James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
practice.

[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]

Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they