No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” complained Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental Philosophy, Scotland the whole philosophy of Common Sense, France the Eclectic Philosophy and Positive Philosophy, England the Association Philosophy. And what has America produced?” Whereupon Peirce took it upon himself to answer his own question, and in 1878 laid out the lineaments of what his friend and patron William James would call pragmatism. James would do more than name the new philosophy; he would popularize it so successfully that Peirce faded into the background of his own eccentricity.
James had no time for any sort of dualism of thinking and doing, believing and acting. “Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action,” he insisted, “and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action.” An idea isn’t good because it’s true. It is good because the consequences of believing it make life better: “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”
