PEIRCE TO STRAWSON object may be satisfactory without that object actually existing (in which case he is open to the charge of preferring wishful thinking to genuine inquiry) In the same year as he published The Meaning of Truth James published A Pluralistic Universe, in which he applied pragmatism in support of a religious world-view He spoke of our awareness of a ‘wider self from which saving experiences flow in’ and of a ‘mother sea of consciousness’ He believed, however, that the amount of suffering in the world prevents us from believing in an infinite, absolute divinity: the superhuman consciousness is limited either in power, or in knowledge, or in both Even God cannot determine or predict the future; whether the world will become better or worse depends on the choices of human beings in cooperation with him In his old age James, a genial and affable personality and a great communicator, was revered by many inside and outside the United States Peirce, on the other hand, was isolated and destitute, and in 1907 was discovered by one of James’s students nearly dead from starvation in a Cambridge lodging house James organized a fund which supplied Peirce’s basic needs until his death from cancer in 1914 James himself died of heart disease in 1910; on his deathbed in Cambridge he asked his brother Henry to remain close for six weeks to receive any messages he could send to him from beyond the grave No messages are recorded James died before completing his metaphysical system, but his pragmatist programme was continued by others after his death John Dewey (1859–1952), in a long academic career at Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Columbia in New York, applied it most particularly in the area of American education, but he also wrote influential books on many social and political topics His constant aim was to explore how far methods of inquiry that had been so successful in physical science and in technology could be extended into other areas of human endeavour In England F C S Schiller (1864–1937) developed a version of pragmatism that he called ‘humanism’ Schiller was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and taught for a while at Cornell University in upstate New York, where he met James, before returning to a fellowship at Corpus Christi College He was a lonely figure at Oxford because in the last years of the nineteenth century, philosophy departments in the major universities of 46