American pragmatism has, in the course of a hundred years, swung back and forth between an attempt to raise the rest of culture to the epistemological level of the natural sciences and an attempt to level down the natural sciences to an epistemological par with art, religion, and politics.

C. S. Peirce sometimes thought of himself as carrying the methods of laboratory science into philosophy and sometimes (in the manner later made fashionable by Russell) claimed to deduce all his philosophical views from the results of mathematical logic. But at other times he subordinated logic to ethics (and ultimately to aesthetics) and raged against the positivism of his “nominalist” opponents.

William James sometimes comes on as tough-minded, empirical, in love with hard facts and concrete details. But at other times, notably in “The Will to Believe,” it becomes clear that his principal motive is to place his father's belief in Society as the Redeemed Form of Man on a par with the theories of the “hard” sciences. By taking a true belief as a successful rule for action, he hoped to rub out the purported difference between scientific beliefs as “evidenced” and religious beliefs as adopted without evidence.

Dewey, in turn, was grateful to natural science, especially as represented by Darwin, for rescuing him from his early Hegelianism. But Hegel had taught him to (in a phrase I borrow from Marjorie Grene) “treat history as our basic phenomenon and draw the world of science, as a limiting case, out of historical reality.”