16

Prag 3.
with the philosophical constitution. I refer to the habit of cherishing contempt for the close study of logic.
So much for the past. The ancestry of pragmatism is respectable enough; but the more conscious adoption of it as lanterna pedibus in the discussion of dark questions, and the elobration of it into a method in aid of philosophic inquiry came, in the first instances, from the humbles soûche imaginable. It was in the earliest seventies that a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge, calling ourselves, half ironically, half-defiantly, 'The Metaphysical Club', - for agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics, - used to meet, somtimes in my study, sometimes int hat of William James. It may be that some of our old-time confederates would today not care to have such wild-oats-sowings made public, though there was nothing but boiled oats, milk and sugar in