Excerpt from Anti-Pragmatism: An Examination Into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy Opportunism in philosophy. As a doctrine it does not make good. But pragmatism as revealing a certain state of mind in our present generation has a profound significance. We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading Sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine inter est in their researches and their speculations, a pub lic which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology only one thing was lacking - popular philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.