ABSTRACT
Pragmatism originated in Cambridge Massachusetts in the late 1860s in the Metaphysical Club-a short-lived reading group whose members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Exciting ideas about science and philosophy were already very much in the air in Europe and they most certainly had drifted across the Atlantic. August Comte’s positivism was all the rage in France from the mid-1880s. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and it and its implications were being intensely discussed by philosophers. By the time the fledgling pragmatists started to talk to each other, the thinking person was already worrying about the problematic relationship between science and God. Science seemed to entail the abandonment of the worldview that had God and religious absolutes at its center.
