A Hotel Corridor
James references Italian writer and pragmatist Giovanni Papini to provide a metaphor for understanding the placement of pragmatism within the world philosophy.
“[Pragmatism] lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.”
James goes on to illuminate this comparison by suggesting that as a philosophical theory it allows one to peek into the rooms lining its path where one may find an atheist situated across the hall from a devout penitent, thus suggesting that everyone adopts their own version of an pragmatic outlook to suit their larger philosophy.
Pragmatism and Progress
In a passage considering the relationship of hypothetical theory the pragmatism of practical application, James comments upon how technological advancement has significantly narrowed the gap; where what was once conceived only in terms of whether it could be done, progress has transformed the process of invention into how it can be used once it can be done. This existential turning point is placed within metaphorical context in the image of a man who
“may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.”
Theology
James winds things up by applying pragmatic conceptions to theological ideas. He accomplishes this through metaphor. Specifically, through a simile that compares the relationship of man to the greater mysteries of God to that of cats and dogs who are equally clueless about the mysteries, but enjoy daily revelations of a shared kinship with their owns, so is man able to philosophize about a God with whom he sees an established kinship.
“I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life.”
“the dead heart of the living tree”
The dead heart of the living is the metaphor James engages for a critique of those rational “truths” conceived to be inherent and not subject to experience and understanding. Truths such as those today termed “conventional wisdom” as well as prejudicial beliefs in a fact formed only as a result of traditional acceptance would thus be the unbeating heart in the natural world.
Stacked Similes
The inability of society to cut out the dead heart and look at anew at the rest of tree to discover a truth a lay hidden is later addressed by James in an excellent example of how writers sometimes use the power of multiple examples of comparison to drive home a single overarching metaphor:
“Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists – you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can’t get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.”
