 In light of this Deweyan optimism, it is significant that Hook took as the subject of his Presidential Address for the American Philosophical Association the question of whether pragmatism had an appropriately “tragic sense of life.” Hook sought to counter the charge that the meliorism and optimism of pragmatism represented a failure to understand the tragic situation that is an inevitable part of the human condition. Hook had argued that Deweyan pragmatism did not represent an excessively optimistic faith in human perfectibility, on the model of Condorcé, and distanced itself from a logically dialectical faith in the inevitable historical progress along the lines of Hegel or Marx. Hook and the pragmatic philosophy recognized that there have been innumerable sites of human failure, self-destructive action and tragic defeat in history. Hook recognized the empirical phenomena of historical evil while believing that a philosophical or theological emphasis upon these phenomena as representing the essence of mankind or determining with historical inevitability the end of civilization could be identified as a “failure of nerve” which went beyond the required acceptance of the facts about the human condition. Rather, Hook’s thesis in his presidential lecture was that it was necessary to appreciate those enduring features of the human condition that rendered utopian thought untenable and incoherent even as they made possible progress through scientific method and an increase in human freedom that could occur at any particular time and place.