•Why it earns a slot
Written at the height of the Pragmatism controversy and prefaced by F.C.S. Schiller himself, Murray's book remains one of the clearest period introductions to the movement, tracing its roots from James's 1890 Principles of Psychology through the logical critiques of Sidgwick and Schiller to the full Humanist position, all in plain language that avoids both technical jargon and caricature.
Murray surveys the origins, arguments, and implications of Pragmatism, tracing how it emerged from new psychology, Darwinism, and dissatisfaction with both empiricism and apriorism. He argues that truth is not a static correspondence with reality but a claim that must be tested by its practical consequences in lived experience. The book concludes by widening Pragmatism into Humanism, the view that reality is always a human selection and that man has both the right and duty to remake his world through purposive action.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.