Hume; in fact Whitehead’s discussion of these thinkers largely focuses on the flaws
of their sensationism and intellectualism. Leibniz, the thinker whom he most closely
resembles, receives relatively few explicit references. Whitehead and Alexander in
effect recapitulate the positions of Leibniz and Spinoza in terms of twentieth-cen-
tury scientifically oriented Idealism.
- A phenomenon noted for all historical periods by sociologists of religion (Stark
and Bainbridge, 1985; Finke and Stark, 1992).
- Kuklick (1977: 135–136; 234–235). Royce had come as a graduate student to
Hopkins from Berkeley, where Gilman had been president before Hopkins; he was
introduced to Idealism by Hopkins’s G. S. Morris, who also taught John Dewey.
During the customary sojourn in Germany, Royce studied with Lotze, Wundt, and
Windelband. Characteristically for the Americans of this period, his own philoso-
phy was more Idealist than that of his German professors.
- James’s changing disciplinary identification may be traced in his successive titles:
assistant professor of physiology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in
1880, and professor in 1885; professor of psychology in 1889; back to professor
of philosophy in 1897 (Boring, 1950: 510–511).
- For this reason Peirce regarded mathematics as the investigation of the conse-
quences of hypotheses; he himself innovated mathematical notation similar to the
work of Dedekind and Cantor (DSB, 1981: 10:484).
- Buchler (1955: 354, 356). Peirce pointed out that an infinite regress results when
one attempts to analyze certain kinds of relations: a statement of relation must
always characterize the relation of relations to their subjects, and so on. The
argument parallels Bradley, except that from Peirce’s mathematical viewpoint, such
nested series of relations fit the definition of the continuum “as that in which every
part is of the same nature as the whole” (EP, 1967: 6:76).
- Brent (1993: 311, 300, 209); Buchler (1955: 323). Eisele (DSB, 1981: 10:485)
summarizes: “Nature syllogizes, making inductions and abductions.”
- This is confirmed by the pattern of the various European analogues to pragmatism.
In Germany, Mach interpreted scientific laws as practical fictions; and indeed James
met and admired Mach during a visit to the Continent in 1882, long before
formulating his own pragmatist doctrine (Johnston, 1972: 181). Vaihinger’s Phi-
losophy of As-If (1911) similarly resonates with James. But the aims are quite
different from James’s religious concerns. Mach’s positivism is purely scientific, and
Vaihinger is a Neo-Kantian concerned with the validity of the forms of experience
in the absence of a thing-in-itself. Pragmatism never became a self-conscious
movement in Germany as it was in the United States. In the German university
orbit the generations of Idealists had long since passed, and there was no demand
for such a stepping-stone between religious Idealism and secularism. Where we do
find the analogue to the United States is in Italy, where a pragmatist movement,
led by Calderoni, arose soon after the zenith of Idealism. Here the timing was like
that in America: the university system was under reform, as secularizers wrested
it from the hands of the church and installed a German-style educational system.
The Italian pragmatists were a halfway house between positivism and Idealism,
criticizing both schools while borrowing elements from both.
Notes to Pages 672–678^ •^1011
