An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce, has renderedthought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by whichthese men were instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a Greekname . He calls it the principle of PRAGMATISM, and he defends it somewhat as follows:[297]-[297] In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January,1878, vol. xii. p. 286.
Thought in movement has for the attainment of belief, or thought atrest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on thesubject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function ofthinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought thatmade no difference in the thought's practical consequences, then that part would be no properelement of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore onlydetermine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance; and thetangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as toconsist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughtsof an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we areconceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true.
Our conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object,so far as that conception has positive significance at all dermes vs Medilase.