The term *pragmatism* first appears in the 1870s in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, in the circle around Harvard. But the figure who carried it out of academic seminars and into a worldwide audience was William James. Trained in medicine (anatomy, physiology), educated for years in Europe, and the man who visited Germany's experimental psychology laboratories and brought their methods back to America — James entered philosophy through the door of psychology.

In 1890 the product of twelve years' work, *The Principles of Psychology*, appeared. The two-volume book does two things. First, it characterises consciousness not as a chain of discrete thoughts (Lockean, atomistic) but as a continuously flowing 'stream of consciousness' — a concept which became one of the basic tools of Joyce, Woolf, and modernist literature. Second, it analyses habit, emotion, and will on a physiological ground but in terms of the organism's adaptation to its environment — for James, the mind is not a separate substance but a coping tool of the organism.

In 1907 James published *Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking*, a series of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The thesis: a 'true' idea is not the one that 'corresponds' to the world but the one whose consequences lead us into action that works in life. James's formula: 'truth is the cash value of an idea' — a proposition, when its bill is paid, what does it return? For religious belief this produces radical consequences: the 'truth' of piety is sought not in a metaphysical proof of God's existence but in the values produced in the believer's life.

Pragmatism is a distinct strand within the European rationalist-empiricist tradition: knowledge is treated as anti-theoretical, pluralist, experiential, and outcome-directed. The line from James to John Dewey to Richard Rorty and contemporary neo-pragmatists has become the spine of American philosophy; it was also carried into educational theory (Dewey), legal theory (Holmes), and political science. 'To do philosophy is not to look at another planet but at the life we are living' — this remains pragmatism's basic stance across the next century.