller, “On Preserving Appearances,” Mind 12, no. 47 (July 1903): 353. This article is one of the first in a series of career-long salvos directed at Bradley. For a variety of reasons—their proximity to each other, the differences in their standing and philosophical outlook, their penchant for trading in barbed and dismissive criticisms—Schiller took to using Bradley as a representation of all that was wrong with philosophy. And he took to his task by way of more endorsements from James. Though worried that Schiller pushed the polemic too far, and attempting in letters to both Schiller and Bradley to get them to see the merits of each other’s case, James nonetheless sides with Schiller. In a response to Bradley’s attacks on Schiller, James comments: “Mr. Bradley in particular can be taken care of by Mr. Schiller. He repeatedly confesses himself unable to comprehend Schiller’s views, he evidently has not sought to do so sympathetically, and I deeply regret to say that his laborious article [“On Truth and Practice,” Mind 13, no. 51 (July 1904)] throws, for my mind, absolutely no useful light upon the subject. It seems to me on the whole an ignoratio elenchi, and I feel free to disregard it altogether” (William James, “Humanism and Truth,” Mind 13, no. 52 [October 1904]: 458).

¹⁶ It is indeed the case that Schiller, more often than not, would reference James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) as much if not more than Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results (1898), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism, or (the under-appreciated) The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909).

¹⁷ William James, Chocorua, NH, to F. C. S. Schiller, 9 June 1896, The Correspondence, vol. 8, 153.

¹⁸ Miller’s complaints are found in “‘The Will to Believe’ and The Duty to Doubt,” International Journal of Ethics 9, no. 2 (January 1899): 169-95.

¹⁹ Goldstein, who was introduced to James by Schiller, is of particular import because he was excised out of the discussion of pragmatism altogether. The standard coverage of Schiller until the publication of The Correspondence of William James, most notably that of Kenneth Winetrout, makes note of a letter that James sent to Schiller shortly before his death. The content of that note has been handed down via Perry’s two-volume The Thought and Character of William James (1935). The actual letter states in full: “Dearest Schiller — Your offer to come to London to see us is lovely, but my condition had better go without a meeting. Five minutes would mean little; + anything more serious would add too much to the fatigue of my journey, rather hazardous at any rate, to L’pool . . . . I leave the ‘Cause’ in your hands, yours and Goldstein’s in Germany—I don’t feel sure about Kallen yet, tho he’s a noble fellow. Good bye + God bless you! Keep your health, your splendid health! It’s better than all the ‘truths’ under the firmament. Ever thy W. J.” (William James, Rye, to F. C. S. Schiller, 8 August 1910, The Correspondence, vol. 12, 573). Perry’s version removes the references to both Goldstein and Kallen.

²⁰ This label is from Bertrand Russell, himself no fan of pragmatism: “The three founders of pragmatism differ greatly inter se; we may distinguish James, Schiller, and Dewey as respectively its religious, literary, and scientific protagonists” (qtd. in Reuben Abel, The Pragmatic, 3).