THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A Story of Ideas in America.

• Author: KELLMAN, STEVEN G.
• Position: Review

THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A Story of Ideas in America BY LOUIS MENAND FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 2001, 546 PAGES, $27.00

In Cambridge, Mass., in 1872, several young men began meeting regularly to discuss philosophical ideas. Though the informal group, who called themselves the Metaphysical Club, apparently disbanded after less than a year, they provide, as author Louis Menand argues and demonstrates, a hook on which to hang many of the most-significant developments in American culture between the Civil War and World War II.

The most-influential members of the Metaphysical Club were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James. Along with John Dewey, a younger figure who was not part of the original circle, but knew and admired all three, they pioneered pragmatism, a cluster of ideas about how ideas are provisional, how they serve not as representations of absolute truth, but as mental modes of adaptation. An absorbing account of the birth of pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club is a rich and rewarding work of intellectual history that celebrates lives of thought and brings challenging thoughts to life.

"About what we really know nothing we ought not to affirm or deny any thing," wrote Chauncey Wright, the Cambridge Socrates who attended meetings of the Metaphysical Club and, like others disillusioned by exalted claims of verity, was loquacious in proclaiming the limits of language. New Darwinian beliefs in natural selection further emphasized life as fluid, a process...