He argued vigorously against both logical positivism and associated philosophers (for example, Bertrand Russell) as well as absolute idealism (such as F. H. Bradley).

He was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, and graduated in the first class of Literae Humaniores, winning later the Taylorian scholarship for German in 1887.

Like his fellow pragmatists across the ocean, Schiller was attempting to stake out an intermediate position between both the spartan landscape of naturalism and the speculative excesses of the metaphysics of his time.

In Riddles Schiller both, The result, Schiller contends, is that naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world (freewill, consciousness, God, purpose, universals), while abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (the imperfect, change, physicality).

In each case we are unable to guide our moral and epistemological "lower" lives to the achievement of life's "higher" ends, ultimately leading to scepticism on both fronts.

Shortly after publishing Riddles of the Sphinx, Schiller became acquainted with the work of pragmatist philosopher William James and this changed the course of his career.

In one of Schiller's most prominent works during this phase of his career, "Axioms as Postulates" (1903), Schiller extended James' will to believe doctrine to show how it could be used to justify not only an acceptance of God, but also our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more.

For example, Schiller argues that the reality of time and change is intrinsically opposed to the very modus operandi of all systems of abstract metaphysics.

The problem lies in the aim of abstract metaphysics for "interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which should be true not here and now, but "eternally" and independently of Time and Change."

If you insist on having a system of eternal and immutable 'truth,' you can get it only by abstracting from those characteristics of reality, which we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and change.

It is worth noting, that while Schiller's work has been largely neglected since his death, Schiller's arguments against a naturalistic account of evolution have been recently cited by advocates of intelligent design to establish the existence of a longer history for the view due to legal concerns in the United States (See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District).

Final Cause) which gives nothingness, lifelessness, and unconscious matter the purpose (and thus potential) of evolving into higher forms: And thus, so far from dispensing with the need for a Divine First Cause, the theory of evolution, if only we have the faith in science to carry it to its conclusion, and the courage to interpret it, proves irrefragably that no evolution was possible without a pre-existent Deity, and a Deity, moreover, transcendent, non-material and non-phenomenal.

The process which the theory of Evolution divined the history of the world to be, must have content and meaning determined from the basis of the scientific data; it is only by a careful study of the history of a thing that we can determine the direction of its development, [and only then] that we can be said to have made the first approximation to the knowledge of the End of the world process.

[11] [This] is teleology of a totally different kind to that which is so vehemently, and on the whole so justly dreaded by the modern exponents of natural science.

It does not attempt to explain things anthropocentrically, or regard all creation as existing for the use and benefit of man; it is as far as the scientist from supposing that cork-trees grow to supply us with champagne corks.

[13]Now, while by today's philosophic standards Schiller's speculations would be considered wildly metaphysical and disconnected from the sciences, compared with the metaphysicians of his day (Hegel, McTaggart, etc.

To justify his attempt to occupy the middle ground between naturalism and abstract metaphysics, Schiller makes a move that anticipates James' The Will to Believe: And in action especially we are often forced to act upon slight possibilities.

In Riddles, Schiller only employs his version of the will to believe doctrine when he is faced with overcoming sceptic and pessimistic methods of philosophy.

In this essay Schiller extends the will to believe doctrine to be the basis of our acceptance of causality, of the uniformity of nature, of our concept of identity, of contradiction, of the law of excluded middle, of space and time, of the goodness of God, and more.

He notes that we postulate that nature is uniform because we need nature to be uniform: [O]ut of the hurly-burly of events in time and space [we] extract[ ] changeless formulas whose chaste abstraction soars above all reference to any 'where' or 'when,' and thereby renders them blank cheques to be filled up at our pleasure with any figures of the sort.

[16]The shift in Schiller's thinking continues in his next published work, The Metaphysics of the Time-Process (1895): The abstractions of metaphysics, then, exist as explanations of the concrete facts of life, and not the latter as illustrations of the former ... Science [along with humanism] does not refuse to interpret the symbols with which it operates; on the contrary, it is only their applicability to the concrete facts originally abstracted from that is held to justify their use and to establish their 'truth.

[19]A few lines down from this passage Schiller adds the following footnote in a 1903 reprint of the essay: "All this seems a very fairly definite anticipation of modern pragmatism."

Schiller provides a detailed defence of his pragmatist theories of truth and meaning in a chapter titled "The Biologic of Judgment" in Logic for Use (1929).

Whenever ... it becomes biologically important to notice differences in roughly similar situations, and to adjust action more closely to the peculiarities of a particular case, the guidance of life by habit, instinct, and impulse breaks down.

In the passage, Schiller makes the claim that thought only occurs when our unthinking habits prove themselves inadequate for handling a particular situation.

Schiller asserts that when a person utters a statement in a situation they are doing so for a specific purpose: to solve the problem that habit could not handle alone.

If the experiential difference between hard and soft diamonds did not connect up with my purpose for entering into thought, the two statements would possess the same meaning.

On the basis of his misunderstandings, Schiller complains that for Peirce to merely say "'truths should have practical consequences'" is to be "very vague, and hints at no reason for the curious connexion it asserts."

Schiller goes on to denigrate Peirce's principle as nothing more than a simple truism "which hardly deserves a permanent place and name in philosophic usage".

After all, Schiller points out, "[i]t is hard ... to see why even the extremest intellectualism should deny that the difference between the truth and the falsehood of an assertion must show itself in some visible way.