And it implies also that data and solutions are ultimately concrete, rooted in the particular existents that make up the context, not in the abstract generalities of a fictitious world of ideas. The pragmatic method is secondly a genetic method. The pragmatist asks always. The historical, evolutionary, functional approach has been invaluable in the human sciences. But throughout most of its history, philosophy has been influenced rather by mathematics and the natural sciences, and so has occupied itself with the quest for fixed relations among timeless essences.
Pragmatism takes time seriously.
In the third place, the pragmatic method looks for continuities and gradations rather than separateness and sharp differences. The integrated personality and coherent culture for which the pragmatist strives he puts forward as an ideal rooted in the wholeness of the world of actuality. The world really is what experience shows it to be. When we say that something is only apparent, we are contrasting it, not with what transcends experience, but with what would be disclosed in other experiences. Transcendent metaphysics converts a functional and contextual difference to a substantive and absolute distinction.