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Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.
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“Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”

William James

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Source
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
Date
1907
Meaning

Meaning of “Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up…”

James presents pragmatism as a method that makes theories answer to practical consequences and experience instead of allowing abstract formulations to remain rigid and self-sufficient.

Source context

Where does it come from?

Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. The sentence follows James’s claim that theories become instruments rather than final answers.

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Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
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“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

William James · Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking · 1907
Meaning & context

James describes theories as tools for moving inquiry and experience forward rather than final intellectual resting places that eliminate the need for further testing or revision.

Source details

Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. Capitalization has been normalized from the represented all-caps sentence while the wording is otherwise preserved.

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A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
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“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

Thomas Paine · Common Sense · 1776
Meaning & context

Custom can disguise error by making the familiar feel legitimate; critical judgment requires re-examining practices that have escaped scrutiny through repetition.

Source details

Common Sense (1776), Introduction. The represented opening sentence is verified in Project Gutenberg #147 and the validated scan-backed Wikisource transcription; Paine argues that familiarity can make a wrong practice appear right before public argument unsettles the custom.

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The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation.
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“The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation.”

Walter Pater · The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry · 1873
Meaning & context

Pater values philosophy for sharpening attention: its practical intellectual service is to make perception more alert rather than allowing experience to pass unnoticed through habit.

Source details

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The line belongs to Pater’s historically controversial conclusion on experience and culture.

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If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
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“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

Francis Bacon · The Advancement of Learning · 1605
Meaning & context

Intellectual confidence can be improved by beginning with questions rather than pretending certainty too early.

Source details

The Advancement of Learning, First Book, Project Gutenberg #5500, transcribed from the 1893 Cassell & Company edition. Bacon contrasts impatience of doubt with mature suspension of judgment and then sets out two ways of contemplation before saying that beginning with certainties ends in doubts while beginning with doubts can end in certainties. It remains early-modern epistemological argument rather than a modern experimental rule for scientific method.

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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”

William James · The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy · 1897
Meaning & context

James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.

Source details

The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.

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You can’t yourself, but exterior influences can do it.
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“You can’t yourself, but exterior influences can do it.”

Mark Twain · What Is Man? · 1906
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Old Man
Meaning & context

The Old Man claims that opinions can change, but attributes the change to new evidence, conversation, study, and other influences entering from outside the individual.

Source details

What Is Man?, Old Man replying to the Young Man’s question about changing an automatic opinion; this is dialogic determinism, not neutral cognitive science.

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