 In a different idiom, James had criticized both the metaphysical Materialism and the metaphysical Idealism that he took to be dominant in the latter part of the nineteenth century. James had argued that both of these seemingly contrary philosophical hypotheses shared the philosophical flaw inherent in the metaphysical approach that he identified as a form of “looking backward.” James identified traditional metaphysics with the method of searching for the necessary presuppositions of empirical phenomena. This form of “looking backward” from the realm of contingent experience to a philosophical set of entities that necessarily existed, whether Materialistic or Idealistic, was contrasted by James with the pragmatic approach which looked to future experience. Accordingly, for James, metaphysical claims were to be interpreted as hypotheses whose adoption or acceptance by an agent was justified only if it would lead to verifiable or confirmable consequences in future human experience. This involved James in a redefinition of the nature of metaphysics, since it transformed metaphysical claims into predictions regarding the consequences for the human condition of adopting them. Thus the pragmatism of both Peirce and James could be understood as calling for the elimination of traditional metaphysics and replacing it with a “scientific”metaphysics, metaphysics within the bounds of scientific methodology