This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... THE PHASES OF THE ECONOMIC INTEREST HENRY WALDGRAVE STUART 1. In the logic of Instrumentalism, truth has been identified with usefulness and the good with the satisfactory. Classifying critics have seen in this the damaging mark of Utilitarianism, certain of them deeming "Amerikanismus" an even shrewder and more specific diagnosis. The association of these terms together and the aptness of either to express what the critics have in mind are matters of small interest. It is of more importance to discover, behind the reproach implied, the assumptions which may have made the reproach seem pertinent. One cannot, of course, suppose it to express a sheer general aversion to the useful or an ascetic abhorrence of all satisfaction on principle. Puritanism, aestheticism, and pedantry should be last resorts in any search for an interpretative clue. The distrust of Utilitarianism need be ascribed to none of these. It comes instead from a conception of the true Utilitarian as a dull and dogmatic being with no interests beyond the range of his own uninquiring vision, no aspiration beyond the complacent survey of his own perfections and no standards beyond the inventory of his own bourgeois tastes and prejudices. The type is indeed not yet extinct in our day: but is it plausible to charge a "new" philosophy with conspiring to perpetuate it? Is Instrumentalism only philistinism called by a more descriptive name? It professes at least to be a logic of hypothesis and experiment, whereas for the perfect philistine there are no ultimate problems and hence no logic but the logic of self-evidence. When Instrumentalism speaks of needs and interests in its analysis of truth and goodness does it then mean the needs and interests that define the...