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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Meaning of Truth, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Meaning of Truth
+
+Author: William James
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5117]
+This file was first posted on May 1, 2002
+Last Updated: July 4, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MEANING OF TRUTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MEANING OF TRUTH
+
+A SEQUEL TO 'PRAGMATISM'
+
+By William James
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+THE pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the
+relation called 'truth' which may obtain between an idea (opinion,
+belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 'Truth,' I there say,
+'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement,
+as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. Pragmatists and
+intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course.
+
+'Where our ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does
+agreement with that object mean? ... Pragmatism asks its usual question.
+"Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference
+will its being true make in any one's actual life? What experiences
+[may] be different from those which would obtain if the belief were
+false? How will the truth be realized? What, in short, is the truth's
+cash-value in experiential terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this
+question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN
+ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE, AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE
+THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have
+true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that
+truth is known as.
+
+'The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth
+HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity
+IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying
+itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of its validATION.
+[Footnote: But 'VERIFIABILITY,' I add, 'is as good as verification.
+For one truth-process completed, there are a million in our lives
+that function in [the] state of nascency. They lead us towards direct
+verification; lead us into the surroundings of the object they envisage;
+and then, if everything, runs on harmoniously, we are so sure that
+verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by
+all that happens.']
+
+'To agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided
+either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into
+such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected
+with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or
+practically .... Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or
+intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't
+entangle our progress in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts
+our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet
+the requirement. It will be true of that reality.
+
+'THE TRUE, to put it very briefly, IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY OF
+OUR THINKING, JUST AS THE RIGHT IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY OF OUR
+BEHAVING. Expedient in almost any fashion, and expedient in the long
+run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently all the
+experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
+equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
+OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.'
+
+This account of truth, following upon the similar ones given by Messrs.
+Dewey and Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest discussion. Few critics
+have defended it, most of them have scouted it. It seems evident that
+the subject is a hard one to understand, under its apparent simplicity;
+and evident also, I think, that the definitive settlement of it will
+mark a turning-point in the history of epistemology, and consequently
+in that of general philosophy. In order to make my own thought more
+accessible to those who hereafter may have to study the question, I have
+collected in the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears
+directly on the truth-question. My first statement was in 1884, in the
+article that begins the present volume. The other papers follow in the
+order of their publication. Two or three appear now for the first time.
+
+One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of
+making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their 'feeling
+good' to us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse for
+this charge, by the unguarded language in which, in the book Pragmatism,
+I spoke of the truth of the belief of certain philosophers in the
+absolute. Explaining why I do not believe in the absolute myself (p.
+78), yet finding that it may secure 'moral holidays' to those who need
+them, and is true in so far forth (if to gain moral holidays be a
+good), [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 75.] I offered this as a conciliatory
+olive-branch to my enemies. But they, as is only too common with such
+offerings, trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver. I
+had counted too much on their good will--oh for the rarity of
+Christian charity under the sun! Oh for the rarity of ordinary secular
+intelligence also! I had supposed it to be matter of common observation
+that, of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects
+are equal, but of which the first denies some vital human need while
+the second satisfies it, the second will be favored by sane men for the
+simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the
+first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of
+philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty.
+Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had shown the
+concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the holiday giver, the
+banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective deliverance, when one says
+'the absolute exists,' amounted, on my showing, just to this, that 'some
+justification of a feeling of security in presence of the universe,'
+exists, and that systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of
+security would be to do violence to a tendency in one's emotional life
+which might well be respected as prophetic.
+
+Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their own
+minds in any such picture, so all that I can do is to apologize, and
+take my offering back. The absolute is true in NO way then, and least of
+all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I assigned!
+
+My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'design' was similar. Reducing,
+by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these concepts to its
+positive experienceable operation, I showed them all to mean the same
+thing, viz., the presence of 'promise' in the world. 'God or no God?'
+means 'promise or no promise?' It seems to me that the alternative is
+objective enough, being a question as to whether the cosmos has one
+character or another, even though our own provisional answer be made
+on subjective grounds. Nevertheless christian and non-christian critics
+alike accuse me of summoning people to say 'God exists,' EVEN WHEN HE
+DOESN'T EXIST, because forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the
+saying doesn't really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but
+only that to say so feels good.
+
+Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the word
+'truth' shall be held to signify, and not over any of the facts embodied
+in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti-pragmatists believe
+in existent objects, just as they believe in our ideas of them. The
+difference is that when the pragmatists speak of truth, they mean
+exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely their workableness;
+whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to
+mean something about the objects. Since the pragmatist, if he agrees
+that an idea is 'really' true, also agrees to whatever it says about
+its object; and since most anti-pragmatists have already come round
+to agreeing that, if the object exists, the idea that it does so is
+workable; there would seem so little left to fight about that I might
+well be asked why instead of reprinting my share in so much verbal
+wrangling, I do not show my sense of 'values' by burning it all up.
+
+I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested
+in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of radical
+empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist
+theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in making radical
+empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,
+next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.
+
+The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
+philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.
+[Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they
+form no part of the material for philosophic debate.]
+
+The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive
+as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular
+experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.
+
+The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
+hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts
+of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no
+extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own
+right a concatenated or continuous structure.
+
+The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the
+rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all
+disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this
+separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In the prevalent
+idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which
+'relates' things together by throwing 'categories' over them like a
+net. The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is
+supposed to be the truth-relation, which connects parts of reality in
+pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known,
+yet which is itself contentless experientially, neither describable,
+explicable, nor reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by
+uttering the name 'truth.'
+
+The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it
+has a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable.
+Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The 'workableness'
+which ideas must have, in order to be true, means particular workings,
+physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up
+from next to next inside of concrete experience. Were this pragmatic
+contention admitted, one great point in the victory of radical
+empiricism would also be scored, for the relation between an object and
+the idea that truly knows it, is held by rationalists to be nothing of
+this describable sort, but to stand outside of all possible temporal
+experience; and on the relation, so interpreted, rationalism is wonted
+to make its last most obdurate rally.
+
+Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this volume
+can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of resistance, not only
+to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also (for if the truth-relation
+were transcendent, others might be so too), that I feel strongly the
+strategical importance of having them definitely met and got out of
+the way. What our critics most persistently keep saying is that though
+workings go with truth, yet they do not constitute it. It is numerically
+additional to them, prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise
+to be explained BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for
+our enemies to establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically
+additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of
+an idea. Since the OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most
+rationalists plead IT, and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves
+on the bystanders the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the
+existence of the object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that
+our critics have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in
+this volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real
+existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the
+existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,' is the
+only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully,
+if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse of language, to say
+the least, to transfer the word 'truth' from the idea to the object's
+existence, when the falsehood of ideas that won't work is explained by
+that existence as well as the truth of those that will.
+
+I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries. But
+once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word 'truth' represent
+a property of the idea, cease to make it something mysteriously
+connected with the object known, and the path opens fair and wide, as
+I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism on its merits. The
+truth of an idea will then mean only its workings, or that in it which
+by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings; it will mean
+neither the idea's object, nor anything 'saltatory' inside the idea,
+that terms drawn from experience cannot describe.
+
+One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes made
+between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the object's
+existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which they, as more
+radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself understand these
+authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of
+the object (provided it be an experienceable object) to the subject, in
+the truth-relation. Dewey in particular has insisted almost ad nauseam
+that the whole meaning of our cognitive states and processes lies in
+the way they intervene in the control and revaluation of independent
+existences or facts. His account of knowledge is not only absurd, but
+meaningless, unless independent existences be there of which our ideas
+take account, and for the transformation of which they work. But because
+he and Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent'
+in the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics
+pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that they
+deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects external
+to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote: It gives me
+pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the pragmatistic church,
+so far as his epistemology goes. See his vigorous book, The Metaphysics
+of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work What
+is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the
+acquaintance only while correcting these proofs, contains some striking
+anticipations of the later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking,
+by Irving E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
+appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
+published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I
+am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the
+extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox in the Quarterly Review for
+April, 1909.]
+
+It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should
+so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.
+
+What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the
+universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas of
+different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the other
+provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the reader
+thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's universe is the
+smallest, being essentially a psychological one. He starts with but one
+sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the independent
+objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most successfully
+validated of all claims is that such facts are there. My universe is
+more essentially epistemological. I start with two things, the objective
+facts and the claims, and indicate which claims, the facts being there,
+will work successfully as the latter's substitutes and which will not.
+I call the former claims true. Dewey's panorama, if I understand this
+colleague, is the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own
+account of its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to
+objects independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this,
+he must correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at second
+hand.
+
+I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the critics
+of my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy, Gardiner,
+Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, Salter, Carus, Lalande, Mentre,
+McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Ladd and others, especially not Professor
+Schinz, who has published under the title of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing
+sociological romance. Some of these critics seem to me to labor under an
+inability almost pathetic, to understand the thesis which they seek to
+refute. I imagine that most of their difficulties have been answered
+by anticipation elsewhere in this volume, and I am sure that my readers
+will thank me for not adding more repetition to the fearful amount that
+is already there.
+
+95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE (MASS.), August, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION
+
+II THE TIGERS IN INDIA
+
+III HUMANISM AND TRUTH
+
+IV THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN
+
+V THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM
+
+VI A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH
+
+VII PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH
+
+VIII THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MIS-UNDERSTANDERS
+
+IX THE MEANING OF THE WORD TRUTH
+
+X THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS CAESAR
+
+XI THE ABSOLUTE AND THE STRENUOUS LIFE
+
+XII PROFESSOR HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM
+
+XIII ABSTRACTIONISM AND 'RELATIVISMUS'
+
+XIV TWO ENGLISH CRITICS
+
+XV A DIALOGUE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MEANING OF TRUTH
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION [Footnote: Read before the Aristotelian
+Society, December 1, 1884, and first published in Mind, vol. x
+(1885).--This, and the following articles have received a very slight
+verbal revision, consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy.]
+
+The following inquiry is (to use a distinction familiar to readers of
+Mr. Shadworth Hodgson) not an inquiry into the 'how it comes,' but
+into the 'what it is' of cognition. What we call acts of cognition are
+evidently realized through what we call brains and their events, whether
+there be 'souls' dynamically connected with the brains or not. But with
+neither brains nor souls has this essay any business to transact. In it
+we shall simply assume that cognition IS produced, somehow, and limit
+ourselves to asking what elements it contains, what factors it implies.
+
+Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it implies
+is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition shall take
+place. Having elsewhere used the word 'feeling' to designate generically
+all states of consciousness considered subjectively, or without respect
+to their possible function, I shall then say that, whatever elements an
+act of cognition may imply besides, it at least implies the existence
+of a FEELING. [If the reader share the current antipathy to the word
+'feeling,' he may substitute for it, wherever I use it, the word 'idea,'
+taken in the old broad Lockian sense, or he may use the clumsy phrase
+'state of consciousness,' or finally he may say 'thought' instead.]
+
+Now it is to be observed that the common consent of mankind has agreed
+that some feelings are cognitive and some are simple facts having a
+subjective, or, what one might almost call a physical, existence, but
+no such self-transcendent function as would be implied in their being
+pieces of knowledge. Our task is again limited here. We are not to ask,
+'How is self-transcendence possible?' We are only to ask, 'How comes it
+that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed
+not only to be possible but actual? And what are the marks used by
+common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest?' In short, our
+inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology,--hardly anything more.
+
+Condillac embarked on a quest similar to this by his famous hypothesis
+of a statue to which various feelings were successively imparted. Its
+first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance. But to avoid all
+possible complication with the question of genesis, let us not attribute
+even to a statue the possession of our imaginary feeling. Let us rather
+suppose it attached to no matter, nor localized at any point in space,
+but left swinging IN VACUO, as it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a
+god. And let us also, to escape entanglement with difficulties about the
+physical or psychical nature of its 'object' not call it a feeling
+of fragrance or of any other determinate sort, but limit ourselves
+to assuming that it is a feeling of Q. What is true of it under this
+abstract name will be no less true of it in any more particular shape
+(such as fragrance, pain, hardness) which the reader may suppose.
+
+Now, if this feeling of Q be the only creation of the god, it will of
+course form the entire universe. And if, to escape the cavils of that
+large class of persons who believe that SEMPER IDEM SENTIRE AC NON
+SENTIRE are the same, [Footnote:1 'The Relativity of Knowledge,' held
+in this sense, is, it may be observed in passing, one of the oddest of
+philosophic superstitions. Whatever facts may be cited in its favor are
+due to the properties of nerve-tissue, which may be exhausted by
+too prolonged an excitement. Patients with neuralgias that last
+unremittingly for days can, however, assure us that the limits of this
+nerve-law are pretty widely drawn. But if we physically could get a
+feeling that should last eternally unchanged, what atom of logical or
+psychological argument is there to prove that it would not be felt as
+long as it lasted, and felt for just what it is, all that time? The
+reason for the opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think
+that so stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be, should
+be allowed to fill eternity with its presence. An interminable
+acquaintance, leading to no knowledge-about,--such would be its
+condition.] we allow the feeling to be of as short a duration as they
+like, that universe will only need to last an infinitesimal part of a
+second. The feeling in question will thus be reduced to its fighting
+weight, and all that befalls it in the way of a cognitive function
+must be held to befall in the brief instant of its quickly snuffed-out
+life,--a life, it will also be noticed, that has no other moment of
+consciousness either preceding or following it.
+
+Well now, can our little feeling, thus left alone in the universe,--for
+the god and we psychological critics may be supposed left out of
+the account,--can the feeling, I say, be said to have any sort of a
+cognitive function? For it to KNOW, there must be something to be known.
+What is there, on the present supposition? One may reply, 'the feeling's
+content q.' But does it not seem more proper to call this the feeling's
+QUALITY than its content? Does not the word 'content' suggest that the
+feeling has already dirempted itself as an act from its content as
+an object? And would it be quite safe to assume so promptly that the
+quality q of a feeling is one and the same thing with a feeling of the
+quality q? The quality q, so far, is an entirely subjective fact which
+the feeling carries so to speak endogenously, or in its pocket. If
+any one pleases to dignify so simple a fact as this by the name of
+knowledge, of course nothing can prevent him. But let us keep closer
+to the path of common usage, and reserve the name knowledge for the
+cognition of 'realities,' meaning by realities things that exist
+independently of the feeling through which their cognition occurs. If
+the content of the feeling occur nowhere in the universe outside of the
+feeling itself, and perish with the feeling, common usage refuses
+to call it a reality, and brands it as a subjective feature of the
+feeling's constitution, or at the most as the feeling's DREAM.
+
+For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense, then, it must be
+self-transcendent; and we must prevail upon the god to CREATE A REALITY
+OUTSIDE OF IT to correspond to its intrinsic quality Q. Thus only can
+it be redeemed from the condition of being a solipsism. If now the new
+created reality RESEMBLE the feeling's quality Q I say that the feeling
+may be held by us TO BE COGNIZANT OF THAT REALITY.
+
+This first instalment of my thesis is sure to be attacked. But one
+word before defending it 'Reality' has become our warrant for calling
+a feeling cognitive; but what becomes our warrant for calling anything
+reality? The only reply is--the faith of the present critic or inquirer.
+At every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in SOME
+realities, even though his realities of this year should prove to be his
+illusions of the next. Whenever he finds that the feeling he is studying
+contemplates what he himself regards as a reality, he must of course
+admit the feeling itself to be truly cognitive. We are ourselves the
+critics here; and we shall find our burden much lightened by being
+allowed to take reality in this relative and provisional way. Every
+science must make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but
+fallible mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do
+it by means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the
+fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly confess
+that our results in this field are affected by our own liability to
+err. THE MOST WE CAN CLAIM IS, THAT WHAT WE SAY ABOUT COGNITION MAY BE
+COUNTED AS TRUE AS WHAT WE SAY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. If our hearers agree
+with us about what are to be held 'realities,' they will perhaps also
+agree to the reality of our doctrine of the way in which they are known.
+We cannot ask for more.
+
+Our terminology shall follow the spirit of these remarks. We will deny
+the function of knowledge to any feeling whose quality or content we do
+not ourselves believe to exist outside of that feeling as well as in
+it. We may call such a feeling a dream if we like; we shall have to see
+later whether we can call it a fiction or an error.
+
+To revert now to our thesis. Some persons will immediately cry out, 'How
+CAN a reality resemble a feeling?' Here we find how wise we were to name
+the quality of the feeling by an algebraic letter Q. We flank the whole
+difficulty of resemblance between an inner state and an outward reality,
+by leaving it free to any one to postulate as the reality whatever sort
+of thing he thinks CAN resemble a feeling,--if not an outward thing,
+then another feeling like the first one,--the mere feeling Q in the
+critic's mind for example. Evading thus this objection, we turn to
+another which is sure to be urged.
+
+It will come from those philosophers to whom 'thought,' in the sense of
+a knowledge of relations, is the all in all of mental life; and who hold
+a merely feeling consciousness to be no better--one would sometimes say
+from their utterances, a good deal worse--than no consciousness at all.
+Such phrases as these, for example, are common to-day in the mouths of
+those who claim to walk in the footprints of Kant and Hegel rather than
+in the ancestral English paths: 'A perception detached from all others,
+"left out of the heap we call a mind," being out of all relation, has no
+qualities--is simply nothing. We can no more consider it than we can
+see vacancy.' 'It is simply in itself fleeting, momentary, unnameable
+(because while we name it it has become another), and for the very same
+reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability.' 'Exclude from what
+we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation, we find
+that none are left.'
+
+Altho such citations as these from the writings of Professor Green might
+be multiplied almost indefinitely, they would hardly repay the pains of
+collection, so egregiously false is the doctrine they teach. Our little
+supposed feeling, whatever it may be, from the cognitive point of view,
+whether a bit of knowledge or a dream, is certainly no psychical zero.
+It is a most positively and definitely qualified inner fact, with a
+complexion all its own. Of course there are many mental facts which it
+is NOT. It knows Q, if Q be a reality, with a very minimum of knowledge.
+It neither dates nor locates it. It neither classes nor names it. And
+it neither knows itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself with other
+feelings, nor estimates its own duration or intensity. It is, in short,
+if there is no more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless and
+useless kind of thing.
+
+But if we must describe it by so many negations, and if it can say
+nothing ABOUT itself or ABOUT anything else, by what right do we deny
+that it is a psychical zero? And may not the 'relationists' be right
+after all?
+
+In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this riddle;
+and a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at. A quotation
+from a too seldom quoted book, the Exploratio Philosophica of John Grote
+(London, 1865), p. 60, will form the best introduction to it.
+
+'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
+ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of the
+"object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus: we
+KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such and such
+things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general, following its
+true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two applications
+of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai, noscere, kennen,
+connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen, savoir. In
+the origin, the former may be considered more what I have called
+phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or familiarity
+with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to the phenomenal
+bodily communication, and is less purely intellectual than the other; it
+is the kind of knowledge which we have of a thing by the presentation
+to the senses or the representation of it in picture or type, a
+Vorstellung. The other, which is what we express in judgments or
+propositions, what is embodied in Begriffe or concepts without any
+necessary imaginative representation, is in its origin the more
+intellectual notion of knowledge. There is no reason, however, why we
+should not express our knowledge, whatever its kind, in either manner,
+provided only we do not confusedly express it, in the same proposition
+or piece of reasoning, in both.'
+
+Now obviously if our supposed feeling of Q is (if knowledge at all) only
+knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he-goat, as
+the ancients would have said, to try to extract from it any deliverance
+ABOUT anything under the sun, even about itself. And it is as unjust,
+after our failure, to turn upon it and call it a psychical nothing, as
+it would be, after our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat, to proclaim
+the non-lactiferous character of the whole goat-tribe. But the entire
+industry of the Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sensation out
+of the pale of philosophic recognition is founded on this false issue.
+It is always the 'speechlessness' of sensation, its inability to make
+any 'statement,'[Footnote: See, for example, Green's Introduction to
+Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, p. 36.] that is held to make the very
+notion of it meaningless, and to justify the student of knowledge in
+scouting it out of existence. 'Significance,' in the sense of standing
+as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be the sole function
+of what mental states we have; and from the perception that our little
+primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense,
+it is an easy step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then
+vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in
+this universal liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct
+acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is left
+about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not all
+'significance' depart from the situation? And when our knowledge about
+things has reached its never so complicated perfection, must there
+not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with it some
+acquaintance with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?
+
+Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
+should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as subject
+or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some judgment,
+perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the other feelings
+may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a name and be no
+longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic know, has its
+'denotation'; and the denotation always means some reality or content,
+relationless as extra or with its internal relations unanalyzed,
+like the Q which our primitive sensation is supposed to know. No
+relation-expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a
+preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents, as this.
+Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a more complex
+kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in her blue abyss,
+it must first come in that simple shape, and be held fast in that first
+intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be attained. The knowledge
+ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo IT, and what is added cannot
+be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and B exclaims, 'Didn't you see my
+brother on the stairs?' we all hold that A may answer, 'I saw him,
+but didn't know he was your brother'; ignorance of brotherhood not
+abolishing power to see. But those who, on account of the unrelatedness
+of the first facts with which we become acquainted, deny them to be
+'known' to us, ought in consistency to maintain that if A did not
+perceive the relationship of the man on the stairs to B, it was
+impossible he should have noticed him at all.]
+
+Let us say no more then about this objection, but enlarge our thesis,
+thus: If there be in the universe a Q other than the Q in the feeling,
+the latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself; an
+acquaintance moreover, which, as mere acquaintance, it would be hard to
+imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase, being in its way
+complete; and which would oblige us (so long as we refuse not to call
+acquaintance knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is cognitive,
+but that all qualities of feeling, SO LONG AS THERE IS ANYTHING OUTSIDE
+OF THEM WHICH THEY RESEMBLE, are feelings OF qualities of existence, and
+perceptions of outward fact.
+
+The point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first
+feeling lies, it will be noticed, in the discovery that q does exist
+elsewhere than in it. In case this discovery were not made, we could
+not be sure the feeling was cognitive; and in case there were nothing
+outside to be discovered, we should have to call the feeling a dream.
+But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the only
+q it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle altered by having
+the self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken
+away. The function is accidental; synthetic, not analytic; and falls
+outside and not inside its being. [Footnote: It seems odd to call so
+important a function accidental, but I do not see how we can mend the
+matter. Just as, if we start with the reality and ask how it may come
+to be known, we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall
+RECONSTRUCT it in its own more private fashion; so, if we start with the
+feeling and ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by invoking
+a reality which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In
+either case, however, the datum we start with remains just what it was.
+One may easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference
+between quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving
+and reconstructing the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must
+confess that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated dualism
+of the knower and the known. See Bowne's Metaphysics, New York, 1882,
+pp. 403-412, and various passages in Lotze, e.g., Logic, Sec. 308.
+['Unmediated' is a bad word to have used.--1909.]]
+
+A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or
+hit, they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however, something
+starts up opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit
+and know.
+
+But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the
+critics look on and see a real q and a feeling of q; and because the two
+resemble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what right have
+we to say this until we know that the feeling of q means to stand for or
+represent just that SAME other q? Suppose, instead of one q, a number
+of real q's in the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can easily
+see which one of them it hits. But how can we distinguish which one the
+feeling knows? It knows the one it stands for. But which one DOES
+it stand for? It declares no intention in this respect. It merely
+resembles; it resembles all indifferently; and resembling, per se, is
+not necessarily representing or standing-for at all. Eggs resemble each
+other, but do not on that account represent, stand for, or know each
+other. And if you say this is because neither of them is a FEELING,
+then imagine the world to consist of nothing but toothaches, which ARE
+feelings, feelings resembling each other exactly,--would they know each
+other the better for all that?
+
+The case of q being a bare quality like that of toothache-pain is quite
+different from that of its being a concrete individual thing. There is
+practically no test for deciding whether the feeling of a bare quality
+means to represent it or not. It can DO nothing to the quality beyond
+resembling it, simply because an abstract quality is a thing to which
+nothing can be done. Being without context or environment or principium
+individuationis, a quiddity with no haecceity, a platonic idea, even
+duplicate editions of such a quality (were they possible), would be
+indiscernible, and no sign could be given, no result altered, whether
+the feeling I meant to stand for this edition or for that, or whether it
+simply resembled the quality without meaning to stand for it at all.
+
+If now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q, by
+assigning to each a CONTEXT which shall distinguish it from its mates,
+we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling knows, by
+extending our principle of resemblance to the context too, and saying
+the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most exactly
+duplicates. But here again the theoretic doubt recurs: duplication and
+coincidence, are they knowledge? The gun shows which q it points to and
+hits, by BREAKING it. Until the feeling can show us which q it points to
+and knows, by some equally flagrant token, why are we not free to deny
+that it either points to or knows any one of the REAL q's at all, and to
+affirm that the word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its relation
+to the reality?
+
+Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite as
+flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in concrete
+cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out. Let
+us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and ask our obliging
+deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let him send me,
+for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and let him
+simultaneously cause the man to die. How would our practical instinct
+spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition of the
+reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a resembling
+reality with my dream? Just such puzzling cases as this are what the
+'society for psychical research' is busily collecting and trying to
+interpret in the most reasonable way.
+
+If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if the
+context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from
+the real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action about the
+death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence,
+and naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long context,
+agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real
+death; if I were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and
+if on awaking I had a habit of ACTING immediately as if they were true
+and so getting 'the start' of my more tardily instructed neighbors,--we
+should in all probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind
+of clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just
+those realities they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed
+to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any one preserved
+would completely vanish, if it should appear that from the midst of my
+dream I had the power of INTERFERING with the course of the reality, and
+making the events in it turn this way or that, according as I dreamed
+they should. Then at least it would be certain that my waking critics
+and my dreaming self were dealing with the SAME.
+
+And thus do men invariably decide such a question. THE FALLING OF THE
+DREAM'S PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES into the real world, and the EXTENT
+of the resemblance between the two worlds are the criteria they
+instinctively use. [Footnote: The thoroughgoing objector might, it is
+true, still return to the charge, and, granting a dream which should
+completely mirror the real universe, and all the actions dreamed in
+which should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in this universe,
+still insist that this is nothing more than harmony, and that it is as
+far as ever from being made clear whether the dream-world refers to that
+other world, all of whose details it so closely copies. This objection
+leads deep into metaphysics. I do not impugn its importance, and justice
+obliges me to say that but for the teachings of my colleague, Dr. Josiah
+Royce, I should neither have grasped its full force nor made my own
+practical and psychological point of view as clear to myself as it is.
+On this occasion I prefer to stick steadfastly to that point of view;
+but I hope that Dr. Royce's more fundamental criticism of the function
+of cognition may ere long see the light. [I referred in this note to
+Royce's religious aspect of philosophy, then about to be published. This
+powerful book maintained that the notion of REFERRING involved that of
+an inclusive mind that shall own both the real q and the mental q, and
+use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former.
+At the time I could not refute this transcendentalist opinion. Later,
+largely through the influence of Professor D. S. Miller (see his essay
+'The meaning of truth and error,' in the Philosophical Review for 1893,
+vol. 2 p. 403) I came to see that any definitely experienceable workings
+would serve as intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's
+intentions would.]] All feeling is for the sake of action, all feeling
+results in action,--to-day no argument is needed to prove these truths.
+But by a most singular disposition of nature which we may conceive
+to have been different, MY FEELINGS ACT UPON THE REALITIES WITHIN MY
+CRITIC'S WORLD. Unless, then, my critic can prove that my feeling does
+not 'point to' those realities which it acts upon, how can he continue
+to doubt that he and I are alike cognizant of one and the same real
+world? If the action is performed in one world, that must be the world
+the feeling intends; if in another world, THAT is the world the feeling
+has in mind. If your feeling bear no fruits in my world, I call it
+utterly detached from my world; I call it a solipsism, and call its
+world a dream-world. If your toothache do not prompt you to ACT as if
+I had a toothache, nor even as if I had a separate existence; if you
+neither say to me, 'I know now how you must suffer!' nor tell me of
+a remedy, I deny that your feeling, however it may resemble mine, is
+really cognizant of mine. It gives no SIGN of being cognizant, and such
+a sign is absolutely necessary to my admission that it is.
+
+Before I can think you to mean my world, you must affect my world;
+before I can think you to mean much of it, you must affect much of it;
+and before I can be sure you mean it AS I DO, you must affect it JUST
+AS I SHOULD if I were in your place. Then I, your critic, will gladly
+believe that we are thinking, not only of the same reality, but that we
+are thinking it ALIKE, and thinking of much of its extent.
+
+Without the practical effects of our neighbor's feelings on our own
+world, we should never suspect the existence of our neighbor's feelings
+at all, and of course should never find ourselves playing the critic as
+we do in this article. The constitution of nature is very peculiar. In
+the world of each of us are certain objects called human bodies, which
+move about and act on all the other objects there, and the occasions of
+their action are in the main what the occasions of our action would be,
+were they our bodies. They use words and gestures, which, if we used
+them, would have thoughts behind them,--no mere thoughts uberhaupt,
+however, but strictly determinate thoughts. I think you have the notion
+of fire in general, because I see you act towards this fire in my room
+just as I act towards it,--poke it and present your person towards it,
+and so forth. But that binds me to believe that if you feel 'fire'
+at all, THIS is the fire you feel. As a matter of fact, whenever we
+constitute ourselves into psychological critics, it is not by dint of
+discovering which reality a feeling 'resembles' that we find out which
+reality it means. We become first aware of which one it means, and then
+we suppose that to be the one it resembles. We see each other looking
+at the same objects, pointing to them and turning them over in various
+ways, and thereupon we hope and trust that all of our several feelings
+resemble the reality and each other. But this is a thing of which we
+are never theoretically sure. Still, it would practically be a case of
+grubelsucht, if a ruffian were assaulting and drubbing my body, to spend
+much time in subtle speculation either as to whether his vision of my
+body resembled mine, or as to whether the body he really MEANT to insult
+were not some body in his mind's eye, altogether other from my own. The
+practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away. If what
+he have in mind be not MY body, why call we it a body at all? His mind
+is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence we trace the things
+that happen. The inference is quite void if the term, once inferred, be
+separated from its connection with the body that made me infer it,
+and connected with another that is not mine at all. No matter for the
+metaphysical puzzle of how our two minds, the ruffian's and mine, can
+mean the same body. Men who see each other's bodies sharing the same
+space, treading the same earth, splashing the same water, making the
+same air resonant, and pursuing the same game and eating out of the
+same dish, will never practically believe in a pluralism of solipsistic
+worlds.
+
+Where, however, the actions of one mind seem to take no effect in the
+world of the other, the case is different. This is what happens in
+poetry and fiction. Every one knows Ivanhoe, for example; but so long as
+we stick to the story pure and simple without regard to the facts of its
+production, few would hesitate to admit that there are as many different
+Ivanhoes as there are different minds cognizant of the story. [Footnote:
+That is, there is no REAL 'Ivanhoe,' not even the one in Sir Walter
+Scott's mind as he was writing the story. That one is only the FIRST
+one of the Ivanhoe-solipsisms. It is quite true we can make it the real
+Ivanhoe if we like, and then say that the other Ivanhoes know it or do
+not know it, according as they refer to and resemble it or no. This is
+done by bringing in Sir Walter Scott himself as the author of the real
+Ivanhoe, and so making a complex object of both. This object, however,
+is not a story pure and simple. It has dynamic relations with the world
+common to the experience of all the readers. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe
+got itself printed in volumes which we all can handle, and to any one of
+which we can refer to see which of our versions be the true one, i.e.,
+the original one of Scott himself. We can see the manuscript; in short
+we can get back to the Ivanhoe in Scott's mind by many an avenue and
+channel of this real world of our experience,--a thing we can by no
+means do with either the Ivanhoe or the Rebecca, either the Templar or
+the Isaac of York, of the story taken simply as such, and detached from
+the conditions of its production. Everywhere, then, we have the same
+test: can we pass continuously from two objects in two minds to a third
+object which seems to be in BOTH minds, because each mind feels every
+modification imprinted on it by the other? If so, the first two objects
+named are derivatives, to say the least, from the same third object, and
+may be held, if they resemble each other, to refer to one and the same
+reality.] The fact that all these Ivanhoes RESEMBLE each other does
+not prove the contrary. But if an alteration invented by one man in his
+version were to reverberate immediately through all the other versions,
+and produce changes therein, we should then easily agree that all
+these thinkers were thinking the SAME Ivanhoe, and that, fiction or no
+fiction, it formed a little world common to them all.
+
+Having reached this point, we may take up our thesis and improve it
+again. Still calling the reality by the name of q and letting the
+critic's feeling vouch for it, we can say that any other feeling will
+be held cognizant of q, provided it both resemble q, and refer to q,
+as shown by its either modifying q directly, or modifying some other
+reality, p or r, which the critic knows to be continuous with q. Or more
+shortly, thus: THE FEELING OF q KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT RESEMBLES,
+AND EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON. If it resemble without
+operating, it is a dream; if it operate without resembling, it is an
+error. [Footnote: Among such errors are those cases in which our feeling
+operates on a reality which it does partially resemble, and yet does not
+intend: as for instance, when I take up your umbrella, meaning to take
+my own. I cannot be said here either to know your umbrella, or my own,
+which latter my feeling more completely resembles. I am mistaking them
+both, misrepresenting their context, etc.
+
+We have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily one mind,
+and the feeling criticised another. But the criticised feeling and its
+critic may be earlier and later feelings of the same mind, and here it
+might seem that we could dispense with the notion of operating, to prove
+that critic and criticised are referring to and meaning to represent
+the SAME. We think we see our past feelings directly, and know what they
+refer to without appeal. At the worst, we can always fix the intention
+of our present feeling and MAKE it refer to the same reality to
+which any one of our past feelings may have referred. So we need no
+'operating' here, to make sure that the feeling and its critic mean the
+same real q. Well, all the better if this is so! We have covered the
+more complex and difficult case in our text, and we may let this easier
+one go. The main thing at present is to stick to practical psychology,
+and ignore metaphysical difficulties.
+
+One more remark. Our formula contains, it will be observed, nothing to
+correspond to the great principle of cognition laid down by Professor
+Ferrier in his Institutes of Metaphysic and apparently adopted by all
+the followers of Fichte, the principle, namely, that for knowledge to
+be constituted there must be knowledge of the knowing mind along with
+whatever else is known: not q, as we have supposed, but q PLUS MYSELF,
+must be the least I can know. It is certain that the common sense
+of mankind never dreams of using any such principle when it tries to
+discriminate between conscious states that are knowledge and conscious
+states that are not. So that Ferrier's principle, if it have any
+relevancy at all, must have relevancy to the metaphysical possibility
+of consciousness at large, and not to the practically recognized
+constitution of cognitive consciousness. We may therefore pass it by
+without further notice here.] It is to be feared that the reader may
+consider this formula rather insignificant and obvious, and hardly worth
+the labor of so many pages, especially when he considers that the only
+cases to which it applies are percepts, and that the whole field of
+symbolic or conceptual thinking seems to elude its grasp. Where the
+reality is either a material thing or act, or a state of the critic's
+consciousness, I may both mirror it in my mind and operate upon it--in
+the latter case indirectly, of course--as soon as I perceive it. But
+there are many cognitions, universally allowed to be such, which neither
+mirror nor operate on their realities.
+
+In the whole field of symbolic thought we are universally held both
+to intend, to speak of, and to reach conclusions about--to know
+in short--particular realities, without having in our subjective
+consciousness any mind-stuff that resembles them even in a remote
+degree. We are instructed about them by language which awakens no
+consciousness beyond its sound; and we know WHICH realities they are by
+the faintest and most fragmentary glimpse of some remote context they
+may have and by no direct imagination of themselves. As minds may differ
+here, let me speak in the first person. I am sure that my own current
+thinking has WORDS for its almost exclusive subjective material, words
+which are made intelligible by being referred to some reality that lies
+beyond the horizon of direct consciousness, and of which I am only aware
+as of a terminal MORE existing in a certain direction, to which the
+words might lead but do not lead yet. The SUBJECT, or TOPIC, of the
+words is usually something towards which I mentally seem to pitch them
+in a backward way, almost as I might jerk my thumb over my shoulder to
+point at something, without looking round, if I were only entirely sure
+that it was there. The UPSHOT, or CONCLUSION, of the words is something
+towards which I seem to incline my head forwards, as if giving assent to
+its existence, tho all my mind's eye catches sight of may be some tatter
+of an image connected with it, which tatter, however, if only endued
+with the feeling of familiarity and reality, makes me feel that the
+whole to which it belongs is rational and real, and fit to be let pass.
+
+Here then is cognitive consciousness on a large scale, and yet what
+it knows, it hardly resembles in the least degree. The formula last laid
+down for our thesis must therefore be made more complete. We may
+now express it thus: A PERCEPT KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT DIRECTLY OR
+INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON AND RESEMBLES; ACONCEPTUAL FEELING, OR THOUGHT
+KNOWS A REALITY, WHENEVER IT ACTUALLY OR POTENTIALLY TERMINATES IN A
+PERCEPT THAT OPERATES ON, OR RESEMBLES THAT REALITY, OR IS OTHERWISE
+CONNECTED WITH IT OR WITH ITS CONTEXT. The latter percept may be either
+sensation or sensorial idea; and when I say the thought must TERMINATE
+in such a percept, I mean that it must ultimately be capable of leading
+up thereto,--by the way of practical [missing section] is an incomplete
+'thought about' that reality, that reality is its 'topic,' etc.
+experience, if the terminal feeling be a sensation; by the way of
+logical or habitual suggestion, if it be only an image in the mind.
+
+Let an illustration make this plainer. I open the first book I take up,
+and read the first sentence that meets my eye: 'Newton saw the handiwork
+of God in the heavens as plainly as Paley in the animal kingdom.' I
+immediately look back and try to analyze the subjective state in which I
+rapidly apprehended this sentence as I read it. In the first place there
+was an obvious feeling that the sentence was intelligible and rational
+and related to the world of realities. There was also a sense of
+agreement or harmony between 'Newton,' 'Paley,' and 'God.' There was no
+apparent image connected with the words 'heavens,' or 'handiwork,' or
+'God'; they were words merely. With 'animal kingdom' I think there was
+the faintest consciousness (it may possibly have been an image of the
+steps) of the Museum of Zoology in the town of Cambridge where I write.
+With 'Paley' there was an equally faint consciousness of a small
+dark leather book; and with 'Newton' a pretty distinct vision of the
+right-hand lower corner of curling periwig. This is all the mind-stuff I
+can discover in my first consciousness of the meaning of this sentence,
+and I am afraid that even not all of this would have been present had I
+come upon the sentence in a genuine reading of the book, and not picked
+it out for an experiment. And yet my consciousness was truly cognitive.
+The sentence is 'about realities' which my psychological critic--for we
+must not forget him--acknowledges to be such, even as he acknowledges
+my distinct feeling that they ARE realities, and my acquiescence in the
+general rightness of what I read of them, to be true knowledge on my
+part.
+
+Now what justifies my critic in being as lenient as this? This
+singularly inadequate consciousness of mine, made up of symbols that
+neither resemble nor affect the realities they stand for,--how can he be
+sure it is cognizant of the very realities he has himself in mind?
+
+He is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such inadequate
+and symbolic thoughts, by developing themselves, terminate in percepts
+that practically modified and presumably resembled his own. By
+'developing' themselves is meant obeying their tendencies, following up
+the suggestions nascently present in them, working in the direction in
+which they seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, making distinct the
+halo, unravelling the fringe, which is part of their composition, and in
+the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content
+seems consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley
+direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing the
+passages about the animal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I may
+satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for him,
+by showing him IN CONCRETO the very animals and their arrangements, of
+which the pages treat. I may get Newton's works and portraits; or if
+I follow the line of suggestion of the wig, I may smother my critic in
+seventeenth-century matters pertaining to Newton's environment, to show
+that the word 'Newton' has the same LOCUS and relations in both our
+minds. Finally I may, by act and word, persuade him that what I mean by
+God and the heavens and the analogy of the handiworks, is just what he
+means also.
+
+My demonstration in the last resort is to his SENSES. My thought makes
+me act on his senses much as he might himself act on them, were he
+pursuing the consequences of a perception of his own. Practically
+then MY thought terminates in HIS realities. He willingly supposes it,
+therefore, to be OF them, and inwardly to RESEMBLE what his own thought
+would be, were it of the same symbolic sort as mine. And the pivot and
+fulcrum and support of his mental persuasion, is the sensible operation
+which my thought leads me, or may lead, to effect--the bringing of
+Paley's book, of Newton's portrait, etc., before his very eyes.
+
+In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about
+and talk about the same world, because WE BELIEVE OUR PERCEPTS ARE
+POSSESSED BY US IN COMMON. And we believe this because the percepts
+of each one of us seem to be changed in consequence of changes in the
+percepts of someone else. What I am for you is in the first instance a
+percept of your own. Unexpectedly, however, I open and show you a book,
+uttering certain sounds the while. These acts are also your percepts,
+but they so resemble acts of yours with feelings prompting them, that
+you cannot doubt I have the feelings too, or that the book is one
+book felt in both our worlds. That it is felt in the same way, that my
+feelings of it resemble yours, is something of which we never can be
+sure, but which we assume as the simplest hypothesis that meets
+the case. As a matter of fact, we never ARE sure of it, and, as
+ERKENNTNISSTHEORETIKER, we can only say that of feelings that should NOT
+resemble each other, both could not know the same thing at the same
+time in the same way. [Footnote: Though both might terminate in the same
+thing and be incomplete thoughts 'about' it.] If each holds to its own
+percept as the reality, it is bound to say of the other percept, that,
+though it may INTEND that reality, and prove this by working change upon
+it, yet, if it do not resemble it, it is all false and wrong. [Footnote:
+The difference between Idealism and Realism is immaterial here. What
+is said in the text is consistent with either theory. A law by which my
+percept shall change yours directly is no more mysterious than a law
+by which it shall first change a physical reality, and then the reality
+change yours. In either case you and I seem knit into a continuous
+world, and not to form a pair of solipsisms.]
+
+If this be so of percepts, how much more so of higher modes of thought!
+Even in the sphere of sensation individuals are probably different
+enough. Comparative study of the simplest conceptual elements seems to
+show a wider divergence still. And when it comes to general theories
+and emotional attitudes towards life, it is indeed time to say with
+Thackeray, 'My friend, two different universes walk about under your hat
+and under mine.'
+
+What can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a chaos
+of mutually repellent solipsisms? Through what can our several minds
+commune? Through nothing but the mutual resemblance of those of our
+perceptual feelings which have this power of modifying one another,
+WHICH ARE MERE DUMB KNOWLEDGES-OF-ACQUAINTANCE, and which must also
+resemble their realities or not know them aright at all. In such pieces
+of knowledge-of-acquaintance all our knowledge-about must end, and
+carry a sense of this possible termination as part of its content.
+These percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere
+matters-of-acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know,
+and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution
+of one of them for another, and the reduction of the substitute to the
+status of a conceptual sign. Contemned though they be by some thinkers,
+these sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock,
+the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem
+of the mind. To find such sensational termini should be our aim with all
+our higher thought. They end discussion; they destroy the false conceit
+of knowledge; and without them we are all at sea with each other's
+meaning. If two men act alike on a percept, they believe themselves to
+feel alike about it; if not, they may suspect they know it in differing
+ways. We can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to
+bring the matter to this test. [Footnote: 'There is no distinction of
+meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of
+practice.... It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the [highest]
+grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects,
+which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object
+of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the
+whole of our conception of the object.' Charles S. Peirce: 'How to make
+our Ideas clear,' in Popular Science Monthly, New York, January, 1878,
+p. 293.] This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting
+with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind.
+'Scientific' theories, on the other hand, always terminate in definite
+percepts. You can deduce a possible sensation from your theory and,
+taking me into your laboratory, prove that your theory is true of my
+world by giving me the sensation then and there. Beautiful is the
+flight of conceptual reason through the upper air of truth. No wonder
+philosophers are dazzled by it still, and no wonder they look with some
+disdain at the low earth of feeling from which the goddess launched
+herself aloft. But woe to her if she return not home to its
+acquaintance; Nirgends haften dann die unsicheren Sohlen--every crazy
+wind will take her, and, like a fire-balloon at night, she will go out
+among the stars.
+
+NOTE.--The reader will easily see how much of the account of the
+truth-function developed later in Pragmatism was already explicit in
+this earlier article, and how much came to be defined later. In this
+earlier article we find distinctly asserted:--
+
+1. The reality, external to the true idea;
+
+2. The critic, reader, or epistemologist, with his own belief, as
+warrant for this reality's existence;
+
+3. The experienceable environment, as the vehicle or medium connecting
+knower with known, and yielding the cognitive RELATION;
+
+4. The notion of POINTING, through this medium, to the reality, as one
+condition of our being said to know it;
+
+5. That of RESEMBLING it, and eventually AFFECTING it, as determining
+the pointing to IT and not to something else.
+
+6. The elimination of the 'epistemological gulf,' so that the whole
+truth-relation falls inside of the continuities of concrete experience,
+and is constituted of particular processes, varying with every object
+and subject, and susceptible of being described in detail.
+
+The defects in this earlier account are:--
+
+1. The possibly undue prominence given to resembling, which altho a
+fundamental function in knowing truly, is so often dispensed with;
+
+2. The undue emphasis laid upon operating on the object itself, which in
+many cases is indeed decisive of that being what we refer to, but which
+is often lacking, or replaced by operations on other things related to
+the object.
+
+3. The imperfect development of the generalized notion of the
+WORKABILITY of the feeling or idea as equivalent to that SATISFACTORY
+ADAPTATION to the particular reality, which constitutes the truth of
+the idea. It is this more generalized notion, as covering all such
+specifications as pointing, fitting, operating or resembling, that
+distinguishes the developed view of Dewey, Schiller, and myself.
+
+4. The treatment, [earlier], of percepts as the only realm of reality. I
+now treat concepts as a co-ordinate realm.
+
+The next paper represents a somewhat broader grasp of the topic on the
+writer's part.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE TIGERS IN INDIA [Footnote: Extracts from a presidential address
+before the American Psychological Association, published in the
+Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895).]
+
+THERE are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or
+intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Altho
+such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively,
+most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or
+the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or
+symbolically.
+
+Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual
+knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit
+here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the tigers?
+What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is
+KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth Hodgson's inelegant but valuable form of
+words?
+
+Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having
+them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought;
+or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to
+them. A great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in
+absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense
+grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called
+INTENTIONAL EXISTENCE of the tigers in our mind. At the very least,
+people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally
+POINTING towards them as we sit here.
+
+But now what do we mean by POINTING, in such a case as this? What is the
+pointing known-as, here?
+
+To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer--one
+that traverses the pre-possessions not only of common sense and
+scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers
+whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of
+our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of
+mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and
+that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real
+context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known
+as our rejection of a jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as
+our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability
+to utter all sorts of propositions which don't contradict other
+propositions that are true of the real tigers. It is even known, if we
+take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate
+in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India
+for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of
+the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no
+self-transcendency in our mental images TAKEN BY THEMSELVES. They are
+one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the
+tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, IF YOU
+ONCE GRANT A CONNECTING WORLD TO BE THERE. In short, the ideas and the
+tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume's language,
+as any two things can be; and pointing means here an operation as
+external and adventitious as any that nature yields.[Footnote: A
+stone in one field may 'fit,' we say, a hole in another field. But the
+relation of 'fitting,' so long as no one carries the stone to the hole
+and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such an act MAY
+happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now. It is
+only an anticipatory name for a further associative and terminative
+process that MAY occur.]
+
+I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there
+is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or
+mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. TO KNOW AN OBJECT IS
+HERE TO LEAD TO IT THROUGH A CONTEXT WHICH THE WORLD SUPPLIES. All this
+was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at our
+meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime
+wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledgment. [Footnote: See Dr.
+Miller's articles on Truth and Error, and on Content and Function, in
+the Philosophical Review, July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.]
+
+Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance
+with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes.
+The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the
+same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and there is no context of
+intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought
+and thing. There is no 'presence in absence' here, and no 'pointing,'
+but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is
+clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when
+the tigers were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states
+of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief always
+does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness
+of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of
+being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get
+better informed, is quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as
+it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we mean
+by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way
+in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to
+terminate by having led us to his lair?
+
+This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in the
+fewest words. And let me first say this: So far as the white paper or
+other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into
+some one else's experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to know it
+there as well as here; so far, again, as it is considered to be a mere
+mask for hidden molecules that other now impossible experiences of our
+own might some day lay bare to view; so far it is a case of tigers in
+India again--the things known being absent experiences, the knowing can
+only consist in passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary
+context that the world supplies. But if our own private vision of the
+paper be considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it
+constituted by itself the universe (and it might perfectly well do so,
+for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the paper seen and
+the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which,
+properly named, is THE DATUM, THE PHENOMENON, OR THE EXPERIENCE. The
+paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper
+and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience,
+when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections
+are traced in different directions. [Footnote: What is meant by this is
+that 'the experience' can be referred to either of two great associative
+systems, that of the experiencer's mental history, or that of the
+experienced facts of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part,
+and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection.
+One might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the
+same object, O, appears also in the mental history of different persons,
+represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases to be the
+private property of one experience, and becomes, so to speak, a shared
+or public thing. We can track its outer history in this way, and
+represent it by the horizontal line. (It is also known representatively
+at other points of the vertical lines, or intuitively there again,
+so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and
+wandering, but I make it straight for simplicity's sake.)] In any case,
+however, it is the same stuff figures in all the sets of lines.
+
+TO KNOW IMMEDIATELY, THEN, OR INTUITIVELY, IS FOR MENTAL CONTENT AND
+OBJECT TO BE IDENTICAL. This is a very different definition from that
+which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither definition
+involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in
+absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of knowledge, both
+of philosophers and of common men. [Footnote: The reader will observe
+that the text is written from the point of view of NAIF realism or
+common sense, and avoids raising the idealistic controversy.]
+
+
+
+III
+
+HUMANISM AND TRUTH [Footnote: Reprinted, with slight verbal revision,
+from Mind, vol. xiii, N. S., p. 457 (October, 1904). A couple of
+interpolations from another article in Mind, 'Humanism and truth once
+more,' in vol. xiv, have been made.]
+
+RECEIVING from the Editor of Mind an advance proof of Mr. Bradley's
+article on 'Truth and Practice,' I understand this as a hint to me to
+join in the controversy over 'Pragmatism' which seems to have seriously
+begun. As my name has been coupled with the movement, I deem it wise to
+take the hint, the more so as in some quarters greater credit has been
+given me than I deserve, and probably undeserved discredit in other
+quarters falls also to my lot.
+
+First, as to the word 'pragmatism.' I myself have only used the term
+to indicate a method of carrying on abstract discussion. The serious
+meaning of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete difference
+to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all
+debated conceptions to that' pragmatic' test, and you will escape
+vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which of two
+statements be true, then they are really one statement in two verbal
+forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement
+be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning. In neither
+case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may save our breath, and
+pass to more important things.
+
+All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should HAVE
+practical [Footnote: 'Practical' in the sense of PARTICULAR, of course,
+not in the sense that the consequences may not be MENTAL as well as
+physical.] consequences. In England the word has been used more broadly
+still, to cover the notion that the truth of any statement CONSISTS in
+the consequences, and particularly in their being good consequences.
+Here we get beyond affairs of method altogether; and since my pragmatism
+and this wider pragmatism are so different, and both are important
+enough to have different names, I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal
+to call the wider pragmatism by the name of 'humanism' is excellent and
+ought to be adopted. The narrower pragmatism may still be spoken of as
+the 'pragmatic method.'
+
+I have read in the past six months many hostile reviews of Schiller's
+and Dewey's publications; but with the exception of Mr. Bradley's
+elaborate indictment, they are out of reach where I write, and I have
+largely forgotten them. I think that a free discussion of the subject
+on my part would in any case be more useful than a polemic attempt at
+rebutting these criticisms in detail. Mr. Bradley in particular can be
+taken care of by Mr. Schiller. He repeatedly confesses himself unable
+to comprehend Schiller's views, he evidently has not sought to do so
+sympathetically, and I deeply regret to say that his laborious article
+throws, for my mind, absolutely no useful light upon the subject.
+It seems to me on the whole an IGNORATIO ELENCHI, and I feel free to
+disregard it altogether.
+
+The subject is unquestionably difficult. Messrs. Dewey's and Schiller's
+thought is eminently an induction, a generalization working itself free
+from all sorts of entangling particulars. If true, it involves much
+restatement of traditional notions. This is a kind of intellectual
+product that never attains a classic form of expression when first
+promulgated. The critic ought therefore not to be too sharp and
+logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but should weigh it as a whole,
+and especially weigh it against its possible alternatives. One should
+also try to apply it first to one instance, and then to another to see
+how it will work. It seems to me that it is emphatically not a case
+for instant execution, by conviction of intrinsic absurdity or of
+self-contradiction, or by caricature of what it would look like if
+reduced to skeleton shape. Humanism is in fact much more like one of
+those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight, as it
+were, borne upon tides 'too deep for sound or foam,' that survive all
+the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin
+to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive
+stab.
+
+Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic
+to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to
+evolutionary ways of understanding life--changes of which we all have
+been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method
+of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view
+involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle.
+This is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its
+bed. Round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there all the same.'
+In reading some of our opponents, I am not a little reminded of those
+catholic writers who refute darwinism by telling us that higher species
+cannot come from lower because minus nequit gignere plus, or that the
+notion of transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to
+their own destruction, and that would violate the principle that every
+reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view is too
+myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive argument. Wide
+generalizations in science always meet with these summary refutations in
+their early days; but they outlive them, and the refutations then sound
+oddly antiquated and scholastic. I cannot help suspecting that the
+humanistic theory is going through this kind of would-be refutation at
+present.
+
+The one condition of understanding humanism is to become
+inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines
+of least, resistance 'on the whole.' 'In other words,' an opponent might
+say, 'resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.' 'Even so,' I make
+reply,--'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For humanism,
+conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's term),
+has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals
+of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so
+different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of
+humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by
+a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in
+any given case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in
+sight, may to the end be a sum of PLUSES and MINUSES, concerning which
+we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements
+a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be
+approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic
+hopes, when one takes up this inductive view of the conditions of
+belief.
+
+As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its being
+to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought about in the
+older notions of scientific truth. 'God geometrizes,' it used to be
+said; and it was believed that Euclid's elements literally reproduced
+his geometrizing. There is an eternal and unchangeable 'reason'; and its
+voice was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent. So also
+of the 'laws of nature,' physical and chemical, so of natural history
+classifications--all were supposed to be exact and exclusive duplicates
+of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things, to which the
+spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate. The
+anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university
+professor, it was thought. Up to about 1850 almost every one believed
+that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite
+code of non-human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of
+theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one
+of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another.
+There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and
+chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for
+so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the
+truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript
+has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws now treated as so much
+'conceptual shorthand,' true so far as they are useful but no farther.
+Our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of
+approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead of rigor.
+'Energetics,' measuring the bare face of sensible phenomena so as to
+describe in a single formula all their changes of 'level,' is the last
+word of this scientific humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough
+outstanding as to the reason for so curious a congruence between the
+world and the mind, but which at any rate makes our whole notion of
+scientific truth more flexible and genial than it used to be.
+
+It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either in mathematics,
+logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be literally re-editing
+processes of nature or thoughts of God. The main forms of our thinking,
+the separation of subjects from predicates, the negative, hypothetic
+and disjunctive judgments, are purely human habits. The ether, as Lord
+Salisbury said, is only a noun for the verb to undulate; and many of our
+theological ideas are admitted, even by those who call them 'true,' to
+be humanistic in like degree.
+
+I fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what
+originally gave the impulse to Messrs. Dewey's and Schiller's views.
+The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of
+our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal
+'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its
+'elegance' or its congruity with our residual beliefs. Yielding to these
+suspicions, and generalizing, we fall into something like the humanistic
+state of mind. Truth we conceive to mean everywhere, not duplication,
+but addition; not the constructing of inner copies of already complete
+realities, but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring
+about a clearer result. Obviously this state of mind is at first full of
+vagueness and ambiguity. 'Collaborating' is a vague term; it must at
+any rate cover conceptions and logical arrangements. 'Clearer' is vaguer
+still. Truth must bring clear thoughts, as well as clear the way to
+action. 'Reality' is the vaguest term of all. The only way to test such
+a programme at all is to apply it to the various types of truth, in the
+hope of reaching an account that shall be more precise. Any hypothesis
+that forces such a review upon one has one great merit, even if in
+the end it prove invalid: it gets us better acquainted with the total
+subject. To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself
+eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset by
+abstract accusations of self-contradiction. I think therefore that
+a decided effort at sympathetic mental play with humanism is the
+provisional attitude to be recommended to the reader.
+
+When I find myself playing sympathetically with humanism, something like
+what follows is what I end by conceiving it to mean.
+
+Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to
+digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which
+we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating, rejecting, or
+rearranging in different degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas are
+recent acquisitions of our own, but most of them are common-sense
+traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-sense tradition,
+of all those which we now live by, that was not in the first instance
+a genuine discovery, an inductive generalization like those more recent
+ones of the atom, of inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness
+to survive The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous
+receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and
+mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception
+of classes with sub classes within them; the separation of fortuitous
+from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite
+conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempt
+to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more
+shareable and manageable shape. They proved of such sovereign use as
+denkmittel that they are now a part of the very structure of our mind.
+We cannot play fast and loose with them. No experience can upset them.
+On the contrary, they apperceive every experience and assign it to its
+place.
+
+To what effect? That we may the better foresee the course of our
+experiences, communicate with one another, and steer our lives by rule.
+Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer, more inclusive mental view.
+
+The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one Time
+and one Space, is probably the concept of permanently existing things.
+When a rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby, he does not look to
+see where it has gone. Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until
+he finds a better belief. That our perceptions mean BEINGS, rattles
+that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not, becomes an
+interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that, once employed,
+it never gets forgotten. It applies with equal felicity to things and
+persons, to the objective and to the ejective realm. However a Berkeley,
+a Mill, or a Cornelius may CRITICISE it, it WORKS; and in practical
+life we never think of 'going back' upon it, or reading our incoming
+experiences in any other terms. We may, indeed, speculatively imagine
+a state of 'pure' experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects
+behind its flux had been framed; and we can play with the idea that some
+primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis. But we
+cannot positively imagine today what the different hypothesis could have
+been, for the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the
+foundations of our life. Our thoughts must still employ it if they are
+to possess reasonableness and truth.
+
+This notion of a FIRST in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience
+which sets us questions, of a SECOND in the way of fundamental
+categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and
+practically irreversible, which define the general frame within which
+answers must fall, and of a THIRD which gives the detail of the answers
+in the shapes most congruous with all our present needs, is, as I take
+it, the essence of the humanistic conception. It represents experience
+in its pristine purity to be now so enveloped in predicates historically
+worked out that we can think of it as little more than an OTHER, of
+a THAT, which the mind, in Mr. Bradley's phrase, 'encounters,' and to
+whose stimulating presence we respond by ways of thinking which we
+call 'true' in proportion as they facilitate our mental or physical
+activities and bring us outer power and inner peace. But whether the
+Other, the universal THAT, has itself any definite inner structure, or
+whether, if it have any, the structure resembles any of our predicated
+WHATS, this is a question which humanism leaves untouched. For us, at
+any rate, it insists, reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual
+inventions, and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings
+with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while
+altering as little as possible the old.
+
+It is hard to see why either Mr. Bradley's own logic or his
+metaphysics should oblige him to quarrel with this conception. He might
+consistently adopt it verbatim et literatim, if he would, and simply
+throw his peculiar absolute round it, following in this the good example
+of Professor Royce. Bergson in France, and his disciples, Wilbois the
+physicist and Leroy, are thoroughgoing humanists in the sense defined.
+Professor Milhaud also appears to be one; and the great Poincare misses
+it by only the breadth of a hair. In Germany the name of Simmel offers
+itself as that of a humanist of the most radical sort. Mach and his
+school, and Hertz and Ostwald must be classed as humanists. The view is
+in the atmosphere and must be patiently discussed.
+
+The best way to discuss it would be to see what the alternative
+might be. What is it indeed? Its critics make no explicit statement,
+Professor Royce being the only one so far who has formulated anything
+definite. The first service of humanism to philosophy accordingly seems
+to be that it will probably oblige those who dislike it to search their
+own hearts and heads. It will force analysis to the front and make
+it the order of the day. At present the lazy tradition that truth is
+adaequatio intellectus et rei seems all there is to contradict it with.
+Mr. Bradley's only suggestion is that true thought 'must correspond to
+a determinate being which it cannot be said to make,' and obviously that
+sheds no new light. What is the meaning of the word to 'correspond'?
+Where is the 'being'? What sort of things are 'determinations,' and what
+is meant in this particular case by 'not to make'?
+
+Humanism proceeds immediately to refine upon the looseness of these
+epithets. We correspond in SOME way with anything with which we enter
+into any relations at all. If it be a thing, we may produce an exact
+copy of it, or we may simply feel it as an existent in a certain place.
+If it be a demand, we may obey it without knowing anything more about it
+than its push. If it be a proposition, we may agree by not contradicting
+it, by letting it pass. If it be a relation between things, we may act
+on the first thing so as to bring ourselves out where the second will
+be. If it be something inaccessible, we may substitute a hypothetical
+object for it, which, having the same consequences, will cipher out for
+us real results. In a general way we may simply ADD OUR THOUGHT TO IT;
+and if it SUFFERS THE ADDITION, and the whole situation harmoniously
+prolongs and enriches itself, the thought will pass for true.
+
+As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to, although they
+may be outside of the present thought as well as in it, humanism sees
+no ground for saying they are outside of finite experience itself.
+Pragmatically, their reality means that we submit to them, take account
+of them, whether we like to or not, but this we must perpetually do with
+experiences other than our own. The whole system of what the present
+experience must correspond to 'adequately' may be continuous with the
+present experience itself. Reality, so taken as experience other than
+the present, might be either the legacy of past experience or the
+content of experience to come. Its determinations for US are in any
+case the adjectives which our acts of judging fit to it, and those are
+essentially humanistic things.
+
+To say that our thought does not 'make' this reality means pragmatically
+that if our own particular thought were annihilated the reality would
+still be there in some shape, though possibly it might be a shape
+that would lack something that our thought supplies. That reality is
+'independent' means that there is something in every experience that
+escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces
+our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two
+terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency,
+within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless,
+and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.
+That this drift of experience itself is in the last resort due to
+something independent of all possible experience may or may not be true.
+There may or may not be an extra-experiential 'ding an sich' that keeps
+the ball rolling, or an 'absolute' that lies eternally behind all the
+successive determinations which human thought has made. But within our
+experience ITSELF, at any rate, humanism says, some determinations show
+themselves as being independent of others; some questions, if we ever
+ask them, can only be answered in one way; some beings, if we ever
+suppose them, must be supposed to have existed previously to the
+supposing; some relations, if they exist ever, must exist as long as
+their terms exist.
+
+Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation of less fixed
+parts of experience (predicates) to other relatively more fixed
+parts (subjects); and we are not required to seek it in a relation of
+experience as such to anything beyond itself. We can stay at home, for
+our behavior as exponents is hemmed in on every side. The forces both of
+advance and of resistance are exerted by our own objects, and the notion
+of truth as something opposed to waywardness or license inevitably grows
+up SOLIPSISTICALLY inside of every human life.
+
+So obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic
+authors 'makes me tired.' 'How can a deweyite discriminate sincerity
+from bluff?' was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where I
+reported on Dewey's Studies. 'How can the mere [Footnote: I know of no
+'mere' pragmatist, if MERENESS here means, as it seems to, the denial of
+all concreteness to the pragmatist's THOUGHT.] pragmatist feel any duty
+to think truly?' is the objection urged by Professor Royce. Mr. Bradley
+in turn says that if a humanist understands his own doctrine, 'he must
+hold any idea, however mad, to be the truth, if any one will have it
+so.' And Professor Taylor describes pragmatism as believing anything one
+pleases and calling it truth.
+
+Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men's thinking
+actually goes on seems to me most surprising. These critics appear to
+suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft of our experience
+must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even THO there were
+compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be no pole for them
+to point to. There must be absolute sailing-directions, they insist,
+decreed from outside, and an independent chart of the voyage added to
+the 'mere' voyage itself, if we are ever to make a port. But is it not
+obvious that even THO there be such absolute sailing-directions in the
+shape of pre-human standards of truth that we OUGHT to follow, the
+only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human
+equipment. The 'ought' would be a brutum fulmen unless there were a felt
+grain inside of our experience that conspired. As a matter of fact the
+DEVOUTEST believers in absolute standards must admit that men fail to
+obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite of the eternal prohibitions,
+and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is no warrant
+against unlimited error in rebus being incurred. The only REAL guarantee
+we have against licentious thinking is the CIRCUMPRESSURE of experience
+itself, which gets us sick of concrete errors, whether there be a
+trans-empirical reality or not. How does the partisan of absolute
+reality know what this orders him to think? He cannot get direct sight
+of the absolute; and he has no means of guessing what it wants of him
+except by following the humanistic clues. The only truth that he
+himself will ever practically ACCEPT will be that to which his finite
+experiences lead him of themselves. The state of mind which shudders
+at the idea of a lot of experiences left to themselves, and that
+augurs protection from the sheer name of an absolute, as if, however
+inoperative, that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is
+like the mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a
+social tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to puff, and
+say 'Parliament or Congress ought to make a law against it,' as if an
+impotent decree would give relief.
+
+All the SANCTIONS of a law of truth lie in the very texture of
+experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth FOR US will
+always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most
+profitably combine.
+
+And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist will always
+have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than will your
+believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the standard
+rigid. If by this latter believer he means a man who pretends to know
+the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist will doubtless prove
+more flexible; but no more flexible than the absolutist himself if the
+latter follows (as fortunately our present-day absolutists do follow)
+empirical methods of inquiry in concrete affairs. To consider hypotheses
+is surely always better than to DOGMATISE ins blaue hinein.
+
+Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been used
+to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as he does, that truth lies in
+rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most propitious reaction,
+he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a learned colleague say,
+from trying to convert opponents, for does not their view, being THEIR
+most propitious momentary reaction, already fill the bill? Only the
+believer in the ante-rem brand of truth can on this theory seek to
+make converts without self-stultification. But can there be
+self-stultification in urging any account whatever of truth? Can
+the definition ever contradict the deed? 'Truth is what I feel like
+saying'--suppose that to be the definition. 'Well, I feel like saying
+that, and I want you to feel like saying it, and shall continue to say
+it until I get you to agree.' Where is there any contradiction? Whatever
+truth may be said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying
+can be held to carry. The TEMPER which a saying may comport is an
+extra-logical matter. It may indeed be hotter in some individual
+absolutist than in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the
+humanist, for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and
+land to make one proselyte, if his nature be enthusiastic enough.
+
+'But how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you
+know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to alter
+during the next minute? How is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth
+possible under such paltry conditions?'
+
+This is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists
+show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of the
+situation. If they would only follow the pragmatic method and ask:
+'What is truth KNOWN-AS? What does its existence stand for in the way of
+concrete goods?'--they would see that the name of it is the inbegriff
+of almost everything that is valuable in our lives. The true is
+the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically
+disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and
+unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is
+inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric,
+of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account.
+Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to
+truth--truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that
+its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all
+little provisional fool's paradises of belief should appear contemptible
+in comparison with its bare pursuit! When absolutists reject humanism
+because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of
+their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in
+comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few
+irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what
+speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject
+our humanism--as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when
+we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like
+systems of philosophy. These contradict the DRAMATIC TEMPERAMENT of
+nature, as our dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so
+far brought us to conceive it. They seem oddly personal and artificial,
+even when not bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree. We turn
+from them to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we
+feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists
+are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and
+cleaner intellectual abodes. [Footnote: I cannot forbear quoting as an
+illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist tempers of
+mind, in a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks on the Dreyfus
+'affaire,' written by one who assuredly had never heard of humanism or
+pragmatism. 'Autant que la Revolution, "l'Affaire" est desormais une de
+nos "origines." Si elle n'a pas fait ouvrir le gouffre, c'est elle du
+moins qui a rendu patent et visible le long travail souterrain qui,
+silencieusement, avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps
+d'aujourd'hui, pour ecarter enfin, d'un coup soudain, la France
+des traditionalistes (poseurs de principes, chercheurs d'unite,
+constructeurs de systemes a priori) el la France eprise du fait positif
+et de libre examen;--la France revolutionnaire et romantique si l'on
+veut, celle qui met tres haut l'individu, qui ne veut pas qu'un juste
+perisse, fut-ce pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la verite dans
+toutes ses parties aussi bien que dans une vue d'ensemble ... Duclaux ne
+pouvait pas concevoir qu'on preferat quelque chose a la verite. Mais il
+voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui, mettant en balance la
+vie d'un homme et la raison d'Etat, lui avouaient de quel poids leger
+ils jugeaient une simple existence individuelle, pour innocente qu'elle
+fut. C'etaient des classiques, des gens a qui l'ensemble seul importe.'
+La Vie de Emile Duclaux, par Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243,
+247-248.]
+
+This is surely enough to show that the humanist does not ignore the
+character of objectivity and independence in truth. Let me turn next to
+what his opponents mean when they say that to be true, our thoughts must
+'correspond.'
+
+The vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the thoughts must COPY
+the reality--cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cognoscentis;
+and philosophy, without having ever fairly sat down to the question,
+seems to have instinctively accepted this idea: propositions are held
+true if they copy the eternal thought; terms are held true if they copy
+extra-mental realities. Implicitly, I think that the copy-theory has
+animated most of the criticisms that have been made on humanism.
+
+A priori, however, it is not self-evident that the sole business of
+our mind with realities should be to copy them. Let my reader suppose
+himself to constitute for a time all the reality there is in the
+universe, and then to receive the announcement that another being is to
+be created who shall know him truly. How will he represent the knowing
+in advance? What will he hope it to be? I doubt extremely whether it
+could ever occur to him to fancy it as a mere copying. Of what use to
+him would an imperfect second edition of himself in the new comer's
+interior be? It would seem pure waste of a propitious opportunity. The
+demand would more probably be for something absolutely new. The reader
+would conceive the knowing humanistically, 'the new comer,' he would
+say, 'must TAKE ACCOUNT OF MY PRESENCE BY REACTING ON IT IN SUCH A WAY
+THAT GOOD WOULD ACCRUE TO US BOTH. If copying be requisite to that end,
+let there be copying; otherwise not.' The essence in any case would not
+be the copying, but the enrichment of the previous world.
+
+I read the other day, in a book of Professor Eucken's, a phrase, 'Die
+erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins,' which seems to be pertinent here.
+Why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate, rather than
+simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read Lotze
+can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the
+secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as 'illusory' because
+they copy nothing in the thing. The notion of a world complete in
+itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing
+to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself a most
+momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and
+insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce
+its far more precious supplement.
+
+'Knowing,' in short, may, for aught we can see beforehand to the
+contrary, be ONLY ONE WAY OF GETTING INTO FRUITFUL RELATIONS WITH
+REALITY whether copying be one of the relations or not.
+
+It is easy to see from what special type of knowing the copy-theory
+arose. In our dealings with natural phenomena the great point is to be
+able to foretell. Foretelling, according to such a writer as Spencer, is
+the whole meaning of intelligence. When Spencer's 'law of intelligence'
+says that inner and outer relations must 'correspond,' it means that the
+distribution of terms in our inner time-scheme and space-scheme must
+be an exact copy of the distribution in real time and space of the real
+terms. In strict theory the mental terms themselves need not answer to
+the real terms in the sense of severally copying them, symbolic mental
+terms being enough, if only the real dates and places be copied. But
+in our ordinary life the mental terms are images and the real ones are
+sensations, and the images so often copy the sensations, that we
+easily take copying of terms as well as of relations to be the natural
+significance of knowing. Meanwhile much, even of this common descriptive
+truth, is couched in verbal symbols. If our symbols FIT the world, in
+the sense of determining our expectations rightly, they may even be the
+better for not copying its terms.
+
+It seems obvious that the pragmatic account of all this routine of
+phenomenal knowledge is accurate. Truth here is a relation, not of our
+ideas to non-human realities, but of conceptual parts of our experience
+to sensational parts. Those thoughts are true which guide us to
+BENEFICIAL INTERACTION with sensible particulars as they occur, whether
+they copy these in advance or not.
+
+From the frequency of copying in the knowledge of phenomenal fact,
+copying has been supposed to be the essence of truth in matters rational
+also. Geometry and logic, it has been supposed, must copy archetypal
+thoughts in the Creator. But in these abstract spheres there is no need
+of assuming archetypes. The mind is free to carve so many figures out of
+space, to make so many numerical collections, to frame so many classes
+and series, and it can analyze and compare so endlessly, that the very
+superabundance of the resulting ideas makes us doubt the 'objective'
+pre-existence of their models. It would be plainly wrong to suppose a
+God whose thought consecrated rectangular but not polar co-ordinates, or
+Jevons's notation but not Boole's. Yet if, on the other hand, we assume
+God to have thought in advance of every POSSIBLE flight of human fancy
+in these directions, his mind becomes too much like a Hindoo idol
+with three heads, eight arms and six breasts, too much made up of
+superfoetation and redundancy for us to wish to copy it, and the whole
+notion of copying tends to evaporate from these sciences. Their objects
+can be better interpreted as being created step by step by men, as fast
+as they successively conceive them.
+
+If now it be asked how, if triangles, squares, square roots, genera,
+and the like, are but improvised human 'artefacts,' their properties
+and relations can be so promptly known to be 'eternal,' the humanistic
+answer is easy. If triangles and genera are of our own production we can
+keep them invariant. We can make them 'timeless' by expressly decreeing
+that on THE THINGS WE MEAN time shall exert no altering effect, that
+they are intentionally and it may be fictitiously abstracted from every
+corrupting real associate and condition. But relations between
+invariant objects will themselves be invariant. Such relations cannot
+be happenings, for by hypothesis nothing shall happen to the objects.
+I have tried to show in the last chapter of my Principles of Psychology
+[Footnote: Vol. ii, pp. 641 ff.] that they can only be relations of
+comparison. No one so far seems to have noticed my suggestion, and I am
+too ignorant of the development of mathematics to feel very confident
+of my own view. But if it were correct it would solve the difficulty
+perfectly. Relations of comparison are matters of direct inspection. As
+soon as mental objects are mentally compared, they are perceived to
+be either like or unlike. But once the same, always the same, once
+different, always different, under these timeless conditions. Which
+is as much as to say that truths concerning these man-made objects are
+necessary and eternal. We can change our conclusions only by changing
+our data first.
+
+The whole fabric of the a priori sciences can thus be treated as a
+man-made product. As Locke long ago pointed out, these sciences have no
+immediate connection with fact. Only IF a fact can be humanized by being
+identified with any of these ideal objects, is what was true of the
+objects now true also of the facts. The truth itself meanwhile was
+originally a copy of nothing; it was only a relation directly perceived
+to obtain between two artificial mental things. [Footnote: Mental things
+which are realities of course within the mental world.]
+
+We may now glance at some special types of knowing, so as to see better
+whether the humanistic account fits. On the mathematical and logical
+types we need not enlarge further, nor need we return at much length to
+the case of our descriptive knowledge of the course of nature. So far
+as this involves anticipation, tho that MAY mean copying, it need, as
+we saw, mean little more than 'getting ready' in advance. But with many
+distant and future objects, our practical relations are to the last
+degree potential and remote. In no sense can we now get ready for the
+arrest of the earth's revolution by the tidal brake, for instance; and
+with the past, tho we suppose ourselves to know it truly, we have no
+practical relations at all. It is obvious that, altho interests strictly
+practical have been the original starting-point of our search for
+true phenomenal descriptions, yet an intrinsic interest in the bare
+describing function has grown up. We wish accounts that shall be true,
+whether they bring collateral profit or not. The primitive function has
+developed its demand for mere exercise. This theoretic curiosity seems
+to be the characteristically human differentia, and humanism recognizes
+its enormous scope. A true idea now means not only one that prepares us
+for an actual perception. It means also one that might prepare us for
+a merely possible perception, or one that, if spoken, would suggest
+possible perceptions to others, or suggest actual perceptions which the
+speaker cannot share. The ensemble of perceptions thus thought of
+as either actual or possible form a system which it is obviously
+advantageous to us to get into a stable and consistent shape; and here
+it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings finds triumphant
+use. Beings acting outside of the thinker explain, not only his actual
+perceptions, past and future, but his possible perceptions and those
+of every one else. Accordingly they gratify our theoretic need in a
+supremely beautiful way. We pass from our immediate actual through
+them into the foreign and the potential, and back again into the future
+actual, accounting for innumerable particulars by a single cause. As
+in those circular panoramas, where a real foreground of dirt, grass,
+bushes, rocks and a broken-down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture
+of sky and earth and of a raging battle, continuing the foreground so
+cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint; so these conceptual
+objects, added to our present perceptual reality, fuse with it into the
+whole universe of our belief. In spite of all berkeleyan criticism, we
+do not doubt that they are really there. Tho our discovery of any one of
+them may only date from now, we unhesitatingly say that it not only
+IS, but WAS there, if, by so saying, the past appears connected more
+consistently with what we feel the present to be. This is historic
+truth. Moses wrote the Pentateuch, we think, because if he didn't, all
+our religious habits will have to be undone. Julius Caesar was real, or
+we can never listen to history again. Trilobites were once alive, or
+all our thought about the strata is at sea. Radium, discovered only
+yesterday, must always have existed, or its analogy with other natural
+elements, which are permanent, fails. In all this, it is but one portion
+of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory
+total state of mind. That state of mind, we say, sees truth, and the
+content of its deliverances we believe.
+
+Of course, if you take the satisfactoriness concretely, as something
+felt by you now, and if, by truth, you mean truth taken abstractly
+and verified in the long run, you cannot make them equate, for it is
+notorious that the temporarily satisfactory is often false. Yet at each
+and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man 'troweth'
+at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself; and
+similarly, abstract truth, truth verified by the long run, and abstract
+satisfactoriness, long-run satisfactoriness, coincide. If, in short, we
+compare concrete with concrete and abstract with abstract, the true
+and the satisfactory do mean the same thing. I suspect that a certain
+muddling of matters hereabouts is what makes the general philosophic
+public so impervious to humanism's claims.
+
+The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of
+change. For the 'trower' at any moment, truth, like the visible area
+round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot calls 'the
+wall of dark seen by small fishes' eyes that pierce a span in the wide
+Ocean,' is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of
+which it is the critic, and which then either suffers alteration or is
+continued unchanged. The critic sees both the first trower's truth and
+his own truth, compares them with each other, and verifies or confutes.
+HIS field of view is the reality independent of that earlier trower's
+thinking with which that thinking ought to correspond. But the critic
+is himself only a trower; and if the whole process of experience should
+terminate at that instant, there would be no otherwise known independent
+reality with which HIS thought might be compared.
+
+The immediate in experience is always provisionally in this situation.
+The humanism, for instance, which I see and try so hard to defend, is
+the completest truth attained from my point of view up to date. But,
+owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can
+ever be THE last one. Every one is insufficient and off its balance, and
+responsible to later points of view than itself. You, occupying some of
+these later points in your own person, and believing in the reality of
+others, will not agree that my point of view sees truth positive, truth
+timeless, truth that counts, unless they verify and confirm what it
+sees.
+
+You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however satisfactory,
+can count positively and absolutely as true only so far as it agrees
+with a standard beyond itself; and if you then forget that this standard
+perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of the experiences,
+you may carelessly go on to say that what distributively holds of
+each experience, holds also collectively of all experience, and that
+experience as such and in its totality owes whatever truth it may be
+possessed-of to its correspondence with absolute realities outside of
+its own being. This evidently is the popular and traditional position.
+From the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one
+another, philosophers pass to the notion that experience uberhaupt must
+need an absolute support. The denial of such a notion by humanism lies
+probably at the root of most of the dislike which it incurs.
+
+But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again?
+Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism is willing to let
+finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must immediately
+breast nonentity. Why may not the advancing front of experience,
+carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against
+the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean
+abyss? Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished?
+And if reality genuinely grows, why may it not grow in these very
+determinations which here and now are made?
+
+In point of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental determinations,
+be these never so 'true.' Take the 'great bear' or 'dipper'
+constellation in the heavens. We call it by that name, we count the
+stars and call them seven, we say they were seven before they were
+counted, and we say that whether any one had ever noted the fact or not,
+the dim resemblance to a long-tailed (or long-necked?) animal was always
+truly there. But what do we mean by this projection into past eternity
+of recent human ways of thinking? Did an 'absolute' thinker actually
+do the counting, tell off the stars upon his standing number-tally, and
+make the bear-comparison, silly as the latter is? Were they explicitly
+seven, explicitly bear-like, before the human witness came? Surely
+nothing in the truth of the attributions drives us to think this.
+They were only implicitly or virtually what we call them, and we human
+witnesses first explicated them and made them 'real.' A fact virtually
+pre-exists when every condition of its realization save one is already
+there. In this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and
+comparing mind. But the stars (once the mind considers them) themselves
+dictate the result. The counting in no wise modifies their previous
+nature, and, they being what and where they are, the count cannot fall
+out differently. It could then ALWAYS be made. NEVER could the number
+seven be questioned, IF THE QUESTION ONCE WERE RAISED.
+
+We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the counting
+that was not there before. And yet that something was ALWAYS TRUE. In
+one sense you create it, and in another sense you FIND it. You have to
+treat your count as being true beforehand, the moment you come to treat
+the matter at all.
+
+Our stellar attributes must always be called true, then; yet none the
+less are they genuine additions made by our intellect to the world of
+fact. Not additions of consciousness only, but additions of 'content.'
+They copy nothing that pre-existed, yet they agree with what
+pre-existed, fit it, amplify it, relate and connect it with a 'wain,'
+a number-tally, or what not, and build it out. It seems to me that
+humanism is the only theory that builds this case out in the good
+direction, and this case stands for innumerable other kinds of case. In
+all such eases, odd as it may sound, our judgment may actually be said
+to retroact and to enrich the past.
+
+Our judgments at any rate change the character of FUTURE reality by
+the acts to which they lead. Where these acts are acts expressive of
+trust,--trust, e.g., that a man is honest, that our health is good
+enough, or that we can make a successful effort,--which acts may be a
+needed antecedent of the trusted things becoming true. Professor Taylor
+says [Footnote: In an article criticising Pragmatism (as he conceives
+it) in the McGill University Quarterly published at Montreal, for May,
+1904.] that our trust is at any rate UNTRUE WHEN IT IS MADE, i. e;
+before the action; and I seem to remember that he disposes of anything
+like a faith in the general excellence of the universe (making the
+faithful person's part in it at any rate more excellent) as a 'lie in
+the soul.' But the pathos of this expression should not blind us to
+the complication of the facts. I doubt whether Professor Taylor would
+himself be in favor of practically handling trusters of these kinds as
+liars. Future and present really mix in such emergencies, and one can
+always escape lies in them by using hypothetic forms. But Mr. Taylor's
+attitude suggests such absurd possibilities of practice that it seems
+to me to illustrate beautifully how self-stultifying the conception of
+a truth that shall merely register a standing fixture may become.
+Theoretic truth, truth of passive copying, sought in the sole interests
+of copying as such, not because copying is GOOD FOR SOMETHING, but
+because copying ought schlechthin to be, seems, if you look at it
+coldly, to be an almost preposterous ideal. Why should the universe,
+existing in itself, also exist in copies? How CAN it be copied in the
+solidity of its objective fulness? And even if it could, what would the
+motive be? 'Even the hairs of your head are numbered.' Doubtless they
+are, virtually; but why, as an absolute proposition, OUGHT the number to
+become copied and known? Surely knowing is only one way of interacting
+with reality and adding to its effect.
+
+The opponent here will ask: 'Has not the knowing of truth any
+substantive value on its own account, apart from the collateral
+advantages it may bring? And if you allow theoretic satisfactions to
+exist at all, do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of
+house and home, and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she
+admits them at all?' The destructive force of such talk disappears as
+soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our
+quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are
+known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist.
+
+Are they not all mere matters of CONSISTENCY--and emphatically NOT of
+consistency between an absolute reality and the mind's copies of it,
+but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and habits of
+reacting, in the mind's own experienceable world? And are not both our
+need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as
+outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that do develop mental
+HABITS--habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment
+where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow
+'law'? If this were so, what would have come first would have been the
+collateral profits of habit as such, and the theoretic life would have
+grown up in aid of these. In point of fact, this seems to have been the
+probable case. At life's origin, any present perception may have been
+'true'--if such a word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions
+became organized, the reactions became 'true' whenever expectation was
+fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were 'false' or 'mistaken' reactions.
+But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction, so the
+impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, and
+a disappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation.
+Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies.
+Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually
+accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery
+refuses to run smoothly. The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.
+
+Theoretic truth thus falls WITHIN the mind, being the accord of some
+of its processes and objects with other processes and objects--'accord'
+consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction
+of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits
+may seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the
+balance--provided always that we are highly organized intellectually,
+which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies
+most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between
+their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of
+sense-perceptions in which their lives are cast. The theoretic truth
+that most of us think we 'ought' to attain to is thus the possession of
+a set of predicates that do not explicitly contradict their subjects.
+We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects
+out.
+
+In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others. The form
+of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral
+profits stop. Such men systematize and classify and schematize and
+make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of
+unifying. Too often the results, glowing with 'truth' for the inventors,
+seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders. Which is as
+much as to say that the purely theoretic criterion of truth can leave us
+in the lurch as easily as any other criterion, and that the absolutists,
+for all their pretensions, are 'in the same boat' concretely with those
+whom they attack.
+
+I am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the extreme. But
+the whole subject is inductive, and sharp logic is hardly yet in order.
+My great trammel has been the non-existence of any definitely stated
+alternative on my opponents' part. It may conduce to clearness if I
+recapitulate, in closing, what I conceive the main points of humanism to
+be. They are these:--
+
+1. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in
+order to be true.
+
+2. By 'reality' humanism means nothing more than the other conceptual
+or perceptual experiences with which a given present experience may find
+itself in point of fact mixed up. [Footnote: This is meant merely to
+exclude reality of an 'unknowable' sort, of which no account in either
+perceptual or conceptual terms can be given. It includes of course any
+amount if empirical reality independent of the knower. Pragmatism, is
+thus 'epistemologically' realistic in its account.]
+
+3. By 'conforming,' humanism means taking account-of in such a way as to
+gain any intellectually and practically satisfactory result.
+
+4. To 'take account-of' and to be 'satisfactory' are terms that admit
+of no definition, so many are the ways in which these requirements can
+practically be worked out.
+
+5. Vaguely and in general, we take account of a reality by preserving
+it in as unmodified a form as possible. But, to be then satisfactory, it
+must not contradict other realities outside of it which claim also to be
+preserved. That we must preserve all the experience we can and minimize
+contradiction in what we preserve, is about all that can be said in
+advance.
+
+6. The truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a positive
+addition to the previous reality, and later judgments may have
+to conform to it. Yet, virtually at least, it may have been true
+previously. Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing:
+the possibility of only one answer, when once the question is raised.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN
+
+[Footnote: Extract from an article entitled 'A World of Pure
+Experience,' in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., September 29,1904.]
+
+Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object
+have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon
+the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the
+former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all
+sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative
+theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into
+the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Commonsense theories left the gap
+untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending
+leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by
+finite knowers, and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory
+act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every
+conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full.
+Either the knower and the known are:
+
+(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different
+contexts; or they are
+
+(2) two pieces of ACTUAL experience belonging to the same subject, with
+definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or
+
+(3) the known is a POSSIBLE experience either of that subject or
+another, to which the said conjunctive transitions WOULD lead, if
+sufficiently prolonged.
+
+To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the
+knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this essay.
+I have treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception, in
+an article in the Journal of Philosophy, for September 1, 1904, called
+'Does consciousness exist?' This is the type of case in which the mind
+enjoys direct 'acquaintance' with a present object. In the other types
+the mind has 'knowledge-about' an object not immediately there. Type 3
+can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so that
+a brief description of that type will now put the present reader
+sufficiently at my point of view, and make him see what the actual
+meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be.
+
+Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cambridge, at ten
+minutes' walk from 'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of the
+latter object. My mind may have before it only the name, or it may have
+a clear image, or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but such an
+intrinsic difference in the image makes no difference in its cognitive
+function. Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experiences of
+conjunction, are what impart to the image, be it what it may, its
+knowing office.
+
+For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean by my image, and I can
+tell you nothing; or if I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
+Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain whether the Hall I see
+be what I had in mind or not; you would rightly deny that I had 'meant'
+that particular hall at all, even tho my mental image might to some
+degree have resembled it. The resemblance would count in that case as
+coincidental merely, for all sorts of things of a kind resemble one
+another in this world without being held for that reason to take
+cognizance of one another.
+
+On the other hand, if I can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its
+history and present uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
+imperfect it may have been, to have led hither and to be now TERMINATED;
+if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so
+that each term of the one context corresponds serially, as I walk, with
+an answering term of the other; why then my soul was prophetic, and
+my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of
+reality. That percept was what I MEANT, for into it my idea has passed
+by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere
+is there jar, but every later moment continues and corroborates an
+earlier one.
+
+In this continuing and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense,
+but denoting definitely felt transitions, LIES ALL THAT THE KNOWING OF
+A PERCEPT BY AN IDEA CAN POSSIBLY CONTAIN OR SIGNIFY. Wherever such
+transitions are felt, the first experience KNOWS the last one. Where
+they do not, or where even as possibles they can not, intervene, there
+can be no pretence of knowing. In this latter case the extremes will be
+connected, if connected at all, by inferior relations--bare likeness or
+succession, or by 'withness' alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus
+comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is MADE; and made
+by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain
+intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their
+terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction
+followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that THEIR
+STARTING-POINT THEREBY BECOMES A KNOWER AND THEIR TERMINUS AN OBJECT
+MEANT OR KNOWN. That is all that knowing (in the simple case considered)
+can be known-as, that is the whole of its nature, put into experiential
+terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely
+say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the outset, even
+altho AT the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of
+substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about
+it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of
+being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with
+conjunctively transitional experiences between. That is what we MEAN
+here by the object's being 'in mind.' Of any deeper more real way of its
+being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to
+discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all.
+
+I know that many a reader will rebel at this. 'Mere intermediaries,' he
+will say, 'even tho they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment,
+only SEPARATE the knower from the known, whereas what we have in
+knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other, an
+"apprehension" in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the
+chasm as by lightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into one
+over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries of
+yours are out of each other, and outside of their termini still.'
+
+But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his
+bone and snapping at its image in the water? If we knew any more real
+kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled to brand all our empirical
+unions as a sham. But unions by continuous transition are the only ones
+we know of, whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that terminates
+in an acquaintance, whether in personal identity, in logical prediction
+through the copula 'is,' or elsewhere. If anywhere there were more
+absolute unions, they could only reveal themselves to us by just such
+conjunctive results. These are what the unions are worth, these are all
+that we can ever practically mean by union, by continuity. Is it not
+time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to
+be one? Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is
+to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to
+the same thing? In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang
+a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship. In a world
+where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience,
+conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything
+else. They will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we have no
+transphenomenal absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world
+by, at a stroke.
+
+So much for the essentials of the cognitive relation where the knowledge
+is conceptual in type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. It consists
+in intermediary experiences (possible, if not actual) of continuously
+developing progress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sensible
+percept which is the object is reached. The percept here not only
+VERIFIES the concept, proves its function of knowing that percept to
+be true, but the percept's existence as the terminus of the chain of
+intermediaries CREATES the function. Whatever terminates that chain was,
+because it now proves itself to be, what the concept 'had in mind.'
+
+The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies
+in the tact that an experience that knows another can figure as its
+REPRESENTATIVE, not in any quasi-miraculous 'epistemological' sense,
+but in the definite, practical sense of being its substitute in various
+operations, sometimes physical and sometimes mental, which lead us to
+its associates and results. By experimenting on our ideas of reality, we
+may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences
+which they severally mean. The ideas form related systems, corresponding
+point for point to the systems which the realities form; and by letting
+an ideal term call up its associates systematically, we may be led to a
+terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in case
+we had operated on the real world. And this brings us to the general
+question of substitution.
+
+What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does the 'substitution' of
+one of them for another mean?
+
+According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time,
+whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others
+that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or
+conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general
+be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate. What the
+nature of the event called 'superseding' signifies, depends altogether
+on the kind of transition that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish
+their predecessors without continuing them in any way. Others are felt
+to increase or to enlarge their meaning, to carry out their purpose, or
+to bring us nearer to their goal. They 'represent' them, and may fulfil
+their function better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to 'fulfil
+a function' in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined
+in only one possible way. In such a world transitions and arrivals (or
+terminations) are the only events that happen, tho they happen by so
+many sorts of path. The only function that one experience can perform is
+to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of
+is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads
+to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. But
+the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents
+itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial
+term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from
+next to next by a great many possible paths.
+
+Either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for
+another, and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an
+advantageous thing to do. As a matter of fact, and in a general way,
+the paths that run through conceptual experiences, that is, through
+'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the things in which they terminate,
+are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield
+inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the 'universal' character
+[Footnote: Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also
+an be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or
+of the possibility of such.] which they frequently possess, and to
+their capacity for association with one another in great systems, they
+outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves, and sweep us
+on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the
+following of trains of sensible perception ever could. Wonderful are
+the new cuts and the short-circuits the thought-paths make. Most
+thought-paths, it is true, are substitutes for nothing actual; they end
+outside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, utopias, fictions
+or mistakes. But where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein,
+we substitute them always; and with these substitutes we pass the
+greater number of our hours. [Footnote: This is why I called our
+experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more
+discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose.
+The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is
+true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a percept (though
+we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body,
+changing by gradual transition when the body moves. But the distant
+parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form
+conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our
+life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round their
+several objective nuclei, partly shared and common partly discrete of
+the real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several
+lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect one
+another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of
+the time are quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei of shared
+'reality' floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly
+subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual
+ending for themselves in the perceptual world--the mere day-dreams and
+joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist WITH
+one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of them it
+is probable that to all eternity no inter-related system of any kind
+will ever be made.]
+
+Whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while
+he has it, may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself.
+From inside of its own entity it says 'more,' and postulates reality
+existing elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to
+consist in a salto motale across an 'epistemological chasm,' such an
+idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might
+be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own. Have we not explained
+that conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the existence of things
+that fall outside of the knowing experience itself--by intermediary
+experiences and by a terminus that fulfils?
+
+Can the knowledge be there before these elements that constitute its
+being have come? And, if knowledge be not there, how can objective
+reference occur?
+
+The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as
+verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its
+way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when
+our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know
+'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of THAT.
+Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing
+that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet
+the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were VIRTUAL
+knowers of the Hall long before we were certified to have been its
+actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power. Just
+so we are 'mortal' all the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
+inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come.
+
+Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this
+virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely
+of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,'
+or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I speak also
+of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which
+we hold for true altho unterminated perceptually, because nothing says
+'no' to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. TO CONTINUE
+THINKING UNCHALLENGED IS, NINETY-NINE TIMES OUT OF A HUNDRED, OUR
+PRACTICAL SUBSTITUTE FOR KNOWING IN THE COMPLETED SENSE. As each
+experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we
+nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact,
+we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as
+it, were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense
+of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the
+future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be
+conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out
+curve. Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of
+direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's
+end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon--what more
+could we have DONE at those moments even if the later verification comes
+complete?
+
+This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the
+objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences
+involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively conjunctive transition
+involves neither chasm nor leap. Being the very original of what we
+mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears. Objective
+reference is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience
+comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition. Our
+fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our
+fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a MORE that continuously
+develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The
+relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are, and
+the only complaint of the transcendentalist's with which I could at
+all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making knowledge to
+consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confessing
+that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually
+there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business, and
+palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing. Only the
+admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are self-transcendent
+and 'true' already; in advance of the experiences that are to terminate
+them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in
+which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled.
+
+This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method.
+What would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of
+all experiential mediation or termination, be KNOWN-AS? What would it
+practically result in for US, were it true?
+
+It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our
+expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the right
+path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face (or
+can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the
+path that led us into the object's nearest neighborhood. Where direct
+acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge about' is the next best thing, and
+an acquaintance with what actually lies about the 'object, and is most
+closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether-waves
+and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never
+PERCTEPTUALLY terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very
+brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which
+are their really next effects.
+
+Even if our ideas did in themselves possess the postulated
+self-transcendency, it would still remain true that their putting us
+into possession of such effects WOULD BE THE SOLE CASH-VALUE OF THE
+SELF-TRANSCENDENCY FOR US. And this cash-value, it is needless to
+say, is verbatim et liberatim what our empiricist account pays in. On
+pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute over self-transcendency is a
+pure logomachy. Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent
+or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don't differ about
+the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits--fruits for us, of course,
+humanistic fruits.
+
+The transcendentalist believes his ideas to be self-transcendent only
+because he finds that in fact they do bear fruits. Why need he quarrel
+with an account of knowledge that insists on naming this effect? Why not
+treat the working of the idea from next to next as the essence of its
+self-transcendency? Why insist that knowing is a static relation out of
+time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life?
+For a thing to be valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself
+valid. When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and
+to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all
+things, should knowing be exempt? Why should it not be making itself
+valid like everything else? That some parts of it may be already valid
+or verified beyond dispute; the empirical philosopher, of course, like
+any one else, may always hope.
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM
+
+[Footnote: Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
+Scientific Methods, vol. ii. No. 5, March 2, 1905.]
+
+Humanism is a ferment that has 'come to stay.' It is not a single
+hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a
+slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear
+as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are
+strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though
+their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small
+confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists often taking part
+against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other
+side. [Footnote: Professor Baldwin, for example. His address 'Selective
+Thinking' (Psychological Review, January, 1898, reprinted in his volume,
+'Development and Evolution') seems to me an unusually well written
+pragmatic manifesto. Nevertheless in 'The Limits of Pragmatism' (ibid;
+January, 1904), he (much less clearly) joins in the attack.]
+
+If humanism really be the name for such a shifting of perspective, it
+is obvious that the whole scene of the philosophic stage will change
+in some degree if humanism prevails. The emphasis of things, their
+foreground and background distribution, their sizes and values, will not
+keep just the same. [Footnote: The ethical changes, it seems to me, are
+beautifully made evident in Professor Dewey's series of articles, which
+will never get the attention they deserve till they are printed in a
+book. I mean: 'The Significance of Emotions,' Psychological Review,
+vol. ii, 13; 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,' ibid; iii, 357;
+'Psychology and Social Practice,' ibid., vii, 105; 'Interpretation
+of Savage Mind,' ibid; ix, 2l7; 'Green's Theory of the Moral Motive,'
+Philosophical Review, vol. i, 593; 'Self-realization as the Moral
+Ideal,' ibid; ii, 652; 'The Psychology of Effort,' ibid; vi, 43;
+'The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality,' ibid; xi, 107,353;
+'Evolution and Ethics,' Monist, vol. viii, 321; to mention only a few.]
+If such pervasive consequences be involved in humanism, it is clear that
+no pains which philosophers may take, first in defining it, and then in
+furthering, checking, or steering its progress, will be thrown away.
+
+It suffers badly at present from incomplete definition. Its most
+systematic advocates, Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary
+programmes only; and its bearing on many vital philosophic problems has
+not been traced except by adversaries who, scenting heresies in advance,
+have showered blows on doctrines--subjectivism and scepticism, for
+example--that no good humanist finds it necessary to entertain. By their
+still greater reticences, the anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed
+the humanists. Much of the controversy has involved the word 'truth.'
+It is always good in debate to know your adversary's point of view
+authentically. But the critics of humanism never define exactly what the
+word 'truth' signifies when they use it themselves. The humanists have
+to guess at their view; and the result has doubtless been much beating
+of the air. Add to all this, great individual differences in both camps,
+and it becomes clear that nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage
+which things have reached at present, as a sharper definition by each
+side of its central point of view.
+
+Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make sure
+of what's what and who is who. Any one can contribute such a definition,
+and, without it, no one knows exactly where he stands. If I offer my own
+provisional definition of humanism now and here, others may improve it,
+some adversary may be led to define his own creed more sharply by the
+contrast, and a certain quickening of the crystallization of general
+opinion may result.
+
+The essential service of humanism, as I conceive the situation, is to
+have seen that THO ONE PART OF OUR EXPERIENCE MAY LEAN UPON ANOTHER PART
+TO MAKE IT WHAT IT IS IN ANY ONE OF SEVERAL ASPECTS IN WHICH IT MAY
+BE CONSIDERED, EXPERIENCE AS A WHOLE IS SELF-CONTAINING AND LEANS
+ON NOTHING. Since this formula also expresses the main contention
+of transcendental idealism, it needs abundant explication to make it
+unambiguous. It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to denying
+theism and pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny either; everything
+would depend on the exegesis; and if the formula ever became canonical,
+it would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters.
+I myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically. If there be a
+God, he is no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the experiencer of
+widest actual conscious span. Read thus, humanism is for me a religion
+susceptible of reasoned defence, tho I am well aware how many minds
+there are to whom it can appeal religiously only when it has been
+monistically translated. Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes for
+me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of--it
+being essentially a SOCIAL philosophy, a philosophy of 'CO,' in which
+conjunctions do the work. But my primary reason for advocating it is its
+matchless intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only of the standing
+'problems' that monism engenders ('problem of evil,' 'problem of
+freedom,' and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and
+paradoxes as well.
+
+It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing
+to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all. It gets
+rid of any need for an absolute of the bradleyan type (avowedly sterile
+for intellectual purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive relations
+found within experience are faultlessly real. It gets rid of the need
+of an absolute of the roycean type (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic
+treatment of the problem of knowledge. As the views of knowledge,
+reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most
+fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of
+focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore to bring the
+views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly
+as I can.
+
+II
+
+If the central humanistic thesis, printed above in italics, be accepted,
+it will follow that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing, the
+knower and the object known must both be portions of experience. One
+part of experience must, therefore, either
+
+(1) Know another part of experience--in other words, parts must, as
+Professor Woodbridge says, [Footnote: In Science, November 4, 1904, p.
+599.] represent ONE ANOTHER instead of representing realities outside of
+'consciousness'--this case is that of conceptual knowledge; or else
+
+(2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate THATS or facts of being,
+in the first instance; and then, as a secondary complication, and
+without doubling up its entitative singleness, any one and the same
+THAT in experience must figure alternately as a thing known and as a
+knowledge of the thing, by reason of two divergent kinds of context into
+which, in the general course of experience, it gets woven. [Footnote:
+This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who has not
+read my two articles 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure
+Experience' in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, 1904.]
+
+This second case is that of sense-perception. There is a stage of
+thought that goes beyond common sense, and of it I shall say more
+presently; but the common-sense stage is a perfectly definite
+halting-place of thought, primarily for purposes of action; and, so long
+as we remain on the common-sense stage of thought, object and subject
+FUSE in the fact of 'presentation' or sense-perception-the pen and hand
+which I now SEE writing, for example, ARE the physical realities which
+those words designate. In this case there is no self-transcendency
+implied in the knowing. Humanism, here, is only a more comminuted
+IDENTITATSPHILOSOPHIE.
+
+In case (1), on the contrary, the representative experience DOES
+TRANSCEND ITSELF in knowing the other experience that is its object.
+No one can talk of the knowledge of the one by the other without seeing
+them as numerically distinct entities, of which the one lies beyond the
+other and away from it, along some direction and with some interval,
+that can be definitely named. But, if the talker be a humanist, he
+must also see this distance-interval concretely and pragmatically, and
+confess it to consist of other intervening experiences--of possible
+ones, at all events, if not of actual. To call my present idea of my
+dog, for example, cognitive of the real dog means that, as the actual
+tissue of experience is constituted, the idea is capable of leading into
+a chain of other experiences on my part that go from next to next and
+terminate at last in vivid sense-perceptions of a jumping, barking,
+hairy body. Those ARE the real dog, the dog's full presence, for my
+common sense. If the supposed talker is a profound philosopher, altho
+they may not BE the real dog for him, they MEAN the real dog, are
+practical substitutes for the real dog, as the representation was a
+practical substitute for them, that real dog being a lot of atoms,
+say, or of mind-stuff, that lie WHERE the sense-perceptions lie in his
+experience as well as in my own.
+
+III
+
+The philosopher here stands for the stage of thought that goes beyond
+the stage of common sense; and the difference is simply that he
+'interpolates' and 'extrapolates,' where common sense does not. For
+common sense, two men see the same identical real dog. Philosophy,
+noting actual differences in their perceptions points out the duality
+of these latter, and interpolates something between them as a more real
+terminus--first, organs, viscera, etc.; next, cells; then, ultimate
+atoms; lastly, mind-stuff perhaps. The original sense-termini of the two
+men, instead of coalescing with each other and with the real dog-object,
+as at first supposed, are thus held by philosophers to be separated by
+invisible realities with which, at most, they are conterminous.
+
+Abolish, now, one of the percipients, and the interpolation changes
+into 'extrapolation.' The sense-terminus of the remaining percipient is
+regarded by the philosopher as not quite reaching reality. He has only
+carried the procession of experiences, the philosopher thinks, to a
+definite, because practical, halting-place somewhere on the way towards
+an absolute truth that lies beyond.
+
+The humanist sees all the time, however, that there is no absolute
+transcendency even about the more absolute realities thus conjectured or
+believed in. The viscera and cells are only possible percepts following
+upon that of the outer body. The atoms again, tho we may never attain
+to human means of perceiving them, are still defined perceptually.
+The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind of experience; and it is
+possible to frame the hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic be
+excluded from philosophy) of two knowers of a piece of mind-stuff and
+the mind-stuff itself becoming 'confluent' at the moment at which our
+imperfect knowing might pass into knowing of a completed type. Even so
+do you and I habitually conceive our two perceptions and the real dog
+as confluent, tho only provisionally, and for the common-sense stage
+of thought. If my pen be inwardly made of mind-stuff, there is no
+confluence NOW between that mind-stuff and my visual perception of the
+pen. But conceivably there might come to be such confluence; for, in
+the case of my HAND, the visual sensations and the inward feelings of
+the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even now as confluent as any
+two things can be.
+
+There is, thus, no breach in humanistic epistemology. Whether knowledge
+be taken as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to pass muster
+for practice, it is hung on one continuous scheme. Reality, howsoever
+remote, is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities
+of experience; and what knows it is defined as an experience THAT
+'REPRESENTS' IT, IN THE SENSE OF BEING SUBSTITUTABLE FOR IT IN OUR
+THINKING because it leads to the same associates, OR IN THE SENSE
+OF 'POINTING TO IT THROUGH A CHAIN OF OTHER EXPERIENCES THAT EITHER
+INTERVENE OR MAY INTERVENE.
+
+Absolute reality here bears the same relation to sensation as sensation
+bears to conception or imagination. Both are provisional or final
+termini, sensation being only the terminus at which the practical man
+habitually stops, while the philosopher projects a 'beyond,' in the
+shape of more absolute reality. These termini, for the practical and the
+philosophical stages of thought respectively, are self-supporting. They
+are not 'true' of anything else, they simply ARE, are REAL. They 'lean
+on nothing,' as my italicized formula said. Rather does the whole
+fabric of experience lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the
+solar system, including many relative positions, leans, for its absolute
+position in space, on any one of its constituent stars. Here, again, one
+gets a new IDENTITATSPHILOSOPHIE in pluralistic form.
+
+IV
+
+If I have succeeded in making this at all clear (tho I fear that brevity
+and abstractness between them may have made me fail), the reader
+will see that the 'truth' of our mental operations must always be an
+intra-experiential affair. A conception is reckoned true by common sense
+when it can be made to lead to a sensation. The sensation, which
+for common sense is not so much 'true' as 'real,' is held to be
+PROVISIONALLY true by the philosopher just in so far as it COVERS (abuts
+at, or occupies the place of) a still more absolutely real experience,
+in the possibility of which, to some remoter experient, the philosopher
+finds reason to believe.
+
+Meanwhile what actually DOES count for true to any individual trower,
+whether he be philosopher or common man, is always a result of his
+APPERCEPTIONS. If a novel experience, conceptual or sensible, contradict
+too emphatically our pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine
+cases out of a hundred it is treated as false. Only when the older and
+the newer experiences are congruous enough to mutually apperceive and
+modify each other, does what we treat as an advance in truth result.
+In no case, however, need truth consist in a relation between our
+experiences and something archetypal or trans-experiential. Should we
+ever reach absolutely terminal experiences, experiences in which we all
+agreed, which were superseded by no revised continuations, these would
+not be TRUE, they would be REAL, they would simply BE, and be indeed
+the angles, corners, and linchpins of all reality, on which the truth of
+everything else would be stayed. Only such OTHER things as led to these
+by satisfactory conjunctions would be 'true.' Satisfactory connection of
+some sort with such termini is all that the word 'truth' means. On the
+common-stage of thought sense-presentations serve as such termini. Our
+ideas and concepts and scientific theories pass for true only so far as
+they harmoniously lead back to the world of sense.
+
+I hope that many humanists will endorse this attempt of mine to trace
+the more essential features of that way of viewing things. I feel almost
+certain that Messrs. Dewey and Schiller will do so. If the attackers
+will also take some slight account of it, it may be that discussion will
+be a little less wide of the mark than it has hitherto been.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH
+
+[Footnote: Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy, July 18,1907.]
+
+My failure in making converts to my conception of truth seems, if I
+may judge by what I hear in conversation, almost complete. An ordinary
+philosopher would feel disheartened, and a common choleric sinner would
+curse God and die, after such a reception. But instead of taking counsel
+of despair, I make bold to vary my statements, in the faint hope that
+repeated droppings may wear upon the stone, and that my formulas may
+seem less obscure if surrounded by something more of a 'mass' whereby to
+apperceive them.
+
+For fear of compromising other pragmatists, whoe'er they be, I will
+speak of the conception which I am trying to make intelligible, as my
+own conception. I first published it in the year 1885, in the first
+article reprinted in the present book. Essential theses of this article
+were independently supported in 1893 and 1895 by Professor D. S. Miller
+[Footnote: Philosophical Review, vol. ii, p. 408, and Psychological
+Review, vol. ii, p. 533.] and were repeated by me in a presidential
+address on 'The knowing of things together' [Footnote: The relevant
+parts of which are printed above, p. 43.] in 1895. Professor Strong,
+in an article in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., [Footnote: Vol. i,
+p. 253.] entitled 'A naturalistic theory of the reference of thought
+to reality,' called our account 'the James-Miller theory of cognition,'
+and, as I understood him, gave it his adhesion. Yet, such is the
+difficulty of writing clearly in these penetralia of philosophy, that
+each of these revered colleagues informs me privately that the account
+of truth I now give--which to me is but that earlier statement more
+completely set forth--is to him inadequate, and seems to leave the gist
+of real cognition out. If such near friends disagree, what can I hope
+from remoter ones, and what from unfriendly critics?
+
+Yet I feel so sure that the fault must lie in my lame forms of statement
+and not in my doctrine, that I am fain to try once more to express
+myself.
+
+Are there not some general distinctions which it may help us to agree
+about in advance? Professor Strong distinguishes between what he calls
+'saltatory' and what he calls 'ambulatory' relations. 'Difference,' for
+example, is saltatory, jumping as it were immediately from one term
+to another, but 'distance' in time or space is made out of intervening
+parts of experience through which we ambulate in succession. Years ago,
+when T. H. Green's ideas were most influential, I was much troubled
+by his criticisms of english sensationalism. One of his disciples in
+particular would always say to me, 'Yes! TERMS may indeed be possibly
+sensational in origin; but RELATIONS, what are they but pure acts of
+the intellect coming upon the sensations from above, and of a higher
+nature?' I well remember the sudden relief it gave me to perceive one
+day that SPACE-relations at any rate were homogeneous with the terms
+between which they mediated. The terms were spaces, and the relations
+were other intervening spaces. [Footnote: See my Principles of
+Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 148-153.] For the Greenites space-relations had
+been saltatory, for me they became thenceforward ambulatory.
+
+Now the most general way of contrasting my view of knowledge with the
+popular view (which is also the view of most epistemologists) is to call
+my view ambulatory, and the other view saltatory; and the most general
+way of characterizing the two views is by saying that my view describes
+knowing as it exists concretely, while the other view only describes its
+results abstractly taken.
+
+I fear that most of my recalcitrant readers fail to recognize that what
+is ambulatory in the concrete may be taken so abstractly as to appear
+saltatory. Distance, for example, is made abstract by emptying out
+whatever is particular in the concrete intervals--it is reduced thus
+to a sole 'difference,' a difference of 'place,' which is a logical or
+saltatory distinction, a so-called 'pure relation.'
+
+The same is true of the relation called 'knowing,' which may connect
+an idea with a reality. My own account of this relation is ambulatory
+through and through. I say that we know an object by means of an idea,
+whenever we ambulate towards the object under the impulse which the idea
+communicates. If we believe in so-called 'sensible' realities, the idea
+may not only send us towards its object, but may put the latter into our
+very hand, make it our immediate sensation. But, if, as most reflective
+people opine, sensible realities are not 'real' realities, but only
+their appearances, our idea brings us at least so far, puts us in touch
+with reality's most authentic appearances and substitutes. In any case
+our idea brings us into the object's neighborhood, practical or ideal,
+gets us into commerce with it, helps us towards its closer acquaintance,
+enables us to foresee it, class it, compare it, deduce it,--in short, to
+deal with it as we could not were the idea not in our possession.
+
+The idea is thus, when functionally considered, an instrument for
+enabling us the better to HAVE TO DO with the object and to act about
+it. But it and the object are both of them bits of the general sheet
+and tissue of reality at large; and when we say that the idea leads us
+towards the object, that only means that it carries us forward
+through intervening tracts of that reality into the object's closer
+neighborhood, into the midst of its associates at least, be these its
+physical neighbors, or be they its logical congeners only. Thus carried
+into closer quarters, we are in an improved situation as regards
+acquaintance and conduct; and we say that through the idea we now KNOW
+the object better or more truly.
+
+My thesis is that the knowing here is MADE by the ambulation through the
+intervening experiences. If the idea led us nowhere, or FROM that object
+instead of towards it, could we talk at all of its having any cognitive
+quality? Surely not, for it is only when taken in conjunction with the
+intermediate experiences that it gets related to THAT PARTICULAR OBJECT
+rather than to any other part of nature. Those intermediaries determine
+what particular knowing function it exerts. The terminus they guide
+us to tells us what object it 'means,' the results they enrich us
+with 'verify' or 'refute' it. Intervening experiences are thus as
+indispensable foundations for a concrete relation of cognition as
+intervening space is for a relation of distance. Cognition, whenever
+we take it concretely, means determinate 'ambulation,' through
+intermediaries, from a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad
+quem. As the intermediaries are other than the termini, and connected
+with them by the usual associative bonds (be these 'external' or be they
+logical, i.e., classificatory, in character), there would appear to
+be nothing especially unique about the processes of knowing. They fall
+wholly within experience; and we need use, in describing them, no
+other categories than those which we employ in describing other natural
+processes.
+
+But there exist no processes which we cannot also consider abstractly,
+eviscerating them down to their essential skeletons or outlines; and
+when we have treated the processes of knowing thus, we are easily led to
+regard them as something altogether unparalleled in nature. For we first
+empty idea, object and intermediaries of all their particularities, in
+order to retain only a general scheme, and then we consider the latter
+only in its function of giving a result, and not in its character of
+being a process. In this treatment the intermediaries shrivel into the
+form of a mere space of separation, while the idea and object retain
+only the logical distinctness of being the end-terms that are separated.
+In other words, the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity
+form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross, and
+then, the relation of the end-terms having become saltatory, the whole
+hocus-pocus of Erkenntnistheorie begins, and goes on unrestrained
+by further concrete considerations. The idea, in 'meaning' an object
+separated by an 'epistemological chasm' from itself, now executes what
+Professor Ladd calls a 'salto mortale'; in knowing the object's nature,
+it now 'transcends' its own. The object in turn becomes 'present' where
+it is really absent, etc.; until a scheme remains upon our hands, the
+sublime paradoxes of which some of us think that nothing short of an
+'absolute' can explain.
+
+The relation between idea and object, thus made abstract and saltatory,
+is thenceforward opposed, as being more essential and previous, to its
+own ambulatory self, and the more concrete description is branded as
+either false or insufficient. The bridge of intermediaries, actual
+or possible, which in every real case is what carries and defines the
+knowing, gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even
+potentially be there. I believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing
+abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted, is the
+main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory, and I
+will therefore say a word more on that general point.
+
+Any vehicle of conjunction, if all its particularities are abstracted
+from it, will leave us with nothing on our hands but the original
+disjunction which it bridged over. But to escape treating the resultant
+self-contradiction as an achievement of dialectical profundity, all we
+need is to restore some part, no matter how small, of what we have taken
+away. In the case of the epistemological chasm the first reasonable step
+is to remember that the chasm was filled with SOME empirical material,
+whether ideational or sensational, which performed SOME bridging
+function and saved us from the mortal leap. Restoring thus the
+indispensable modicum of reality to the matter of our discussion, we
+find our abstract treatment genuinely useful. We escape entanglement
+with special cases without at the same time falling into gratuitous
+paradoxes. We can now describe the general features of cognition, tell
+what on the whole it DOES FOR US, in a universal way.
+
+We must remember that this whole inquiry into knowing grows up on a
+reflective level. In any real moment of knowing, what we are thinking of
+is our object, not the way in which we ourselves are momentarily knowing
+it. We at this moment, as it happens, have knowing itself for our
+object; but I think that the reader will agree that his present knowing
+of that object is included only abstractly, and by anticipation, in
+the results he may reach. What he concretely has before his mind, as he
+reasons, is some supposed objective instance of knowing, as he conceives
+it to go on in some other person, or recalls it from his own past. As
+such, he, the critic, sees it to contain both an idea and an object, and
+processes by which the knower is guided from the one towards the other.
+He sees that the idea is remote from the object, and that, whether
+through intermediaries or not, it genuinely HAS TO DO with it. He sees
+that it thus works beyond its immediate being, and lays hold of a
+remote reality; it jumps across, transcends itself. It does all this by
+extraneous aid, to be sure, but when the aid has come, it HAS done it
+and the result is secure. Why not talk of results by themselves, then,
+without considering means? Why not treat the idea as simply grasping
+or intuiting the reality, of its having the faculty anyhow, of shooting
+over nature behind the scenes and knowing things immediately and
+directly? Why need we always lug in the bridging?--it only retards our
+discourse to do so.
+
+Such abstract talk about cognition's results is surely convenient; and
+it is surely as legitimate as it is convenient, SO LONG AS WE DO NOT
+FORGET OR POSITIVELY DENY, WHAT IT IGNORES. We may on occasion say
+that our idea meant ALWAYS that particular object, that it led us there
+because it was OF it intrinsically and essentially. We may insist that
+its verification follows upon that original cognitive virtue in it--and
+all the rest--and we shall do no harm so long as we know that these are
+only short cuts in our thinking. They are positively true accounts of
+fact AS FAR AS THEY GO, only they leave vast tracts of fact out of the
+account, tracts of tact that have to be reinstated to make the accounts
+literally true of any real case. But if, not merely passively ignoring
+the intermediaries, you actively deny them [Footnote: This is the
+fallacy which I have called 'vicious intellectualism' in my book A
+Pluralistic Universe, Longmans, Green & Co., 1909.] to be even potential
+requisites for the results you are so struck by, your epistemology goes
+to irremediable smash. You are as far off the track as an historian
+would be, if, lost in admiration of Napoleon's personal power, he were
+to ignore his marshals and his armies, and were to accuse you of
+error in describing his conquests as effected by their means. Of such
+abstractness and one-sidedness I accuse most of the critics of my own
+account.
+
+In the second lecture of the book Pragmatism, I used the illustration
+of a squirrel scrambling round a tree-trunk to keep out of sight of
+a pursuing man: both go round the tree, but does the man go round the
+squirrel? It all depends, I said, on what you mean by going round.' In
+one sense of the word the man 'goes round,' in another sense he does
+not. I settled the dispute by pragmatically distinguishing the senses.
+But I told how some disputants had called my distinction a shuffling
+evasion and taken their stand on what they called 'plain honest English
+going-round.'
+
+In such a simple case few people would object to letting the term in
+dispute be translated into its concreter equivalents. But in the case
+of a complex function like our knowing they act differently. I give full
+concrete particular value for the ideas of knowing in every case I can
+think of, yet my critics insist that 'plain honest English knowing' is
+left out of my account. They write as if the minus were on my side and
+the plus on theirs.
+
+The essence of the matter for me is that altho knowing can be both
+abstractly and concretely described, and altho the abstract descriptions
+are often useful enough, yet they are all sucked up and absorbed without
+residuum into the concreter ones, and contain nothing of any essentially
+other or higher nature, which the concrete descriptions can be justly
+accused of leaving behind. Knowing is just a natural process like any
+other. There is no ambulatory process whatsoever, the results of which
+we may not describe, if we prefer to, in saltatory terms, or represent
+in static formulation. Suppose, e.g., that we say a man is 'prudent.'
+Concretely, that means that he takes out insurance, hedges in betting,
+looks before he leaps. Do such acts CONSTITUTE the prudence? ARE they
+the man qua prudent?
+
+Or is the prudence something by itself and independent of them? As a
+constant habit in him, a permanent tone of character, it is convenient
+to call him prudent in abstraction from any one of his acts, prudent in
+general and without specification, and to say the acts follow from the
+pre-existing prudence. There are peculiarities in his psycho-physical
+system that make him act prudently; and there are tendencies to
+association in our thoughts that prompt some of them to make for truth
+and others for error. But would the man be prudent in the absence of
+each and all of the acts? Or would the thoughts be true if they had no
+associative or impulsive tendencies? Surely we have no right to oppose
+static essences in this way to the moving processes in which they live
+embedded.
+
+My bedroom is above my library. Does the 'aboveness' here mean
+aught that is different from the concrete spaces which have to be
+moved-through in getting from the one to the other? It means, you may
+say, a pure topographic relation, a sort of architect's plan among the
+eternal essences. But that is not the full aboveness, it is only an
+abbreviated substitute that on occasion may lead my mind towards truer,
+i.e., fuller, dealings with the real aboveness. It is not an aboveness
+ante rem, it is a post rem extract from the aboveness in rebus. We
+may indeed talk, for certain conveniences, as if the abstract scheme
+preceded, we may say 'I must go up stairs because of the essential
+aboveness,' just as we may say that the man 'does prudent acts because
+of his ingrained prudence,' or that our ideas 'lead us truly because of
+their intrinsic truth.' But this should not debar us on other occasions
+from using completer forms of description. A concrete matter of fact
+always remains identical under any form of description, as when we say
+of a line, now that it runs from left to right, and now that it runs
+from right to left. These are but names of one and the same fact, one
+more expedient to use at one time, one at another. The full facts of
+cognition, whatever be the way in which we talk about them, even when
+we talk most abstractly, stand inalterably given in the actualities and
+possibilities of the experience-continuum. [Footnote 1: The ultimate
+object or terminus of a cognitive process may in certain instances lie
+beyond the direct experience of the particular cognizer, but it, of
+course, must exist as part of the total universe of experience whose
+constitution, with cognition in it, the critic is discussing.] But my
+critics treat my own more concrete talk as if IT were the kind that
+sinned by its inadequacy, and as if the full continuum left something
+out.
+
+A favorite way of opposing the more abstract to the more concrete
+account is to accuse those who favor the latter of 'confounding
+psychology with logic.' Our critics say that when we are asked what
+truth MEANS, we reply by telling only how it is ARRIVED-AT. But since a
+meaning is a logical relation, static, independent of time, how can it
+possibly be identified, they say, with any concrete man's experience,
+perishing as this does at the instant of its production? This, indeed,
+sounds profound, but I challenge the profundity. I defy any one to show
+any difference between logic and psychology here. The logical relation
+stands to the psychological relation between idea and object only as
+saltatory abstractness stands to ambulatory concreteness. Both relations
+need a psychological vehicle; and the 'logical' one is simply the
+'psychological' one disemboweled of its fulness, and reduced to a bare
+abstractional scheme.
+
+A while ago a prisoner, on being released, tried to assassinate the
+judge who had sentenced him. He had apparently succeeded in conceiving
+the judge timelessly, had reduced him to a bare logical meaning, that
+of being his 'enemy and persecutor,' by stripping off all the concrete
+conditions (as jury's verdict, official obligation, absence of personal
+spite, possibly sympathy) that gave its full psychological character to
+the sentence as a particular man's act in time. Truly the sentence WAS
+inimical to the culprit; but which idea of it is the truer one, that
+bare logical definition of it, or its full psychological specification?
+The anti-pragmatists ought in consistency to stand up for the criminal's
+view of the case, treat the judge as the latter's logical enemy, and bar
+out the other conditions as so much inessential psychological stuff.
+
+II
+
+A still further obstacle, I suspect, stands in the way of my account's
+acceptance. Like Dewey and like Schiller, I have had to say that
+the truth of an idea is determined by its satisfactoriness. But
+satisfactoriness is a subjective term, just as idea is; and truth
+is generally regarded as 'objective.' Readers who admit that
+satisfactoriness is our only MARK of truth, the only sign that we
+possess the precious article, will still say that the objective relation
+between idea and object which the word 'truth' points to is left out of
+my account altogether. I fear also that the association of my poor name
+with the 'will to believe' (which 'will,' it seems to me, ought to play
+no part in this discussion) works against my credit in some quarters.
+I fornicate with that unclean thing, my adversaries may think, whereas
+your genuine truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan heroics, and feel as
+if truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of death to
+all our satisfactions. Such divergences certainly prove the complexity
+of the area of our discussion; but to my mind they also are based on
+misunderstandings, which (tho with but little hope of success) I will
+try to diminish by a further word of explanation.
+
+First, then, I will ask my objectors to define exactly what SORT of
+thing it is they have in mind when they speak of a truth that shall be
+absolute, complete and objective; and then I will defy them to show me
+any conceivable standing-room for such a kind of truth outside the terms
+of my own description. It will fall, as I contend, entirely within the
+field of my analysis.
+
+To begin with, it must obtain between an idea and a reality that is the
+idea's object; and, as a predicate, it must apply to the idea and not
+to the object, for objective realities are not TRUE, at least not in the
+universe of discourse to which we are now confining ourselves, for there
+they are taken as simply BEING, while the ideas are true OF them. But we
+can suppose a series of ideas to be successively more and more true
+of the same object, and can ask what is the extreme approach to being
+absolutely true that the last idea might attain to.
+
+The maximal conceivable truth in an idea would seem to be that it should
+lead to an actual merging of ourselves with the object, to an utter
+mutual confluence and identification. On the common-sense level
+of belief this is what is supposed really to take place in
+sense-perception. My idea of this pen verifies itself through
+my percept; and my percept is held to BE the pen for the time
+being--percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as
+identical. But the physiology of the senses has criticised common sense
+out of court, and the pen 'in itself' is now believed to lie beyond my
+momentary percept. Yet the notion once suggested, of what a completely
+consummated acquaintance with a reality might be like, remains over for
+our speculative purposes. TOTAL CONFLUX OF THE MIND WITH THE REALITY
+would be the absolute limit of truth, there could be no better or more
+satisfying knowledge than that.
+
+Such total conflux, it is needless to say, is ALREADY EXPLICITLY
+PROVIDED FOR, AS A POSSIBILITY, IN MY ACCOUNT OF THE MATTER. If an idea
+should ever lead us not only TOWARDS, or UP TO, or AGAINST, a reality,
+but so close that we and the reality should MELT TOGETHER, it would be
+made absolutely true, according to me, by that performance.
+
+In point of fact philosophers doubt that this ever occurs. What happens,
+they think, is only that we get nearer and nearer to realities,
+we approximate more and more to the all-satisfying limit; and the
+definition of actually, as distinguished from imaginably, complete and
+objective truth, can then only be that it belongs to the idea that
+will lead us as CLOSE UP AGAINST THE OBJECT as in the nature of our
+experience is possible, literally NEXT to it, for instance.
+
+Suppose, now, there were an idea that did this for a certain objective
+reality. Suppose that no further approach were possible, that nothing
+lay between, that the next step would carry us right INTO the reality;
+then that result, being the next thing to conflux, would make the idea
+true in the maximal degree that might be supposed practically attainable
+in the world which we inhabit.
+
+Well, I need hardly explain that THAT DEGREE OF TRUTH IS ALSO PROVIDED
+FOR IN MY ACCOUNT OF THE MATTER. And if satisfactions are the marks of
+truth's presence, we may add that any less true substitute for such a
+true idea would prove less satisfactory. Following its lead, we should
+probably find out that we did not quite touch the terminus. We should
+desiderate a closer approach, and not rest till we had found it.
+
+I am, of course, postulating here a standing reality independent of the
+idea that knows it. I am also postulating that satisfactions grow pari
+passu with our approximation to such reality. [Footnote 1: Say, if
+you prefer to, that DISsatisfactions decrease pari passu with
+such approximation. The approximation may be of any kind
+assignable--approximation in time or in space, or approximation in kind,
+which in common speech means 'copying.'] If my critics challenge this
+latter assumption, I retort upon them with the former. Our whole notion
+of a standing reality grows up in the form of an ideal limit to the
+series of successive termini to which our thoughts have led us and
+still are leading us. Each terminus proves provisional by leaving us
+unsatisfied. The truer idea is the one that pushes farther; so we
+are ever beckoned on by the ideal notion of an ultimate completely
+satisfactory terminus. I, for one, obey and accept that notion. I can
+conceive no other objective CONTENT to the notion of ideally perfect
+truth than that of penetration into such a terminus, nor can I conceive
+that the notion would ever have grown up, or that true ideas would ever
+have been sorted out from false or idle ones, save for the greater
+sum of satisfactions, intellectual or practical, which the truer ones
+brought with them. Can we imagine a man absolutely satisfied with an
+idea and with all its relations to his other ideas and to his sensible
+experiences, who should yet not take its content as a true account of
+reality? The matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the
+matter of the satisfactory. You may put either word first in your ways
+of talking; but leave out that whole notion of SATISFACTORY WORKING or
+LEADING (which is the essence of my pragmatistic account) and call truth
+a static logical relation, independent even of POSSIBLE leadings or
+satisfactions, and it seems to me you cut all ground from under you.
+
+I fear that I am still very obscure. But I respectfully implore those
+who reject my doctrine because they can make nothing of my stumbling
+language, to tell us in their own name--und zwar very concretely and
+articulately!--just how the real, genuine and absolutely 'objective'
+truth which they believe in so profoundly, is constituted and
+established. They mustn't point to the 'reality' itself, for truth is
+only our subjective relation to realities. What is the nominal
+essence of this relation, its logical definition, whether or not it be
+'objectively' attainable by mortals?
+
+Whatever they may say it is, I have the firmest faith that my account
+will prove to have allowed for it and included it by anticipation, as
+one possible case in the total mixture of cases. There is, in short,
+no ROOM for any grade or sort of truth outside of the framework of
+the pragmatic system, outside of that jungle of empirical workings and
+leadings, and their nearer or ulterior terminations, of which I seem to
+have written so unskilfully.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH
+
+I
+
+[Footnote: Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, etc., August 15,
+1907 (vol. iv, p. 464).]
+
+Professor J. B. Pratt's paper in the Journal of Philosophy for June 6,
+1907, is so brilliantly written that its misconception of the pragmatist
+position seems doubly to call for a reply.
+
+He asserts that, for a pragmatist, truth cannot be a relation between
+an idea and a reality outside and transcendent of the idea, but must
+lie 'altogether within experience,' where it will need 'no reference to
+anything else to justify it'--no reference to the object, apparently.
+The pragmatist must 'reduce everything to psychology,' aye, and to the
+psychology of the immediate moment. He is consequently debarred from
+saying that an idea that eventually gets psychologically verified WAS
+already true before the process of verifying was complete; and he is
+equally debarred from treating an idea as true provisionally so long as
+he only believes that he CAN verify it whenever he will.
+
+Whether such a pragmatist as this exists, I know not, never having
+myself met with the beast. We can define terms as we like; and if that
+be my friend Pratt's definition of a pragmatist, I can only concur with
+his anti-pragmatism. But, in setting up the weird type, he quotes words
+from me; so, in order to escape being classed by some reader along with
+so asinine a being, I will reassert my own view of truth once more.
+
+Truth is essentially a relation between two things, an idea, on the one
+hand, and a reality outside of the idea, on the other. This relation,
+like all relations, has its fundamentum, namely, the matrix of
+experiential circumstance, psychological as well as physical, in which
+the correlated terms are found embedded. In the case of the relation
+between 'heir' and 'legacy' the fundamentum is a world in which there
+was a testator, and in which there is now a will and an executor; in the
+case of that between idea and object, it is a world with circumstances
+of a sort to make a satisfactory verification process, lying around
+and between the two terms. But just as a man may be called an heir and
+treated as one before the executor has divided the estate, so an idea
+may practically be credited with truth before the verification process
+has been exhaustively carried out--the existence of the mass of
+verifying circumstance is enough. Where potentiality counts for
+actuality in so many other cases, one does not see why it may not so
+count here. We call a man benevolent not only for his kind acts paid in,
+but for his readiness to perform others; we treat an idea as 'luminous'
+not only for the light it has shed, but for that we expect it will
+shed on dark problems. Why should we not equally trust the truth of our
+ideas? We live on credits everywhere; and we use our ideas far oftener
+for calling up things connected with their immediate objects, than for
+calling up those objects themselves. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred
+the only use we should make of the object itself, if we were led up to
+it by our idea, would be to pass on to those connected things by its
+means. So we continually curtail verification-processes, letting our
+belief that they are possible suffice.
+
+What CONSTITUTES THE RELATION known as truth, I now say, is just the
+EXISTENCE IN THE EMPIRICAL WORLD OF THIS FUNDAMENTUM OF CIRCUMSTANCE
+SURROUNDING OBJECT AND IDEA and ready to be either short-circuited
+or traversed at full length. So long as it exists, and a satisfactory
+passage through it between the object and the idea is possible, that
+idea will both BE true, and will HAVE BEEN true of that object, whether
+fully developed verification has taken place or not. The nature and
+place and affinities of the object of course play as vital a part in
+making the particular passage possible as do the nature and associative
+tendencies of the idea; so that the notion that truth could fall
+altogether inside of the thinker's private experience and be something
+purely psychological, is absurd. It is BETWEEN the idea and the object
+that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms.
+
+But the 'intellectualistic' position, if I understand Mr. Pratt rightly,
+is that, altho we can use this fundamentum, this mass of go-between
+experience, for TESTING truth, yet the truth-relation in itself remains
+as something apart. It means, in Mr. Pratt's words, merely 'THIS SIMPLE
+THING THAT THE OBJECT OF WHICH ONE IS THINKING IS AS ONE THINKS IT.'
+
+It seems to me that the word 'as,' which qualifies the relation here,
+and bears the whole 'epistemological' burden, is anything but simple.
+What it most immediately suggests is that the idea should be LIKE the
+object; but most of our ideas, being abstract concepts, bear almost no
+resemblance to their objects. The 'as' must therefore, I should say, be
+usually interpreted functionally, as meaning that the idea shall lead
+us into the same quarters of experience AS the object would. Experience
+leads ever on and on, and objects and our ideas of objects may both
+lead to the same goals. The ideas being in that case shorter cuts, we
+SUBSTITUTE them more and more for their objects; and we habitually waive
+direct verification of each one of them, as their train passes through
+our mind, because if an idea leads AS the object would lead, we can say,
+in Mr. Pratt's words, that in so far forth the object is AS we think it,
+and that the idea, verified thus in so far forth, is true enough.
+
+Mr. Pratt will undoubtedly accept most of these facts, but he will deny
+that they spell pragmatism. Of course, definitions are free to every
+one; but I have myself never meant by the pragmatic view of truth
+anything different from what I now describe; and inasmuch as my use of
+the term came earlier than my friend's, I think it ought to have the
+right of way. But I suspect that Professor Pratt's contention is not
+solely as to what one must think in order to be called a pragmatist. I
+am cure that he believes that the truth-relation has something MORE in
+it than the fundamentum which I assign can account for. Useful to
+test truth by, the matrix of circumstance, he thinks, cannot found the
+truth-relation in se, for that is trans-empirical and 'saltatory.'
+
+Well, take an object and an idea, and assume that the latter is true of
+the former--as eternally and absolutely true as you like. Let the object
+be as much 'as' the idea thinks it, as it is possible for one thing to
+be 'as' another. I now formally ask of Professor Pratt to tell what this
+'as'-ness in itself CONSISTS in--for it seems to me that it ought to
+consist in something assignable and describable, and not remain a pure
+mystery, and I promise that if he can assign any determination of it
+whatever which I cannot successfully refer to some specification of what
+in this article I have called the empirical fundamentum, I will confess
+my stupidity cheerfully, and will agree never to publish a line upon
+this subject of truth again.
+
+
+II
+
+Professor Pratt has returned to the charge in a whole book, [Footnote
+1: J. B. Pratt: What is Pragmatism. New York, The Macmillan Company,
+1909.--The comments I have printed were written in March, 1909, after
+some of the articles printed later in the present volume.] which for
+its clearness and good temper deserves to supersede all the rest of
+the anti-pragmatistic literature. I wish it might do so; for its author
+admits all MY essential contentions, simply distinguishing my account
+of truth as 'modified' pragmatism from Schiller's and Dewey's, which he
+calls pragmatism of the 'radical' sort. As I myself understand Dewey and
+Schiller, our views absolutely agree, in spite of our different modes of
+statement; but I have enough trouble of my own in life without having to
+defend my friends, so I abandon them provisionally to the tender mercy
+of Professor Pratt's interpretations, utterly erroneous tho I deem these
+to be. My reply as regards myself can be very short, for I prefer to
+consider only essentials, and Dr. Pratt's whole book hardly takes the
+matter farther than the article to which I retort in Part I of the
+present paper.
+
+He repeats the 'as'-formula, as if it were something that I, along with
+other pragmatists, had denied, [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 77-80.] whereas
+I have only asked those who insist so on its importance to do something
+more than merely utter it--to explicate it, for example, and tell us
+what its so great importance consists in. I myself agree most cordially
+that for an idea to be true the object must be 'as' the idea declares
+it, but I explicate the 'as'-ness as meaning the idea's verifiability.
+
+Now since Dr. Pratt denies none of these verifying 'workings' for which
+I have pleaded, but only insists on their inability to serve as the
+fundamentum of the truth-relation, it seems that there is really nothing
+in the line of FACT about which we differ, and that the issue between us
+is solely as to how far the notion of workableness or verifiability
+is an essential part of the notion of 'trueness'--'trueness' being Dr.
+Pratt's present name for the character of as-ness in the true idea.
+I maintain that there is no meaning left in this notion of as-ness or
+trueness if no reference to the possibility of concrete working on the
+part of the idea is made.
+
+Take an example where there can be no possible working. Suppose I have
+an idea to which I give utterance by the vocable 'skrkl,' claiming at
+the same time that it is true. Who now can say that it is FALSE, for why
+may there not be somewhere in the unplumbed depths of the cosmos some
+object with which 'skrkl' can agree and have trueness in Dr. Pratt's
+sense? On the other hand who can say that it is TRUE, for who can lay
+his hand on that object and show that it and nothing else is what I MEAN
+by my word? But yet again, who can gainsay any one who shall call my
+word utterly IRRELATIVE to other reality, and treat it as a bare fact in
+my mind, devoid of any cognitive function whatever. One of these
+three alternatives must surely be predicated of it. For it not to be
+irrelevant (or not-cognitive in nature), an object of some kind must be
+provided which it may refer to. Supposing that object provided, whether
+'skrkl' is true or false of it, depends, according to Professor Pratt,
+on no intermediating condition whatever. The trueness or the falsity is
+even now immediately, absolutely, and positively there.
+
+I, on the other hand, demand a cosmic environment of some kind to
+establish which of them is there rather than utter irrelevancy.
+[Footnote: Dr. Pratt, singularly enough, disposes of this primal
+postulate of all pragmatic epistemology, by saying that the pragmatist
+'unconsciously surrenders his whole case by smuggling in the idea of a
+conditioning environment which determines whether or not the experience
+can work, and which cannot itself be identified with the experience or
+any part of it' (pp. 167-168). The 'experience' means here of course the
+idea, or belief; and the expression 'smuggling in' is to the last degree
+diverting. If any epistemologist could dispense with a conditioning
+environment, it would seem to be the antipragmatist, with his immediate
+saltatory trueness, independent of work done. The mediating pathway
+which the environment supplies is the very essence of the pragmatist's
+explanation.] I then say, first, that unless some sort of a natural path
+exists between the 'skrkl' and THAT object, distinguishable among the
+innumerable pathways that run among all the realities of the universe,
+linking them promiscuously with one another, there is nothing there to
+constitute even the POSSIBILITY OF ITS REFERRING to that object rather
+than to any other.
+
+I say furthermore that unless it have some TENDENCY TO FOLLOW UP THAT
+PATH, there is nothing to constitute its INTENTION to refer to the
+object in question.
+
+Finally, I say that unless the path be strown with possibilities
+of frustration or encouragement, and offer some sort of terminal
+satisfaction or contradiction, there is nothing to constitute its
+agreement or disagreement with that object, or to constitute the as-ness
+(or 'not-as-ness') in which the trueness (or falseness) is said to
+consist.
+
+I think that Dr. Pratt ought to do something more than repeat the name
+'trueness,' in answer to my pathetic question whether that there be not
+some CONSTITUTION to a relation as important as this. The pathway, the
+tendency, the corroborating or contradicting progress, need not in every
+case be experienced in full, but I don't see, if the universe doesn't
+contain them among its possibilities of furniture, what LOGICAL MATERIAL
+FOR DEFINING the trueness of my idea is left. But if it do contain them,
+they and they only are the logical material required.
+
+I am perplexed by the superior importance which Dr. Pratt attributes
+to abstract trueness over concrete verifiability in an idea, and I wish
+that he might be moved to explain. It is prior to verification, to be
+sure, but so is the verifiability for which I contend prior, just as a
+man's 'mortality' (which is nothing but the possibility of his death) is
+prior to his death, but it can hardly be that this abstract priority of
+all possibility to its correlative fact is what so obstinate a quarrel
+is about. I think it probable that Dr. Pratt is vaguely thinking
+of something concreter than this. The trueness of an idea must mean
+SOMETHING DEFINITE IN IT THAT DETERMINES ITS TENDENCY TO WORK, and
+indeed towards this object rather than towards that. Undoubtedly there
+is something of this sort in the idea, just as there is something in man
+that accounts for his tendency towards death, and in bread that accounts
+for its tendency to nourish. What that something is in the case of truth
+psychology tells us: the idea has associates peculiar to itself, motor
+as well as ideational; it tends by its place and nature to call these
+into being, one after another; and the appearance of them in succession
+is what we mean by the 'workings' of the idea. According to what they
+are, does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to
+light. These tendencies have still earlier conditions which, in a
+general way, biology, psychology and biography can trace. This whole
+chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things
+in which new relations, not simply causal, can now be found, or into
+which they can now be introduced,--the relations namely which we
+epistemologists study, relations of adaptation, of substitutability, of
+instrumentality, of reference and of truth.
+
+The prior causal conditions, altho there could be no knowing of any
+kind, true or false, without them, are but preliminary to the question
+of what makes the ideas true or false when once their tendencies have
+been obeyed. The tendencies must exist in some shape anyhow, but their
+fruits are truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, according to what they
+concretely turn out to be. They are not 'saltatory' at any rate, for
+they evoke their consequences contiguously, from next to next only; and
+not until the final result of the whole associative sequence, actual
+or potential, is in our mental sight, can we feel sure what its
+epistemological significance, if it have any, may be. True knowing is,
+in fine, not substantially, in itself, or 'as such,' inside of the idea
+from the first, any more than mortality AS SUCH is inside of the man, or
+nourishment AS SUCH inside of the bread. Something else is there first,
+that practically MAKES FOR knowing, dying or nourishing, as the case may
+be. That something is the 'nature' namely of the first term, be it idea,
+man, or bread, that operates to start the causal chain of processes
+which, when completed, is the complex fact to which we give whatever
+functional name best fits the case. Another nature, another chain of
+cognitive workings; and then either another object known or the same
+object known differently, will ensue.
+
+Dr. Pratt perplexes me again by seeming to charge Dewey and Schiller
+[Footnote: Page 200] (I am not sure that he charges me) with an account
+of truth which would allow the object believed in not to exist, even
+if the belief in it were true. 'Since the truth of an idea,' he writes,
+'means merely the fact that the idea works, that fact is all that you
+mean when you say the idea is true' (p. 206). 'WHEN YOU SAY THE IDEA IS
+TRUE'--does that mean true for YOU, the critic, or true for the believer
+whom you are describing? The critic's trouble over this seems to come
+from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist
+always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' 'But is the
+object REALLY true or not?'--the critic then seems to ask,--as if
+the pragmatist were bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of his
+epistemology and tell us what realities indubitably exist. 'One world at
+a time,' would seem to be the right reply here.
+
+One other trouble of Dr. Pratt's must be noticed. It concerns the
+'transcendence' of the object. When our ideas have worked so as to bring
+us flat up against the object, NEXT to it, 'is our relation to it then
+ambulatory or saltatory?' Dr. Pratt asks. If YOUR headache be my object,
+'MY experiences break off where yours begin,' Dr. Pratt writes,
+and 'this fact is of great importance, for it bars out the sense of
+transition and fulfilment which forms so important an element in the
+pragmatist description of knowledge--the sense of fulfilment due to a
+continuous passage from the original idea to the known object. If this
+comes at all when I know your headache, it comes not with the object,
+but quite on my side of the "epistemological gulf." The gulf is still
+there to be transcended.' (p. 158).
+
+Some day of course, or even now somewhere in the larger life of
+the universe, different men's headaches may become confluent or be
+'co-conscious.' Here and now, however, headaches do transcend each other
+and, when not felt, can be known only conceptually. My idea is that
+you really have a headache; it works well with what I see of your
+expression, and with what I hear you say; but it doesn't put me in
+possession of the headache itself. I am still at one remove, and the
+headache 'transcends' me, even tho it be in nowise transcendent of human
+experience generally. Bit the 'gulf' here is that which the pragmatist
+epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses, by
+saying there must be an object and an idea. The idea however doesn't
+immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next to next so as to
+bridge it, fully or approximately. If it bridges it, in the pragmatist's
+vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be called a 'true' idea.
+If it only MIGHT bridge it, but doesn't, or if it throws a bridge
+distinctly AT it, it still has, in the onlooking pragmatist's eyes, what
+Professor Pratt calls 'trueness.' But to ask the pragmatist thereupon
+whether, when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object, it is
+REALLY true or has REAL trueness,--in other words whether the headache
+he supposes, and supposes the thinker he supposes, to believe in, be
+a real headache or not,--is to step from his hypothetical universe of
+discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MISUNDERSTANDERS [Footnote:
+Reprint from the Philosophical Review, January, 1908 (vol. xvii, p. 1).]
+
+The account of truth given in my volume entitled Pragmatism,
+continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that I
+am tempted to make a final brief reply. My ideas may well deserve
+refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in their
+proper shape. The fantastic character of the current misconceptions
+shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism
+assumes. Persons who are familiar with a conception move about so
+easily in it that they understand each other at a hint, and can converse
+without anxiously attending to their P's and Q's. I have to admit, in
+view of the results, that we have assumed too ready an intelligence,
+and consequently in many places used a language too slipshod. We should
+never have spoken elliptically. The critics have boggled at every word
+they could boggle at, and refused to take the spirit rather than the
+letter of our discourse. This seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in
+the whole point of view. It also shows, I think, that the second stage
+of opposition, which has already begun to express itself in the stock
+phrase that 'what is new is not true, and what is true not new,' in
+pragmatism, is insincere. If we said nothing in any degree new, why
+was our meaning so desperately hard to catch? The blame cannot be laid
+wholly upon our obscurity of speech, for in other subjects we have
+attained to making ourselves understood. But recriminations are
+tasteless; and, as far as I personally am concerned, I am sure that some
+of the misconception I complain of is due to my doctrine of truth being
+surrounded in that volume of popular lectures by a lot of other opinions
+not necessarily implicated with it, so that a reader may very naturally
+have grown confused. For this I am to blame,--likewise for omitting
+certain explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part
+supply.
+
+FIRST MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IS ONLY A RE-EDITING OF POSITIVISM.
+
+This seems the commonest mistake. Scepticism, positivism, and
+agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing
+that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means, without further
+explanation. But the former doctrines then either suggest or declare
+that real truth, absolute truth, is inaccessible to us, and that we
+must fain put up with relative or phenomenal truth as its next best
+substitute. By scepticism this is treated as an unsatisfactory state of
+affairs, while positivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it, call
+real truth sour grapes, and consider phenomenal truth quite sufficient
+for all our 'practical' purposes.
+
+In point of fact, nothing could be farther from all this than what
+pragmatism has to say of truth. Its thesis is an altogether previous
+one. It leaves off where these other theories begin, having contented
+itself with the word truth's DEFINITION. 'No matter whether any mind
+extant in the universe possess truth or not,' it asks, 'what does
+the notion of truth signify IDEALLY?' 'What kind of things would true
+judgments be IN CASE they existed?' The answer which pragmatism offers
+is intended to cover the most complete truth that can be conceived of,
+'absolute' truth if you like, as well as truth of the most relative and
+imperfect description. This question of what truth would be like if it
+did exist, belongs obviously to a purely speculative field of inquiry.
+It is not a theory about any sort of reality, or about what kind of
+knowledge is actually possible; it abstracts from particular terms
+altogether, and defines the nature of a possible relation between two of
+them.
+
+As Kant's question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous
+philosophers, so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to
+have escaped attention hitherto, but even so subtile, it would seem,
+that when openly broached now, dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to
+apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist to be treating of something wholly
+different. He insists, they say (I quote an actual critic), 'that the
+greater problems are insoluble by human intelligence, that our need of
+knowing truly is artificial and illusory, and that our reason, incapable
+of reaching the foundations of reality, must turn itself exclusively
+towards ACTION.' There could not be a worse misapprehension.
+
+SECOND MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IS PRIMARILY AN APPEAL TO ACTION.
+
+The name 'pragmatism,' with its suggestions of action, has been an
+unfortunate choice, I have to admit, and has played into the hands of
+this mistake. But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so
+blind to the nature of the inquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of
+ideas 'working' well, the only thing they think of is their immediate
+workings in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money,
+or gain some similar 'practical' advantage. Ideas do work thus, of
+course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside of
+the mental world also. Not crediting us with this rudimentary insight,
+our critics treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers,
+doctors, financiers, and men of action generally, who need some sort
+of a rough and ready weltanschauung, but have no time or wit to study
+genuine philosophy. It is usually described as a characteristically
+American movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently
+fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants
+cash returns immediately.
+
+It is quite true that, when the refined theoretic question that
+pragmatism begins with is once answered, secondary corollaries of a
+practical sort follow. Investigation shows that, in the function called
+truth, previous realities are not the only independent variables. To
+a certain extent our ideas, being realities, are also independent
+variables, and, just as they follow other reality and fit it, so, in
+a measure, does other reality follow and fit them. When they add
+themselves to being, they partly redetermine the existent, so that
+reality as a whole appears incompletely definable unless ideas also
+are kept account of. This pragmatist doctrine, exhibiting our ideas
+as complemental factors of reality, throws open (since our ideas are
+instigators of our action) a wide window upon human action, as well as a
+wide license to originality in thought. But few things could be sillier
+than to ignore the prior epistemological edifice in which the window is
+built, or to talk as if pragmatism began and ended at the window. This,
+nevertheless, is what our critics do almost without exception. They
+ignore our primary step and its motive, and make the relation to action,
+which is our secondary achievement, primary.
+
+THIRD MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISTS CUT THEMSELVES OFF FROM THE RIGHT TO
+BELIEVE IN EJECTIVE REALITIES.
+
+They do so, according to the critics, by making the truth of our beliefs
+consist in their verifiability, and their verifiability in the way in
+which they do work for us. Professor Stout, in his otherwise admirable
+and hopeful review of Schiller in Mind for October, 1897, considers that
+this ought to lead Schiller (could he sincerely realize the effects of
+his own doctrine) to the absurd consequence of being unable to believe
+genuinely in another man's headache, even were the headache there.
+He can only 'postulate' it for the sake of the working value of the
+postulate to himself. The postulate guides certain of his acts and leads
+to advantageous consequences; but the moment he understands fully that
+the postulate is true ONLY (!) in this sense, it ceases (or should
+cease) to be true for him that the other man really HAS a headache. All
+that makes the postulate most precious then evaporates: his interest in
+his fellow-man 'becomes a veiled form of self-interest, and his world
+grows cold, dull, and heartless.'
+
+Such an objection makes a curious muddle of the pragmatist's universe
+of discourse. Within that universe the pragmatist finds some one with
+a headache or other feeling, and some one else who postulates that
+feeling. Asking on what condition the postulate is 'true' the pragmatist
+replies that, for the postulator at any rate, it is true just
+in proportion as to believe in it works in him the fuller sum of
+satisfactions. What is it that is satisfactory here? Surely to BELIEVE
+in the postulated object, namely, in the really existing feeling of
+the other man. But how (especially if the postulator were himself a
+thoroughgoing pragmatist) could it ever be satisfactory to him NOT
+to believe in that feeling, so long as, in Professor Stout's words,
+disbelief 'made the world seem to him cold, dull, and heartless'?
+Disbelief would seem, on pragmatist principles, quite out of the
+question under such conditions, unless the heartlessness of the world
+were made probable already on other grounds. And since the belief in the
+headache, true for the subject assumed in the pragmatist's universe of
+discourse, is also true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing
+purposes has assumed that entire universe, why is it not true in that
+universe absolutely? The headache believed in is a reality there, and no
+extant mind disbelieves it, neither the critic's mind nor his subject's!
+Have our opponents any better brand of truth in this real universe of
+ours that they can show us? [Footnote: I see here a chance to forestall
+a criticism which some one may make on Lecture III of my Pragmatism,
+where, on pp. 96-100, I said that 'God' and 'Matter' might be regarded
+as synonymous terms, so long as no differing future consequences were
+deducible from the two conceptions. The passage was transcribed from my
+address at the California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal
+of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. I had no sooner given the address than
+I perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage
+unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative
+value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a
+godless universe, I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart,'
+meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable
+from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing
+us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if
+a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent?
+Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves
+above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration.
+The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a
+manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in.
+Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work,
+and is point of fact no one treats it as a serious hypothesis. The
+godless universe would be exactly similar. Even if matter could do
+every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as
+satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern men's part
+is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them
+sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God
+remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for
+definite pragmatic reasons.]
+
+So much for the third misunderstanding, which is but one specification
+of the following still wider one.
+
+FOURTH MISUNDERSTANDING: NO PRAGMATIST CAN BE A REALIST IN HIS
+EPISTEMOLOGY.
+
+This is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our
+beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction. Of course
+satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; so the conclusion is
+drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject, who then may
+manufacture it at his pleasure. True beliefs become thus wayward
+affections, severed from all responsibility to other parts of
+experience.
+
+It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion,
+ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse.
+The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any
+non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there.
+The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with
+ideas. What, now, he asks, can make those ideas true of that reality?
+Ordinary epistemology contents itself with the vague statement that the
+ideas must 'correspond' or 'agree'; the pragmatist insists on being more
+concrete, and asks what such 'agreement' may mean in detail. He finds
+first that the ideas must point to or lead towards THAT reality and no
+other, and then that the pointings and leadings must yield satisfaction
+as their result. So far the pragmatist is hardly less abstract than the
+ordinary slouchy epistemologist; but as he defines himself farther, he
+grows more concrete. The entire quarrel of the intellectualist with him
+is over his concreteness, intellectualism contending that the vaguer and
+more abstract account is here the more profound. The concrete pointing
+and leading are conceived by the pragmatist to be the work of other
+portions of the same universe to which the reality and the mind belong,
+intermediary verifying bits of experience with which the mind at one
+end, and the reality at the other, are joined. The 'satisfaction,' in
+turn, is no abstract satisfaction ueberhaupt, felt by an unspecified
+being, but is assumed to consist of such satisfactions (in the plural)
+as concretely existing men actually do find in their beliefs. As we
+humans are constituted in point of fact, we find that to believe in
+other men's minds, in independent physical realities, in past events, in
+eternal logical relations, is satisfactory. We find hope satisfactory.
+We often find it satisfactory to cease to doubt. Above all we find
+CONSISTENCY satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the
+entire rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our
+sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and
+our whole stock of previously acquired truths.
+
+The pragmatist, being himself a man, and imagining in general no
+contrary lines of truer belief than ours about the 'reality' which he
+has laid at the base of his epistemological discussion, is willing to
+treat our satisfactions as possibly really true guides to it, not as
+guides true solely for US. It would seem here to be the duty of his
+critics to show with some explicitness why, being our subjective
+feelings, these satisfactions can not yield 'objective' truth. The
+beliefs which they accompany 'posit' the assumed reality, 'correspond'
+and 'agree' with it, and 'fit' it in perfectly definite and assignable
+ways, through the sequent trains of thought and action which form
+their verification, so merely to insist on using these words abstractly
+instead of concretely is no way of driving the pragmatist from the
+field,--his more concrete account virtually includes his critic's. If
+our critics have any definite idea of a truth more objectively grounded
+than the kind we propose, why do they not show it more articulately?
+As they stand, they remind one of Hegel's man who wanted 'fruit,' but
+rejected cherries, pears, and grapes, because they were not fruit in the
+abstract. We offer them the full quart-pot, and they cry for the empty
+quart-capacity.
+
+But here I think I hear some critic retort as follows: 'If satisfactions
+are all that is needed to make truth, how about the notorious fact that
+errors are so often satisfactory? And how about the equally notorious
+fact that certain true beliefs may cause the bitterest dissatisfaction?
+Isn't it clear that not the satisfaction which it gives, but the
+relation of the belief TO THE REALITY is all that makes it true? Suppose
+there were no such reality, and that the satisfactions yet remained:
+would they not then effectively work falsehood? Can they consequently be
+treated distinctively as the truth-builders? It is the INHERENT RELATION
+TO REALITY of a belief that gives us that specific TRUTH-satisfaction,
+compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest humbug.
+The satisfaction of KNOWING TRULY is thus the only one which the
+pragmatist ought to have considered. As a PSYCHOLOGICAL SENTIMENT,
+the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then only as a
+concomitant of truth, not as a constituent. What CONSTITUTES truth
+is not the sentiment, but the purely logical or objective function of
+rightly cognizing the reality, and the pragmatist's failure to reduce
+this function to lower values is patent.'
+
+Such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me a tissue of confusion. To begin
+with, when the pragmatist says 'indispensable,' it confounds this with
+'sufficient.' The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for
+truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless
+reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were
+cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse, he would
+straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in
+spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critic, there
+can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so
+much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives
+them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully
+posited 'reality' AB INITIO, and why, throughout my whole discussion, I
+remain an epistemological realist. [Footnote: I need hardly remind
+the reader that both sense-percepts and percepts of ideal relation
+(comparisons, etc.) should be classed among the realities. The bulk of
+our mental 'stock' consists of truths concerning these terms.]
+
+The anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further confusion of imagining
+that, in undertaking to give him an account of what truth formally
+means, we are assuming at the same time to provide a warrant for
+it, trying to define the occasions when he can be sure of materially
+possessing it. Our making it hinge on a reality so 'independent' that
+when it comes, truth comes, and when it goes, truth goes with it,
+disappoints this naive expectation, so he deems our description
+unsatisfactory. I suspect that under this confusion lies the still
+deeper one of not discriminating sufficiently between the two notions,
+truth and reality. Realities are not TRUE, they ARE; and beliefs are
+true OF them. But I suspect that in the anti-pragmatist mind the two
+notions sometimes swap their attributes. The reality itself, I fear, is
+treated as if 'true' and conversely. Whoso tells us of the one, it is
+then supposed, must also be telling us of the other; and a true idea
+must in a manner BE, or at least YIELD without extraneous aid, the
+reality it cognitively is possessed of.
+
+To this absolute-idealistic demand pragmatism simply opposes its non
+possumus. If there is to be truth, it says, both realities and beliefs
+about them must conspire to make it; but whether there ever is such a
+thing, or how anyone can be sure that his own beliefs possess it, it
+never pretends to determine. That truth-satisfaction par excellence
+which may tinge a belief unsatisfactory in other ways, it easily
+explains as the feeling of consistency with the stock of previous
+truths, or supposed truths, of which one's whole past experience may
+have left one in possession.
+
+But are not all pragmatists sure that their own belief is right? their
+enemies will ask at this point; and this leads me to the
+
+FIFTH MISUNDERSTANDING: WHAT PRAGMATISTS SAY IS INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR
+SAYING SO.
+
+A correspondent puts this objection as follows: 'When you say to your
+audience, "pragmatism is the truth concerning truth," the first truth is
+different from the second. About the first you and they are not to be at
+odds; you are not giving them liberty to take or leave it according as
+it works satisfactorily or not for their private uses. Yet the second
+truth, which ought to describe and include the first, affirms this
+liberty. Thus the INTENT of your utterance seems to contradict the
+CONTENT of it.'
+
+General scepticism has always received this same classic refutation.
+'You have to dogmatize,' the rationalists say to the sceptics,' whenever
+you express the sceptical position; so your lives keep contradicting
+your thesis.' One would suppose that the impotence of so hoary an
+argument to abate in the slightest degree the amount of general
+scepticism in the world might have led some rationalists themselves to
+doubt whether these instantaneous logical refutations are such
+fatal ways, after all, of killing off live mental attitudes. General
+scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is
+a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each
+successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic
+than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it is
+so irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into
+a formal proposition,--he simply chooses it as a habit. He provokingly
+hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is
+not illogical or stupid,--on the contrary, he often impresses us by his
+intellectual superiority. This is the REAL scepticism that rationalists
+have to meet, and their logic does not even touch it.
+
+No more can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior: his act of utterance,
+so far from contradicting, accurately exemplifies the matter which he
+utters. What is the matter which he utters? In part, it is this, that
+truth, concretely considered, is an attribute of our beliefs, and that
+these are attitudes that follow satisfactions. The ideas around which
+the satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypotheses that
+challenge or summon a belief to come and take its stand upon them.
+The pragmatist's idea of truth is just such a challenge. He finds it
+ultra-satisfactory to accept it, and takes his own stand accordingly.
+But, being gregarious as they are, men seek to spread their beliefs,
+to awaken imitation, to infect others. Why should not YOU also find the
+same belief satisfactory? thinks the pragmatist, and forthwith endeavors
+to convert you. You and he will then believe similarly; you will hold
+up your subject-end of a truth, which will be a truth objective and
+irreversible if the reality holds up the object-end by being itself
+present simultaneously. What there is of self-contradiction in all this
+I confess I cannot discover. The pragmatist's conduct in his own case
+seems to me on the contrary admirably to illustrate his universal
+formula; and of all epistemologists, he is perhaps the only one who is
+irreproachably self-consistent.
+
+SIXTH MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM EXPLAINS NOT WHAT TRUTH IS, BUT ONLY
+HOW IT IS ARRIVED AT.
+
+In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what it is incidentally to
+telling us how it is arrived at,--for what IS arrived at except just
+what the truth is? If I tell you how to get to the railroad station,
+don't I implicitly introduce you to the WHAT, to the being and nature of
+that edifice? It is quite true that the abstract WORD 'how' hasn't
+the same meaning as the abstract WORD 'what,' but in this universe of
+concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats asunder. The reasons why
+I find it satisfactory to believe that any idea is true, the HOW of my
+arriving at that belief, may be among the very reasons why the idea IS
+true in reality. If not, I summon the anti-pragmatist to explain the
+impossibility articulately.
+
+His trouble seems to me mainly to arise from his fixed inability to
+understand how a concrete statement can possibly mean as much, or be as
+valuable, as an abstract one. I said above that the main quarrel between
+us and our critics was that of concreteness VERSUS abstractness. This is
+the place to develop that point farther.
+
+In the present question, the links of experience sequent upon an idea,
+which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist
+indeed ARE, the CONCRETE relation of truth that may obtain between the
+idea and that reality. They, he says, are all that we mean when we speak
+of the idea 'pointing' to the reality, 'fitting' it, 'corresponding'
+with it, or 'agreeing' with it,--they or other similar mediating trains
+of verification. Such mediating events make the idea 'true.' The idea
+itself, if it exists at all, is also a concrete event: so pragmatism
+insists that truth in the singular is only a collective name for truths
+in the plural, these consisting always of series of definite events; and
+that what intellectualism calls the truth, the inherent truth, of any
+one such series is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act,
+for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a
+way that we consider satisfactory.
+
+The pragmatist himself has no objection to abstractions. Elliptically,
+and 'for short,' he relies on them as much as any one, ending upon
+innumerable occasions that their comparative emptiness makes of them
+useful substitutes for the overfulness of the facts he meets, with. But
+he never ascribes to them a higher grade of reality. The full reality
+of a truth for him is always some process of verification, in which the
+abstract property of connecting ideas with objects truly is workingly
+embodied. Meanwhile it is endlessly serviceable to be able to talk of
+properties abstractly and apart from their working, to find them the
+same in innumerable cases, to take them 'out of time,' and to treat
+of their relations to other similar abstractions. We thus form whole
+universes of platonic ideas ante rem, universes in posse, tho none of
+them exists effectively except in rebus. Countless relations obtain
+there which nobody experiences as obtaining,--as, in the eternal
+universe of musical relations, for example, the notes of Aennchen von
+Tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them. Even
+so the music of the future sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter. Or, if
+we take the world of geometrical relations, the thousandth decimal of
+'pi' sleeps there, tho no one may ever try to compute it. Or, if we take
+the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless
+boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically FITTED; countless
+stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually.
+In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths
+are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
+
+For the anti-pragmatist these prior timeless relations are the
+presupposition of the concrete ones, and possess the profounder dignity
+and value. The actual workings of our ideas in verification-processes
+are as naught in comparison with the 'obtainings' of this discarnate
+truth within them.
+
+For the pragmatist, on the contrary,--all discarnate truth is static,
+impotent, and relatively spectral, full truth being the truth that
+energizes and does battle. Can any one suppose that the sleeping quality
+of truth would ever have been abstracted or have received a name, if
+truths had remained forever in that storage-vault of essential timeless
+'agreements' and had never been embodied in any panting struggle of
+men's live ideas for verification? Surely no more than the abstract
+property of 'fitting' would have received a name, if in our world
+there had been no backs or feet or gaps in walls to be actually fitted.
+EXISTENTIAL truth is incidental to the actual competition of opinions.
+ESSENTIAL truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no
+one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried
+it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not
+more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior
+degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse
+abstraction-worship. As well might a pencil insist that the outline
+is the essential thing in all pictorial representation, and chide
+the paint-brush and the camera for omitting it, forgetting that THEIR
+pictures not only contain the whole outline, but a hundred other things
+in addition. Pragmatist truth contains the whole of intellectualist
+truth and a hundred other things in addition. Intellectualist truth is
+then only pragmatist truth in posse. That on innumerable occasions men
+do substitute truth in posse or verifiability, for verification or truth
+in act, is a fact to which no one attributes more importance than the
+pragmatist: he emphasizes the practical utility of such a habit. But
+he does not on that account consider truth in posse,--truth not alive
+enough ever to have been asserted or questioned or contradicted, to be
+the metaphysically prior thing, to which truths in act are tributary and
+subsidiary. When intellectualists do this, pragmatism charges them with
+inverting the real relation. Truth in posse MEANS only truths in act;
+and he insists that these latter take precedence in the order of logic
+as well as in that of being.
+
+SEVENTH MINUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IGNORES THE THEORETICAL INTEREST.
+
+This would seem to be an absolutely wanton slander, were not a
+certain excuse to be found in the linguistic affinities of the word
+'pragmatism,' and in certain offhand habits of speech of ours which
+assumed too great a generosity on our reader's part. When we spoke of
+the meaning of ideas consisting "in their 'practical' consequences",
+or of the 'practical' differences which our beliefs make to us; when we
+said that the truth of a belief consists in its 'working' value, etc.;
+our language evidently was too careless, for by 'practical' we were
+almost unanimously held to mean OPPOSED to theoretical or genuinely
+cognitive, and the consequence was punctually drawn that a truth in our
+eyes could have no relation to any independent reality, or to any other
+truth, or to anything whatever but the acts which we might ground on it
+or the satisfactions they might bring. The mere existence of the idea,
+all by itself, if only its results were satisfactory, would give full
+truth to it, it was charged, in our absurd pragmatist epistemology.
+The solemn attribution of this rubbish to us was also encouraged by two
+other circumstances. First, ideas ARE practically useful in the narrow
+sense, false ideas sometimes, but most often ideas which we can verify
+by the sum total of all their leadings, and the reality of whose objects
+may thus be considered established beyond doubt. That these ideas should
+be true in advance of and apart from their utility, that, in other
+words, their objects should be really there, is the very condition of
+their having that kind of utility,--the objects they connect us with are
+so important that the ideas which serve as the objects' substitutes grow
+important also. This manner of their practical working was the first
+thing that made truths good in the eyes of primitive men; and
+buried among all the other good workings by which true beliefs are
+characterized, this kind of subsequential utility remains.
+
+The second misleading circumstance was the emphasis laid by Schiller
+and Dewey on the fact that, unless a truth be relevant to the mind's
+momentary predicament, unless it be germane to the 'practical'
+situation,--meaning by this the quite particular perplexity,--it is
+no good to urge it. It doesn't meet our interests any better than a
+falsehood would under the same circumstances. But why our predicaments
+and perplexities might not be theoretical here as well as narrowly
+practical, I wish that our critics would explain. They simply assume
+that no pragmatist CAN admit a genuinely theoretic interest. Having used
+the phrase 'cash-value' of an idea, I am implored by one correspondent
+to alter it, 'for every one thinks you mean only pecuniary profit and
+loss.' Having said that the true is 'the expedient in our thinking,' I
+am rebuked in this wise by another learned correspondent:
+
+'The word expedient has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The
+pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national
+banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be
+unsound.'
+
+But the word 'practical' is so habitually loosely used that more
+indulgence might have been expected. When one says that a sick man has
+now practically recovered, or that an enterprise has practically failed,
+one usually means I just the opposite of practically in the literal
+sense. One means that, altho untrue in strict practice, what one says
+is true in theory, true virtually, certain to be true. Again, by the
+practical one often means the distinctively concrete, the individual,
+particular, and effective, as opposed to the abstract, general, and
+inert. To speak for myself, whenever I have emphasized the practical
+nature of truth, this is mainly what has been in my mind. 'Pragmata' are
+things in their plurality; and in that early California address, when I
+described pragmatism as holding that the meaning of any proposition
+can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future
+practical experience, whether passive or active, expressly added these
+qualifying words: the point lying rather in the fact that the experience
+must be particular than in the fact that it must be active,--by 'active'
+meaning here 'practical' in the narrow literal sense. [Footnote: The
+ambiguity of the word 'practical' comes out well in these words of a
+recent would-be reporter of our views: 'Pragmatism is an Anglo-Saxon
+reaction against the intellectualism and rationalism of the Latin
+mind.... Man, each individual man is the measure of things. He is able
+to conceive one but relative truths, that is to say, illusions. What
+these illusions are worth is revealed to him, not by general theory, but
+by individual practice. Pragmatism, which consists in experiencing
+these illusions of the mind and obeying them by acting them out, is a
+PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT WORDS, a philosophy of GESTURES AND OF ACTS,
+which abandons what is general and olds only to what is particular.'
+(Bourdeau, in Journal des. debats, October 89, 1907.)] But particular
+consequences can perfectly well be of a theoretic nature. Every remote
+fact which we infer from an idea is a particular theoretic consequence
+which our mind practically works towards. The loss of every old opinion
+of ours which we see that we shall have to give up if a new opinion
+be true, is a particular theoretic as well as a particular practical
+consequence. After man's interest in breathing freely, the greatest of
+all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits, as most of his
+physical interests do), is his interest in consistency, in feeling
+that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions.
+We tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose. Is the
+present candidate for belief perhaps contradicted by principle number
+one? Is it compatible with fact number two? and so forth. The particular
+operations here are the purely logical ones of analysis, deduction,
+comparison, etc.; and altho general terms may be used ad libitum, the
+satisfactory practical working of the candidate--idea consists in
+the consciousness yielded by each successive theoretic consequence in
+particular. It is therefore simply idiotic to repeat that pragmatism
+takes no account of purely theoretic interests. All it insists on
+is that verity in act means VERIFICATIONS, and that these are always
+particulars. Even in exclusively theoretic matters, it insists that
+vagueness and generality serve to verify nothing.
+
+EIGHTH MISUNDERSTANDING: PRAGMATISM IS SHUT UP TO SOLIPSISM.
+
+I have already said something about this misconception under the third
+and fourth heads, above, but a little more may be helpful. The objection
+is apt to clothe itself in words like these: 'You make truth to consist
+in every value except the cognitive value proper; you always leave your
+knower at many removes (or, at the uttermost, at one remove) from his
+real object; the best you do is to let his ideas carry him towards it;
+it remains forever outside of him,' etc.
+
+I think that the leaven working here is the rooted intellectualist
+persuasion that, to know a reality, an idea must in some inscrutable
+fashion possess or be it. [Footnote: Sensations may, indeed, possess
+their objects or coalesce with them, as common sense supposes that they
+do; and intuited differences between concepts may coalesce with the
+'eternal' objective differences; but to simplify our discussion. here
+we can afford to abstract from these very special cases of knowing.]
+For pragmatism this kind of coalescence is inessential. As a rule our
+cognitions are only processes of mind off their balance and in motion
+towards real termini; and the reality of the termini, believed in by the
+states of mind in question, can be guaranteed only by some wider knower
+[Footnote: The transcendental idealist thinks that, in some inexplicable
+way, the finite states of mind are identical with the transfinite
+all-knower which he finds himself obliged to postulate in order to
+supply a fundamentum far the relation of knowing, as he apprehends it.
+Pragmatists can leave the question of identity open; but they cannot do
+without the wider knower any more than they can do without the reality,
+if they want to prove a case of knowing. They themselves play the part
+of the absolute knower for the universe of discourse which serves them
+as material for epistemologizing. They warrant the reality there,
+and the subject's true knowledge, there, of it. But whether what they
+themselves say about that whole universe is objectively true, i.e.,
+whether the pragmatic theory of truth is true really, they cannot
+warrant,--they can only believe it To their hearers they can only
+propose it, as I propose it to my readers, as something to be verified
+ambulando, or by the way is which its consequences may confirm it]. But
+if there is no reason extant in the universe why they should be doubted,
+the beliefs are true in the only sense in which anything can be true
+anyhow: they are practically and concretely true, namely. True in the
+mystical mongrel sense of an Identitatsphilosophie they need not be; nor
+is there any intelligible reason why they ever need be true otherwise
+than verifiably and practically. It is reality's part to possess its
+own existence; it is thought's part to get into 'touch' with it by
+innumerable paths of verification.
+
+I fear that the 'humanistic' developments of pragmatism may cause a
+certain difficulty here. We get at one truth only through the rest of
+truth; and the reality, everlastingly postulated as that which all our
+truth must keep in touch with, may never be given to us save in the
+form of truth other than that which we are now testing. But since Dr.
+Schiller has shown that all our truths, even the most elemental, are
+affected by race-inheritance with a human coefficient, reality per se
+thus may appear only as a sort of limit; it may be held to shrivel to
+the mere PLACE for an object, and what is known may be held to be only
+matter of our psyche that we fill the place with. It must be confessed
+that pragmatism, worked in this humanistic way, is COMPATIBLE with
+solipsism. It joins friendly hands with the agnostic part of kantism,
+with contemporary agnosticism, and with idealism generally. But worked
+thus, it is a metaphysical theory about the matter of reality, and flies
+far beyond pragmatism's own modest analysis of the nature of the knowing
+function, which analysis may just as harmoniously be combined with less
+humanistic accounts of reality. One of pragmatism's merits is that it
+is so purely epistemological. It must assume realities; but it prejudges
+nothing as to their constitution, and the most diverse metaphysics can
+use it as their foundation. It certainly has no special affinity with
+solipsism.
+
+As I look back over what I have written, much of it gives me a queer
+impression, as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that
+readers might well laugh at my pomposity. It may be, however, that
+concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole originality
+of pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of
+seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it. Dr.
+Schiller, with his two 'practical' aspects of truth, (1) relevancy to
+situation, and (2) subsequential utility, is only filling the cup of
+concreteness to the brim for us. Once seize that cup, and you cannot
+misunderstand pragmatism. It seems as if the power of imagining the
+world concretely MIGHT have been common enough to let our readers
+apprehend us better, as if they might have read between our lines, and,
+in spite of all our infelicities of expression, guessed a little
+more correctly what our thought was. But alas! this was not on fate's
+programme, so we can only think, with the German ditty:--
+
+   "Es waer' zu schoen gewesen, Es hat nicht sollen sein."
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE MEANING OF THE WORD TRUTH [Footnote: Remarks at the meeting of the
+American Philosophical Association, Cornell University, December, 1907.]
+
+My account of truth is realistic, and follows the epistemological
+dualism of common sense. Suppose I say to you 'The thing exists'--is
+that true or not? How can you tell? Not till my statement has developed
+its meaning farther is it determined as being true, false, or irrelevant
+to reality altogether. But if now you ask 'what thing?' and I reply 'a
+desk'; if you ask 'where?' and I point to a place; if you ask 'does it
+exist materially, or only in imagination?' and I say 'materially'; if
+moreover I say 'I mean that desk' and then grasp and shake a desk
+which you see just as I have described it, you are willing to call
+my statement true. But you and I are commutable here; we can exchange
+places; and, as you go bail for my desk, so I can go bail for yours.
+
+This notion of a reality independent of either of us, taken from
+ordinary social experience, lies at the base of the pragmatist
+definition of truth. With some such reality any statement, in order
+to be counted true, must agree. Pragmatism defines 'agreeing' to mean
+certain ways of 'working,' be they actual or potential. Thus, for my
+statement 'the desk exists' to be true of a desk recognized as real by
+you, it must be able to lead me to shake your desk, to explain myself
+by words that suggest that desk to your mind, to make a drawing that is
+like the desk you see, etc. Only in such ways as this is there sense in
+saying it agrees with THAT reality, only thus does it gain for me the
+satisfaction of hearing you corroborate me. Reference then to something
+determinate, and some sort of adaptation to it worthy of the name
+of agreement, are thus constituent elements in the definition of any
+statement of mine as 'true'.
+
+You cannot get at either the reference or the adaptation without using
+the notion of the workings. THAT the thing is, WHAT it is, and WHICH it
+is (of all the possible things with that what) are points determinable
+only by the pragmatic method. The 'which' means a possibility of
+pointing, or of otherwise singling out the special object; the 'what'
+means choice on our part of an essential aspect to conceive it by (and
+this is always relative to what Dewey calls our own 'situation');
+and the 'that' means our assumption of the attitude of belief, the
+reality-recognizing attitude. Surely for understanding what the word
+'true' means as applied to a statement, the mention of such workings is
+indispensable. Surely if we leave them out the subject and the object
+of the cognitive relation float-in the same universe, 'tis true--but
+vaguely and ignorantly and without mutual contact or mediation.
+
+Our critics nevertheless call the workings inessential. No functional
+possibilities 'make' our beliefs true, they say; they are true
+inherently, true positively, born 'true' as the Count of Chambord was
+born 'Henri-Cinq.' Pragmatism insists, on the contrary, that statements
+and beliefs are thus inertly and statically true only by courtesy:
+they practically pass for true; but you CANNOT DEFINE WHAT YOU MEAN by
+calling them true without referring to their functional possibilities.
+These give its whole LOGICAL CONTENT to that relation to reality on a
+belief's part to which the name 'truth' is applied, a relation which
+otherwise remains one of mere coexistence or bare withness.
+
+
+
+The foregoing statements reproduce the essential content of the lecture
+on Truth in my book PRAGMATISM. Schiller's doctrine of 'humanism,'
+Dewey's 'Studies in logical theory,' and my own 'radical empiricism,'
+all involve this general notion of truth as 'working,' either actual or
+conceivable. But they envelop it as only one detail in the midst of much
+wider theories that aim eventually at determining the notion of what
+'reality' at large is in its ultimate nature and constitution.
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS CAESAR [Footnote: Originally printed under the
+title of 'Truth versus Truthfulness,' in the Journal of Philosophy.]
+
+My account of truth is purely logical and relates to its definition
+only. I contend that you cannot tell what the WORD 'true' MEANS, as
+applied to a statement, without invoking the CONCEPT OF THE STATEMENTS
+WORKINGS.
+
+Assume, to fix our ideas, a universe composed of two things only:
+imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, and me, saying 'Caesar really
+existed.' Most persons would naively deem truth to be thereby uttered,
+and say that by a sort of actio in distans my statement had taken direct
+hold of the other fact.
+
+But have my words so certainly denoted THAT Caesar?--or so certainly
+connoted HIS individual attributes? To fill out the complete measure
+of what the epithet 'true' may ideally mean, my thought ought to bear
+a fully determinate and unambiguous 'one-to-one-relation' to its own
+particular object. In the ultrasimple universe imagined the reference is
+uncertified. Were there two Caesars we shouldn't know which was meant.
+The conditions of truth thus seem incomplete in this universe of
+discourse so that it must be enlarged.
+
+Transcendentalists enlarge it by invoking an absolute mind which,
+as it owns all the facts, can sovereignly correlate them. If it intends
+that my statement SHALL refer to that identical Caesar, and that the
+attributes I have in mind SHALL mean his attributes, that intention
+suffices to make the statement true.
+
+I, in turn, enlarge the universe by admitting finite intermediaries
+between the two original facts. Caesar HAD, and my statement HAS,
+effects; and if these effects in any way run together, a concrete medium
+and bottom is provided for the determinate cognitive relation, which, as
+a pure ACTIO IN DISTANS, seemed to float too vaguely and unintelligibly.
+
+The real Caesar, for example, wrote a manuscript of which I see a
+real reprint, and say 'the Caesar I mean is the author of THAT.' The
+workings of my thought thus determine both its denotative and its
+connotative significance more fully. It now defines itself as neither
+irrelevant to the real Caesar, nor false in what it suggests of him. The
+absolute mind, seeing me thus working towards Caesar through the cosmic
+intermediaries, might well say: 'Such workings only specify in detail
+what I meant myself by the statement being true. I decree the cognitive
+relation between the two original facts to mean that just that kind of
+concrete chain of intermediaries exists or can exist.'
+
+But the chain involves facts prior to the statement the logical
+conditions of whose truth we are defining, and facts subsequent to it;
+and this circumstance, coupled with the vulgar employment of the terms
+truth and fact as synonyms, has laid my account open to misapprehension.
+'How,' it is confusedly asked, 'can Caesar's existence, a truth already
+2000 years old, depend for its truth on anything about to happen now?
+How can my acknowledgment of it be made true by the acknowledgment's own
+effects? The effects may indeed confirm my belief, but the belief was
+made true already by the fact that Caesar really did exist.'
+
+Well, be it so, for if there were no Caesar, there could, of course,
+be no positive truth about him--but then distinguish between 'true' as
+being positively and completely so established, and 'true' as being so
+only 'practically,' elliptically, and by courtesy, in the sense of
+not being positively irrelevant or UNtrue. Remember also that Caesar's
+having existed in fact may make a present statement false or irrelevant
+as well as it may make it true, and that in neither case does it itself
+have to alter. It being given, whether truth, untruth, or irrelevancy
+shall be also given depends on something coming from the statement
+itself. What pragmatism contends for is that you cannot adequately
+DEFINE the something if you leave the notion of the statement's
+functional workings out of your account. Truth meaning agreement with
+reality, the mode of the agreeing is a practical problem which the
+subjective term of the relation alone can solve.
+
+NOTE. This paper was originally followed by a couple of paragraphs meant
+to conciliate the intellectualist opposition. Since you love the word
+'true' so, and since you despise so the concrete working of our ideas,
+I said, keep the word 'truth' for the saltatory and incomprehensible
+relation you care so much for, and I will say of thoughts that know
+their objects in an intelligible sense that they are 'truthful.'
+
+Like most offerings, this one has been spurned, so I revoke it,
+repenting of my generosity. Professor Pratt, in his recent book, calls
+any objective state of FACTS 'a truth,' and uses the word 'trueness'
+in the sense of 'truth' as proposed by me. Mr. Hawtrey (see below, page
+281) uses 'correctness' in the same sense. Apart from the general evil
+of ambiguous vocabularies, we may really forsake all hope, if the term
+'truth' is officially to lose its status as a property of our beliefs
+and opinions, and become recognized as a technical synonym for 'fact.'
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE ABSOLUTE AND THE STRENUOUS LIFE [Footnote: Reprinted from the
+Journal of Philosophy, etc., 1906.]
+
+Professor W. A. Brown, in the Journal for August 15, approves my
+pragmatism for allowing that a belief in the absolute may give
+holidays to the spirit, but takes me to task for the narrowness of this
+concession, and shows by striking examples how great a power the same
+belief may have in letting loose the strenuous life.
+
+I have no criticism whatever to make upon his excellent article, but let
+me explain why 'moral holidays' were the only gift of the absolute which
+I picked out for emphasis. I was primarily concerned in my lectures with
+contrasting the belief that the world is still in process of making
+with the belief that there is an 'eternal' edition of it ready-made
+and complete. The former, or 'pluralistic' belief, was the one that my
+pragmatism favored. Both beliefs confirm our strenuous moods. Pluralism
+actually demands them, since it makes the world's salvation depend upon
+the energizing of its several parts, among which we are. Monism permits
+them, for however furious they may be, we can always justify ourselves
+in advance for indulging them by the thought that they WILL HAVE BEEN
+expressions of the absolute's perfect life. By escaping from your finite
+perceptions to the conception of the eternal whole, you can hallow any
+tendency whatever. Tho the absolute DICTATES nothing, it will SANCTION
+anything and everything after the fact, for whatever is once there will
+have to be regarded as an integral member of the universe's perfection.
+Quietism and frenzy thus alike receive the absolute's permit to exist.
+Those of us who are naturally inert may abide in our resigned passivity;
+those whose energy is excessive may grow more reckless still. History
+shows how easily both quietists and fanatics have drawn inspiration from
+the absolutistic scheme. It suits sick souls and strenuous ones equally
+well.
+
+One cannot say thus of pluralism. Its world is always vulnerable, for
+some part may go astray; and having no 'eternal' edition of it to draw
+comfort from, its partisans must always feel to some degree insecure.
+If, as pluralists, we grant ourselves moral holidays, they can only be
+provisional breathing-spells, intended to refresh us for the morrow's
+fight. This forms one permanent inferiority of pluralism from the
+pragmatic point of view. It has no saving message for incurably sick
+souls. Absolutism, among its other messages, has that message, and is
+the only scheme that has it necessarily. That constitutes its chief
+superiority and is the source of its religious power. That is why,
+desiring to do it full justice, I valued its aptitude for moral-holiday
+giving so highly. Its claims in that way are unique, whereas its
+affinities with strenuousness are less emphatic than those of the
+pluralistic scheme.
+
+In the last lecture of my book I candidly admitted this inferiority of
+pluralism. It lacks the wide indifference that absolutism shows. It
+is bound to disappoint many sick souls whom absolutism can console.
+It seems therefore poor tactics for absolutists to make little of this
+advantage. The needs of sick souls are surely the most urgent; and
+believers in the absolute should rather hold it to be great merit in
+their philosophy that it can meet them so well.
+
+The pragmatism or pluralism which I defend has to fall back on a certain
+ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or
+guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are
+not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation ANY HOW, has a
+slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be
+looked askance on, even in the church. Which side is right here, who can
+say? Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy
+must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body
+and drift of all the truths in sight. I conceive this to be the more
+strenuous type of emotion; but I have to admit that its inability to
+let loose quietistic raptures is a serious deficiency in the pluralistic
+philosophy which I profess.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PROFESSOR HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM [Footnote: Reprint from the Journal of
+Philosophy for December 3, 1908 (vol. v, p. 689), of a review of Le
+Pragmatisme et ses Diverses Formes Anglo-Americaines, by Marcel Hebert.
+(Paris: Librairie critique Emile Nourry. 1908. Pp. 105.)]
+
+Professor Marcel Hebert is a singularly erudite and liberal thinker
+(a seceder, I believe, from the Catholic priesthood) and an uncommonly
+direct and clear writer. His book Le Divin is one of the ablest reviews
+of the general subject of religious philosophy which recent years have
+produced; and in the small volume the title of which is copied above he
+has, perhaps, taken more pains not to do injustice to pragmatism than
+any of its numerous critics. Yet the usual fatal misapprehension of its
+purposes vitiates his exposition and his critique. His pamphlet seems to
+me to form a worthy hook, as it were, on which to hang one more attempt
+to tell the reader what the pragmatist account of truth really means.
+
+M. Hebert takes it to mean what most people take it to mean, the
+doctrine, namely, that whatever proves subjectively expedient in the way
+of our thinking is 'true' in the absolute and unrestricted sense of the
+word, whether it corresponds to any objective state of things outside of
+our thought or not. Assuming this to be the pragmatist thesis, M. Hebert
+opposes it at length. Thought that proves itself to be thus expedient
+may, indeed, have every OTHER kind of value for the thinker, he says,
+but cognitive value, representative value, VALEUR DE CONNAISSANCE
+PROPREMENT DITE, it has not; and when it does have a high degree of
+general utility value, this is in every case derived from its previous
+value in the way of correctly representing independent objects that have
+an important influence on our lives. Only by thus representing things
+truly do we reap the useful fruits. But the fruits follow on the truth,
+they do not constitute it; so M. Hebert accuses pragmatism of telling us
+everything about truth except what it essentially is. He admits, indeed,
+that the world is so framed that when men have true ideas of realities,
+consequential utilities ensue in abundance; and no one of our critics,
+I think, has shown as concrete a sense of the variety of these utilities
+as he has; but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities are secondary,
+we insist on treating them as primary, and that the connaissance
+objective from which they draw all their being is something which we
+neglect, exclude, and destroy. The utilitarian value and the strictly
+cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize, he says--and
+in the main he allows that they do harmonize--but they are not logically
+identical for that. He admits that subjective interests, desires,
+impulses may even have the active 'primacy' in our intellectual life.
+Cognition awakens only at their spur, and follows their cues and aims;
+yet, when it IS awakened, it is objective cognition proper and not
+merely another name for the impulsive tendencies themselves in the state
+of satisfaction. The owner of a picture ascribed to Corot gets uneasy
+when its authenticity is doubted. He looks up its origin and is
+reassured. But his uneasiness does not make the proposition false, any
+more than his relief makes the proposition true, that the actual Corot
+was the painter. Pragmatism, which, according to M. Hebert, claims that
+our sentiments MAKE truth and falsehood, would oblige us to conclude
+that our minds exert no genuinely cognitive function whatever.
+
+This subjectivist interpretation of our position seems to follow from my
+having happened to write (without supposing it necessary to explain that
+I was treating of cognition solely on its subjective side) that in the
+long run the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, much as
+the good is the expedient in the way of our behavior! Having previously
+written that truth means 'agreement with reality,' and insisted that the
+chief part of the expediency of any one opinion is its agreement
+with the rest of acknowledged truth, I apprehended no exclusively
+subjectivistic reading of my meaning. My mind was so filled with the
+notion of objective reference that I never dreamed that my hearers
+would let go of it; and the very last accusation I expected was that
+in speaking of ideas and their satisfactions, I was denying realities
+outside. My only wonder now is that critics should have found so silly
+a personage as I must have seemed in their eyes, worthy of explicit
+refutation.
+
+The object, for me, is just as much one part of reality as the idea
+is another part. The truth of the idea is one relation of it to the
+reality, just as its date and its place are other relations. All three
+relations CONSIST of intervening parts of the universe which can in
+every particular case be assigned and catalogued, and which differ in
+every instance of truth, just as they differ with every date and place.
+
+The pragmatist thesis, as Dr. Schiller and I hold it,--I prefer to let
+Professor Dewey speak for himself,--is that the relation called 'truth'
+is thus concretely DEFINABLE. Ours is the only articulate attempt in the
+field to say positively what truth actually CONSISTS OF. Our denouncers
+have literally nothing to oppose to it as an alternative. For them, when
+an idea is true, it IS true, and there the matter terminates; the word
+'true' being indefinable. The relation of the true idea to its object,
+being, as they think, unique, it can be expressed in terms of nothing
+else, and needs only to be named for any one to recognize and understand
+it. Moreover it is invariable and universal, the same in every single
+instance of truth, however diverse the ideas, the realities, and the
+other relations between them may be.
+
+Our pragmatist view, on the contrary, is that the truth-relation is a
+definitely experienceable relation, and therefore describable as well
+as namable; that it is not unique in kind, and neither invariable nor
+universal. The relation to its object that makes an idea true in any
+given instance, is, we say, embodied in intermediate details of reality
+which lead towards the object, which vary in every instance, and which
+in every instance can be concretely traced. The chain of workings which
+an opinion sets up IS the opinion's truth, falsehood, or irrelevancy,
+as the case may be. Every idea that a man has works some consequences
+in him, in the shape either of bodily actions or of other ideas. Through
+these consequences the man's relations to surrounding realities are
+modified. He is carried nearer to some of them and farther from others,
+and gets now the feeling that the idea has worked satisfactorily, now
+that it has not. The idea has put him into touch with something that
+fulfils its intent, or it has not.
+
+This something is the MAN'S OBJECT, primarily. Since the only realities
+we can talk about are such OBJECTS-BELIEVED-IN, the pragmatist, whenever
+he says 'reality,' means in the first instance what may count for the
+man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such.
+Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence. The idea, for
+example, may be that a certain door opens into a room where a glass of
+beer may be bought. If opening the door leads to the actual sight and
+taste of the beer, the man calls the idea true. Or his idea may be
+that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the
+hypothenuse of a triangle, such a relation being, of course, a reality
+quite as much as a glass of beer is. If the thought of such a relation
+leads him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare the figures they make,
+he may at last, perceiving one equality after another, SEE the relation
+thought of, by a vision quite as particular and direct as was the taste
+of the beer. If he does so, he calls THAT idea, also, true. His idea
+has, in each case, brought him into closer touch with a reality felt at
+the moment to verify just that idea. Each reality verifies and validates
+its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in
+the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which
+the idea was able to set up. These 'workings' differ in every single
+instance, they never transcend experience, they consist of particulars,
+mental or sensible, and they admit of concrete description in every
+individual case. Pragmatists are unable to see what you can possibly
+MEAN by calling an idea true, unless you mean that between it as a
+terminus a quo in some one's mind and some particular reality as a
+terminus ad quem, such concrete workings do or may intervene. Their
+direction constitutes the idea's reference to that reality, their
+satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto, and the two things
+together constitute the 'truth' of the idea for its possessor.
+Without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the
+pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called
+truth can be built up.
+
+The anti-pragmatist view is that the workings are but evidences of the
+truth's previous inherent presence in the idea, and that you can wipe
+the very possibility of them out of existence and still leave the truth
+of the idea as solid as ever. But surely this is not a counter-theory
+of truth to ours. It is the renunciation of all articulate theory. It is
+but a claim to the right to call certain ideas true anyhow; and this is
+what I meant above by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us no real
+alternative, and that our account is literally the only positive theory
+extant. What meaning, indeed, can an idea's truth have save its power of
+adapting us either mentally or physically to a reality?
+
+How comes it, then, that our critics so uniformly accuse us of
+subjectivism, of denying the reality's existence? It comes, I think,
+from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our analysis.
+However independent and elective realities may be, we can talk about
+them, in framing our accounts of truth, only as so many objects
+believed-in. But the process of experience leads men so continually
+to supersede their older objects by newer ones which they find it more
+satisfactory to believe in, that the notion of an ABSOLUTE reality
+inevitably arises as a grenzbegriff, equivalent to that of an object
+that shall never be superseded, and belief in which shall be endgueltig.
+Cognitively we thus live under a sort of rule of three: as our private
+concepts represent the sense-objects to which they lead us, these being
+public realities independent of the individual, so these sense-realities
+may, in turn, represent realities of a hypersensible order, electrons,
+mind-stuff. God, or what not, existing independently of all human
+thinkers. The notion of such final realities, knowledge of which would
+be absolute truth, is an outgrowth of our cognitive experience from
+which neither pragmatists nor anti-pragmatists escape. They form an
+inevitable regulative postulate in every one's thinking. Our notion of
+them is the most abundantly suggested and satisfied of all our beliefs,
+the last to suffer doubt. The difference is that our critics use this
+belief as their sole paradigm, and treat any one who talks of
+human realities as if he thought the notion of reality 'in itself'
+illegitimate. Meanwhile, reality-in-itself, so far as by them TALKED OF,
+is only a human object; they postulate it just as we postulate it; and
+if we are subjectivists they are so no less. Realities in themselves
+can be there FOR any one, whether pragmatist or anti-pragmatist, only by
+being believed; they are believed only by their notions appearing true;
+and their notions appear true only because they work satisfactorily.
+Satisfactorily, moreover, for the particular thinker's purpose. There is
+no idea which is THE true idea, of anything. Whose is THE true idea of
+the absolute? Or to take M. Hebert's example, what is THE true idea of a
+picture which you possess? It is the idea that most satisfactorily meets
+your present interest. The interest may be in the picture's place, its
+age, its 'tone,' its subject, its dimensions, its authorship, its price,
+its merit, or what not. If its authorship by Corot have been doubted,
+what will satisfy the interest aroused in you at that moment will be
+to have your claim to own a Corot confirmed; but, if you have a normal
+human mind, merely calling it a Corot will not satisfy other demands of
+your mind at the same time. For THEM to be satisfied, what you learn of
+the picture must make smooth connection with what you know of the rest
+of the system of reality in which the actual Corot played his part.
+M. Hebert accuses us of holding that the proprietary satisfactions of
+themselves suffice to make the belief true, and that, so far as we are
+concerned, no actual Corot need ever have existed. Why we should be thus
+cut off from the more general and intellectual satisfactions, I know
+not; but whatever the satisfactions may be, intellectual or proprietary,
+they belong to the subjective side of the truth-relation. They found our
+beliefs; our beliefs are in realities; if no realities are there, the
+beliefs are false but if realities are there, how they can even be KNOWN
+without first being BELIEVED; or how BELIEVED except by our first having
+ideas of them that work satisfactorily, pragmatists find it impossible
+to imagine. They also find it impossible to imagine what makes the
+anti-pragmatists' dogmatic 'ipse dixit' assurance of reality
+more credible than the pragmatists conviction based on concrete
+verifications. M. Hebert will probably agree to this, when put in
+this way, so I do not see our inferiority to him in the matter of
+connaissance proprement dite.
+
+Some readers will say that, altho I may possibly believe in realities
+beyond our ideas Dr. Schiller, at any rate, does not. This is a great
+misunderstanding, for Schiller's doctrine and mine are identical,
+only our exposition follow different directions. He starts from the
+subjective pole of the chain, the individual with his beliefs, as the
+more concrete and immediately given phenomenon. 'An individual claims
+his belief to be true,' Schiller says, 'but what does he mean by true?
+and how does he establish the claim?' With these questions we embark
+on a psychological inquiry. To be true, it appears, means, FOR THAT
+INDIVIDUAL, to work satisfactorily for him; and the working and the
+satisfaction, since they vary from case to case, admit of no universal
+description. What works is true and represents a reality, for the
+individual for whom it works. If he is infallible, the reality is
+'really' there; if mistaken it is not there, or not there as he thinks
+it. We all believe, when our ideas work satisfactorily; but we don't yet
+know who of us is infallible; so that the problem of truth and that of
+error are EBENBURTIG and arise out of the same situations. Schiller,
+remaining with the fallible individual, and treating only
+of reality-for-him, seems to many of his readers to ignore
+reality-in-itself altogether. But that is because he seeks only to tell
+us how truths are attained, not what the content of those truths, when
+attained, shall be. It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be
+that in transsubjective realities. It certainly SEEMS the truest for
+no rival belief is as voluminously satisfactory, and it is probably
+Dr. Schiller's own belief; but he is not required, for his immediate
+purpose, to profess it. Still less is he obliged to assume it in advance
+as the basis of his discussion.
+
+I, however, warned by the ways of critics, adopt different tactics. I
+start from the object-pole of the idea-reality chain and follow it in
+the opposite direction from Schiller's. Anticipating the results of the
+general truth-processes of mankind, I begin with the abstract notion
+of an objective reality. I postulate it, and ask on my own account, I
+VOUCHING FOR THIS REALITY, what would make any one else's idea of it
+true for me as well as for him. But I find no different answer from that
+which Schiller gives. If the other man's idea leads him, not only
+to believe that the reality is there, but to use it as the reality's
+temporary substitute, by letting it evoke adaptive thoughts and acts
+similar to those which the reality itself would provoke, then it is
+true in the only intelligible sense, true through its particular
+consequences, and true for me as well as for the man.
+
+My account is more of a logical definition; Schiller's is more of a
+psychological description. Both treat an absolutely identical matter of
+experience, only they traverse it in opposite ways.
+
+Possibly these explanations may satisfy M. Hebert, whose little
+book, apart from the false accusation of subjectivism, gives a fairly
+instructive account of the pragmatist epistemology.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+ABSTRACTIONISM AND 'RELATIVISMUS'
+
+Abstract concepts, such as elasticity, voluminousness, disconnectedness,
+are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which we find it useful
+to single out. Useful, because we are then reminded of other things
+that offer those same aspects; and, if the aspects carry consequences in
+those other things, we can return to our first things, expecting those
+same consequences to accrue.
+
+To be helped to anticipate consequences is always a gain, and such being
+the help that abstract concepts give us, it is obvious that their use is
+fulfilled only when we get back again into concrete particulars by their
+means, bearing the consequences in our minds, and enriching our notion
+of the original objects therewithal.
+
+Without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars by,
+we are like men hopping on one foot. Using concepts along with the
+particulars, we become bipedal. We throw our concept forward, get
+a foothold on the consequence, hitch our line to this, and draw our
+percept up, travelling thus with a hop, skip and jump over the surface
+of life at a vastly rapider rate than if we merely waded through the
+thickness of the particulars as accident rained them down upon our
+heads. Animals have to do this, but men raise their heads higher and
+breathe freely in the upper conceptual air.
+
+The enormous esteem professed by all philosophers for the
+conceptual form of consciousness is easy to understand. From Plato's
+time downwards it has been held to be our sole avenue to essential
+truth. Concepts are universal, changeless, pure; their relations are
+eternal; they are spiritual, while the concrete particulars which they
+enable us to handle are corrupted by the flesh. They are precious in
+themselves, then, apart from their original use, and confer new dignity
+upon our life.
+
+One can find no fault with this way of feeling about concepts so long as
+their original function does not get swallowed up in the admiration
+and lost. That function is of course to enlarge mentally our momentary
+experiences by ADDING to them the consequences conceived; but
+unfortunately, that function is not only too often forgotten by
+philosophers in their reasonings, but is often converted into its exact
+opposite, and made a means of diminishing the original experience
+by DENYING (implicitly or explicitly) all its features save the one
+specially abstracted to conceive it by.
+
+This itself is a highly abstract way of stating my complaint, and it
+needs to be redeemed from obscurity by showing instances of what is
+meant. Some beliefs very dear to my own heart have been conceived in
+this viciously abstract way by critics. One is the 'will to believe,' so
+called; another is the indeterminism of certain futures; a third is the
+notion that truth may vary with the standpoint of the man who holds it.
+I believe that the perverse abuse of the abstracting function has led
+critics to employ false arguments against these doctrines, and often has
+led their readers to false conclusions. I should like to try to save the
+situation, if possible, by a few counter-critical remarks.
+
+Let me give the name of 'vicious abstractionism' to a way of using
+concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation
+by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it
+under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the
+positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we
+proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich
+phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken,
+treating it as a case of 'nothing but' that concept, and acting as if
+all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted
+were expunged. [Footnote: Let not the reader confound the fallacy here
+described with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in
+the mood 'celarent' of the logic-books.] Abstraction, functioning in
+this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance
+in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds
+impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and
+logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of
+the universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple
+source. THE VICIOUSLY PRIVATIVE EMPLOYMENT OF ABSTRACT CHARACTERS AND
+CLASS NAMES is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the
+rationalistic mind.
+
+To proceed immediately to concrete examples, cast a glance at the belief
+in 'free will,' demolished with such specious persuasiveness recently
+by the skilful hand of Professor Fullerton. [Footnote: Popular Science
+Monthly, N. Y., vols. lviii and lix.] When a common man says that his
+will is free, what does he mean? He means that there are situations of
+bifurcation inside of his life in which two futures seem to him equally
+possible, for both have their roots equally planted in his present and
+his past. Either, if realized, will grow out of his previous motives,
+character and circumstances, and will continue uninterruptedly the
+pulsations of his personal life. But sometimes both at once are
+incompatible with physical nature, and then it seems to the naive
+observer as if he made a choice between them NOW, and that the question
+of which future is to be, instead of having been decided at the
+foundation of the world, were decided afresh at every passing moment in
+I which fact seems livingly to grow, and possibility seems, in turning
+itself towards one act, to exclude all others.
+
+He who takes things at their face-value here may indeed be deceived. He
+may far too often mistake his private ignorance of what is predetermined
+for a real indetermination of what is to be. Yet, however imaginary
+it may be, his picture of the situation offers no appearance of breach
+between the past and future. A train is the same train, its passengers
+are the same passengers, its momentum is the same momentum, no matter
+which way the switch which fixes its direction is placed. For the
+indeterminist there is at all times enough past for all the different
+futures in sight, and more besides, to find their reasons in it, and
+whichever future comes will slide out of that past as easily as the
+train slides by the switch. The world, in short, is just as CONTINUOUS
+WITH ITSELF for the believers in free will as for the rigorous
+determinists, only the latter are unable to believe in points of
+bifurcation as spots of really indifferent equilibrium or as containing
+shunts which there--and there only, NOT BEFORE--direct existing motions
+without altering their amount.
+
+Were there such spots of indifference, the rigorous determinists think,
+the future and the past would be separated absolutely, for, ABSTRACTLY
+TAKEN, THE WORD 'INDIFFERENT' SUGGESTS DISCONNECTION SOLELY. Whatever
+is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached. Take the
+term thus strictly, and you see, they tell us, that if any spot of
+indifference is found upon the broad highway between the past and the
+future, then no connection of any sort whatever, no continuous momentum,
+no identical passenger, no common aim or agent, can be found on both
+sides of the shunt or switch which there is moved. The place is an
+impassable chasm.
+
+Mr. Fullerton writes--the italics are mine--as follows:--
+
+'In so far as my action is free, what I have been, what I am, what I
+have always done or striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or resolve
+to do at the present moment--these things can have NO MORE TO DO WITH
+ITS FUTURE REALIZATION THAN IF THEY HAD NO EXISTENCE.... The possibility
+is a hideous one; and surely even the most ardent free-willist will,
+when he contemplates it frankly, excuse me for hoping that if I am free
+I am at least not very free, and that I may reasonably expect to find
+SOME degree of consistency in my life and actions. ... Suppose that I
+have given a dollar to a blind beggar. Can I, if it is really an act
+of free-will, be properly said to have given the money? Was it given
+because I was a man of tender heart, etc., etc.? ... What has all
+this to do with acts of free-will? If they are free, they must not be
+conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery of
+the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They must be
+causeless, not determined. They must drop from a clear sky out of the
+void, for just in so far as they can be accounted for, they are not
+free.' [Footnote: Loc. cit., vol. lviii, pp. 189, 188.]
+
+Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about
+the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I am only
+trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some
+of the doctrine's assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the
+indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both of
+re-direction and of continuation. But because in the 'either--or' of the
+re-direction we hesitate, the determinist abstracts this little element
+of discontinuity from the superabundant continuities of the experience,
+and cancels in its behalf all the connective characters with which the
+latter is filled. Choice, for him, means henceforward DISconnection pure
+and simple, something undetermined in advance IN ANY RESPECT WHATEVER,
+and a life of choices must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of which
+could we be treated as one and the same man. If Nero were 'free' at. the
+moment of ordering his mother's murder, Mr. McTaggart [Footnote: Some
+Dogmas of Religion, p. 179.] assures us that no one would have the
+right at any other moment to call him a bad man, for he would then be an
+absolutely other Nero.
+
+A polemic author ought not merely to destroy his victim. He ought to try
+a bit to make him feel his error--perhaps not enough to convert him,
+but enough to give him a bad conscience and to weaken the energy of his
+defence. These violent caricatures of men's beliefs arouse only contempt
+for the incapacity of their authors to see the situations out of which
+the problems grow. To treat the negative character of one abstracted
+element as annulling all the positive features with which it coexists,
+is no way to change any actual indeterminist's way of looking on the
+matter, tho it may make the gallery applaud.
+
+Turn now to some criticisms of the 'will to believe,' as another example
+of the vicious way in which abstraction is currently employed. The right
+to believe in things for the truth of which complete objective proof is
+yet lacking is defended by those who apprehend certain human situations
+in their concreteness. In those situations the mind has alternatives
+before it so vast that the full evidence for either branch is missing,
+and yet so significant that simply to wait for proof, and to doubt while
+waiting, might often in practical respects be the same thing as weighing
+down the negative side. Is life worth while at all? Is there any general
+meaning in all this cosmic weather? Is anything being permanently bought
+by all this suffering? Is there perhaps a transmundane experience in
+Being, something corresponding to a 'fourth dimension,' which, if we had
+access to it, might patch up some of this world's zerrissenheit and
+make things look more rational than they at first appear? Is there a
+superhuman consciousness of which our minds are parts, and from which
+inspiration and help may come? Such are the questions in which the right
+to take sides practically for yes or no is affirmed by some of us, while
+others hold that this is methodologically inadmissible, and summon us to
+die professing ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every one to refuse
+to believe.
+
+I say nothing of the personal inconsistency of some of these critics,
+whose printed works furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to
+believe, in spite of their denunciations of it as a phrase and as a
+recommended thing. Mr. McTaggart, whom I will once more take as an
+example, is sure that 'reality is rational and righteous' and 'destined
+sub specie temporis to become perfectly good'; and his calling this
+belief a result of necessary logic has surely never deceived any reader
+as to its real genesis in the gifted author's mind. Mankind is made on
+too uniform a pattern for any of us to escape successfully from acts of
+faith. We have a lively vision of what a certain view of the universe
+would mean for us. We kindle or we shudder at the thought, and our
+feeling runs through our whole logical nature and animates its workings.
+It CAN'T be that, we feel; it MUST be this. It must be what it OUGHT
+to be, and OUGHT to be this; and then we seek for every reason, good
+or bad, to make this which so deeply ought to be, seem objectively the
+probable thing. We show the arguments against it to be insufficient, so
+that it MAY be true; we represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's
+loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of syllogistic proof. We
+reinforce it by remembering the enlargement of our world by music, by
+thinking of the promises of sunsets and the impulses from vernal woods.
+And the essence of the whole experience, when the individual swept
+through it says finally 'I believe,' is the intense concreteness of
+his vision, the individuality of the hypothesis before him, and the
+complexity of the various concrete motives and perceptions that issue in
+his final state.
+
+But see now how the abstractionist treats this rich and intricate vision
+that a certain state of things must be true. He accuses the believer of
+reasoning by the following syllogism:--
+
+All good desires must be fulfilled; The desire to believe this
+proposition is a good desire;
+
+Ergo, this proposition must be believed.
+
+He substitutes this abstraction for the concrete state of mind of the
+believer, pins the naked absurdity of it upon him, and easily proves
+that any one who defends him must be the greatest fool on earth. As if
+any real believer ever thought in this preposterous way, or as if any
+defender of the legitimacy of men's concrete ways of concluding ever
+used the abstract and general premise, 'All desires must be fulfilled'!
+Nevertheless, Mr. McTaggart solemnly and laboriously refutes the
+syllogism in sections 47 to 57 of the above-cited book. He shows that
+there is no fixed link in the dictionary between the abstract concepts
+'desire,' 'goodness' and 'reality'; and he ignores all the links which
+in the single concrete case the believer feels and perceives to be
+there! He adds:--
+
+'When the reality of a thing is uncertain, the argument encourages us to
+suppose that our approval of a thing can determine its reality. And when
+this unhallowed link has once been established, retribution overtakes
+us. For when the reality of the thing is independently certain, we
+[then] have to admit that the reality of the thing should determine our
+approval of that thing. I find it difficult to imagine a more degraded
+position.'
+
+One here feels tempted to quote ironically Hegel's famous equation of
+the real with the rational to his english disciple, who ends his chapter
+with the heroic words:--
+
+'For those who do not pray, there remains the resolve that, so far as
+their strength may permit, neither the pains of death nor the pains
+of life shall drive them to any comfort in that which they hold to be
+false, or drive them from any comfort [discomfort?] in that which they
+hold to be true.'
+
+How can so ingenious-minded a writer fail to see how far over the heads
+of the enemy all his arrows pass? When Mr. McTaggart himself believes
+that the universe is run by the dialectic energy of the absolute idea,
+his insistent desire to have a world of that sort is felt by him to
+be no chance example of desire in general, but an altogether peculiar
+insight-giving passion to which, in this if in no other instance, he
+would be stupid not to yield. He obeys its concrete singularity, not
+the bare abstract feature in it of being a 'desire.' His situation is as
+particular as that of an actress who resolves that it is best for her
+to marry and leave the stage, of a priest who becomes secular, of a
+politician who abandons public life. What sensible man would seek
+to refute the concrete decisions of such persons by tracing them
+to abstract premises, such as that 'all actresses must marry,' 'all
+clergymen must be laymen,' 'all politicians should resign their posts'?
+Yet this type of refutation, absolutely unavailing though it be for
+purposes of conversion, is spread by Mr. McTaggart through many pages of
+his book. For the aboundingness of our real reasons he substitutes
+one narrow point. For men's real probabilities he gives a skeletonized
+abstraction which no man was ever tempted to believe.
+
+The abstraction in my next example is less simple, but is quite as
+flimsy as a weapon of attack. Empiricists think that truth in general is
+distilled from single men's beliefs; and the so-called pragmatists 'go
+them one better' by trying to define what it consists in when it comes.
+It consists, I have elsewhere said, in such a working on the part of the
+beliefs as may bring the man into satisfactory relations with objects to
+which these latter point. The working is of course a concrete working
+in the actual experience of human beings, among their ideas, feelings,
+perceptions, beliefs and acts, as well as among the physical things
+of their environment, and the relations must be understood as being
+possible as well as actual. In the chapter on truth of my book
+Pragmatism I have taken pains to defend energetically this view. Strange
+indeed have been the misconceptions of it by its enemies, and many have
+these latter been. Among the most formidable-sounding onslaughts on the
+attempt to introduce some concreteness into our notion of what the truth
+of an idea may mean, is one that has been raised in many quarters to the
+effect that to make truth grow in any way out of human opinion is but
+to reproduce that protagorean doctrine that the individual man is
+'the measure of all things,' which Plato in his immortal dialogue, the
+Thaeatetus, is unanimously said to have laid away so comfortably in
+its grave two thousand years ago. The two cleverest brandishers of this
+objection to make truth concrete, Professors Rickert and Munsterberg,
+write in German, [Footnote: Munsterberg's book has just appeared in an
+English version: The Eternal Values, Boston, 1909.] and 'relativismus'
+is the name they give to the heresy which they endeavor to uproot.
+
+The first step in their campaign against 'relativismus' is entirely
+in the air. They accuse relativists--and we pragmatists are typical
+relativists--of being debarred by their self-adopted principles,
+not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of
+believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and
+absolute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in
+the pragmatic sense, of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree,
+and which no man should ever wish to change. Both charges fall wide
+of their mark. I myself, as a pragmatist, believe in my own account of
+truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his. And I
+believe in it for the very reason that I have the idea of truth which
+my learned adversaries contend that no pragmatist can frame. I expect,
+namely, that the more fully men discuss and test my account, the more
+they will agree that it fits, and the less will they desire a change.
+I may of course be premature in this confidence, and the glory of
+being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision and
+correction of my scheme, which later will then be judged untrue in
+just the measure in which it departs from that finally satisfactory
+formulation. To admit, as we pragmatists do, that we are liable to
+correction (even tho we may not expect it) involves the use on our
+part of an ideal standard. Rationalists themselves are, as individuals,
+sometimes sceptical enough to admit the abstract possibility of their
+own present opinions being corrigible and revisable to some degree, so
+the fact that the mere NOTION of an absolute standard should seem to
+them so important a thing to claim for themselves and to deny to us is
+not easy to explain. If, along with the notion of the standard, they
+could also claim its exclusive warrant for their own fulminations now,
+it would be important to them indeed. But absolutists like Rickert
+freely admit the sterility of the notion, even in their own hands. Truth
+is what we OUGHT to believe, they say, even tho no man ever did or shall
+believe it, and even tho we have no way of getting at it save by the
+usual empirical processes of testing our opinions by one another and
+by facts. Pragmatically, then, this part of the dispute is idle. No
+relativist who ever actually walked the earth [Footnote: Of course
+the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books, who
+dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he
+now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy--target for the rationalist
+shooting-gallery--hit him and he turns a summersault--yet he is the only
+sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.]
+has denied the regulative character in his own thinking of the notion of
+absolute truth. What is challenged by relativists is the pretence on any
+one's part to have found for certain at any given moment what the shape
+of that truth is. Since the better absolutists agree in this, admitting
+that the proposition 'There is absolute truth' is the only absolute
+truth of which we can be sure, [Footnote: Compare Bickert's Gegenstand
+der Erkentniss, pp. 187, 138. Munsterberg's version of this first truth
+is that 'Es gibt eine Welt,'--see his Philosophie der Werte, pp. 38 and
+74 And, after all, both these philosophers confess in the end that the
+primal truth of which they consider our supposed denial so irrational
+is not properly an insight at all, but a dogma adopted by the will which
+any one who turns his back on duty may disregard! But if it all reverts
+to 'the will to believe,' pragmatists have that privilege as well as
+their critics.] further debate is practically unimportant, so we may
+pass to their next charge.
+
+It is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most
+apparent. The antipragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, refuses
+to give any account of what the words may mean. For him they form a
+self-explanatory term. The pragmatist, on the contrary, articulately
+defines their meaning. Truth absolute, he says, means an ideal set
+of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of
+experience be expected to converge. In this definition of absolute truth
+he not only postulates that there is a tendency to such convergence
+of opinions, to such ultimate consensus, but he postulates the other
+factors of his definition equally, borrowing them by anticipation from
+the true conclusions expected to be reached. He postulates the existence
+of opinions, he postulates the experience that will sift them, and the
+consistency which that experience will show. He justifies himself in
+these assumptions by saying that they are not postulates in the strict
+sense but simple inductions from the past extended to the future by
+analogy; and he insists that human opinion has already reached a pretty
+stable equilibrium regarding them, and that if its future development
+fails to alter them, the definition itself, with all its terms included,
+will be part of the very absolute truth which it defines. The hypothesis
+will, in short, have worked successfully all round the circle and proved
+self-corroborative, and the circle will be closed.
+
+The anti-pragmatist, however, immediately falls foul of the word
+'opinion' here, abstracts it from the universe of life, and uses it as
+a bare dictionary-substantive, to deny the rest of the assumptions which
+it coexists withal. The dictionary says that an opinion is 'what some
+one thinks or believes.' This definition leaves every one's opinion free
+to be autogenous, or unrelated either to what any one else may think or
+to what the truth may be.
+
+Therefore, continue our abstractionists, we must conceive it as
+essentially thus unrelated, so that even were a billion men to sport the
+same opinion, and only one man to differ, we could admit no collateral
+circumstances which might presumptively make it more probable that he,
+not they, should be wrong. Truth, they say, follows not the counting of
+noses, nor is it only another name for a majority vote. It is a relation
+that antedates experience, between our opinions and an independent
+something which the pragmatist account ignores, a relation which, tho
+the opinions of individuals should to all eternity deny it, would still
+remain to qualify them as false. To talk of opinions without referring
+to this independent something, the anti-pragmatist assures us, is to
+play Hamlet with Hamlet's part left out.
+
+But when the pragmatist speaks of opinions, does he mean any such
+insulated and unmotived abstractions as are here supposed? Of course
+not, he means men's opinions in the flesh, as they have really formed
+themselves, opinions surrounded by their causes and the influences
+they obey and exert, and along with the whole environment of social
+communication of which they are a part and out of which they take
+their rise. Moreover the 'experience' which the pragmatic definition
+postulates is the independent something which the anti-pragmatist
+accuses him of ignoring. Already have men grown unanimous in the opinion
+that such experience is of an independent reality, the existence of
+which all opinions must acknowledge, in order to be true. Already do
+they agree that in the long run it is useless to resist experience's
+pressure; that the more of it a man has, the better position he stands
+in, in respect of truth; that some men, having had more experience, are
+therefore better authorities than others; that some are also wiser by
+nature and better able to interpret the experience they have had; that
+it is one part of such wisdom to compare notes, discuss, and follow the
+opinion of our betters; and that the more systematically and thoroughly
+such comparison and weighing of opinions is pursued, the truer the
+opinions that survive are likely to be. When the pragmatist talks
+of opinions, it is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly and
+interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind; and when the
+anti-pragmatist tries to floor him because the word 'opinion' can also
+be taken abstractly and as if it had no environment, he simply ignores
+the soil out of which the whole discussion grows. His weapons cut
+the air and strike no blow. No one gets wounded in the war against
+caricatures of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the German
+onslaughts upon 'relativismus' consists. Refuse to use the word
+'opinion' abstractly, keep it in its real environment, and the withers
+of pragmatism remain unwrung. That men do exist who are 'opinionated,'
+in the sense that their opinions are self-willed, is unfortunately a
+fact that must be admitted, no matter what one's notion of truth in
+general may be. But that this fact should make it impossible for truth
+to form itself authentically out of the life of opinion is what no
+critic has yet proved. Truth may well consist of certain opinions, and
+does indeed consist of nothing but opinions, tho not every opinion need
+be true. No pragmatist needs to dogmatize about the consensus of opinion
+in the future being right--he need only postulate that it will probably
+contain more of truth than any one's opinion now.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+TWO ENGLISH CRITICS
+
+Mr. Bertrand Russell's article entitled 'Transatlantic Truth,'
+[Footnote: In the Albany Review for January, 1908.] has all the
+clearness, dialectic subtlety, and wit which one expects from his pen,
+but it entirely fails to hit the right point of view for apprehending
+our position. When, for instance, we say that a true proposition is one
+the consequences of believing which are good, he assumes us to mean that
+any one who believes a proposition to be true must first have made
+out clearly that its consequences be good, and that his belief must
+primarily be in that fact,--an obvious absurdity, for that fact is the
+deliverance of a new proposition, quite different from the first one and
+is, moreover, a fact usually very hard to verify, it being 'far easier,'
+as Mr. Russell justly says, 'to settle the plain question of fact: "Have
+popes always been infallible?"' than to settle the question whether the
+effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole good.'
+
+We affirm nothing as silly as Mr. Russell supposes. Good consequences
+are not proposed by us merely as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by
+which truth's presence is habitually ascertained, tho they may indeed
+serve on occasion as such a sign; they are proposed rather as the
+lurking motive inside of every truth-claim, whether the 'trower' be
+conscious of such motive, or whether he obey it blindly. They are
+proposed as the causa existendi of our beliefs, not as their logical cue
+or premise, and still less as their objective deliverance or content.
+They assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference
+in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports.
+
+No truth-claimer except the pragmatist himself need ever be aware of the
+part played in his own mind by consequences, and he himself is aware
+of it only abstractly and in general, and may at any moment be quite
+oblivious of it with respect to his own beliefs.
+
+Mr. Russell next joins the army of those who inform their readers that
+according to the pragmatist definition of the word 'truth' the belief
+that A exists may be 'true' even when A does not exist. This is the
+usual slander repeated to satiety by our critics. They forget that in
+any concrete account of what is denoted by 'truth' in human life, the
+word can only be used relatively to some particular trower. Thus, I may
+hold it true that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name, and
+may express my opinion to a critic. If the critic be both a pragmatist
+and a baconian, he will in his capacity of pragmatist see plain that the
+workings of my opinion, I being who I am, make it perfectly true for
+me, while in his capacity of baconian he still believes that Shakespeare
+never wrote the plays in question. But most anti-pragmatist critics
+take the wont 'truth' as something absolute, and easily play on their
+reader's readiness to treat his OWE truths as the absolute ones. If
+the reader whom they address believes that A does not exist, while we
+pragmatists show that those for whom tho belief that it exists works
+satisfactorily will always call it true, he easily sneers at the naivete
+of our contention, for is not then the belief in question 'true,' tho
+what it declares as fact has, as the reader so well knows, no existence?
+Mr. Russell speaks of our statement as an 'attempt to get rid of fact'
+and naturally enough considers it 'a failure' (p. 410). 'The old notion
+of truth reappears,' he adds--that notion being, of course, that when a
+belief is true, its object does exist.
+
+It is, of course, BOUND to exist, on sound pragmatic principles.
+Concepts signify consequences. How is the world made different for me
+by my conceiving an opinion of mine under the concept 'true'? First, an
+object must be findable there (or sure signs of such an object must be
+found) which shall agree with the opinion. Second, such an opinion must
+not be contradicted by anything else I am aware of. But in spite of
+the obvious pragmatist requirement that when I have said truly that
+something exists, it SHALL exist, the slander which Mr. Russell repeats
+has gained the widest currency.
+
+Mr. Russell himself is far too witty and athletic a ratiocinator simply
+to repeat the slander dogmatically. Being nothing if not mathematical
+and logical, he must prove the accusation secundum artem, and convict us
+not so much of error as of absurdity. I have sincerely tried to follow
+the windings of his mind in this procedure, but for the life of me I
+can only see in it another example of what I have called (above, p. 249)
+vicious abstractionism. The abstract world of mathematics and pure logic
+is so native to Mr. Russell that he thinks that we describers of the
+functions of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathematical terms
+and functions. A mathematical term, as a, b, c, x, y, sin., log.,
+is self-sufficient, and terms of this sort, once equated, can be
+substituted for one another in endless series without error. Mr.
+Russell, and also Mr. Hawtrey, of whom I shall speak presently, seem to
+think that in our mouth also such terms as 'meaning,' 'truth,' 'belief,'
+'object,' 'definition,' are self-sufficients with no context of varying
+relation that might be further asked about. What a word means is
+expressed by its definition, isn't it? The definition claims to be exact
+and adequate, doesn't it? Then it can be substituted for the word--since
+the two are identical--can't it? Then two words with the same definition
+can be substituted for one another, n'est--ce pas? Likewise two
+definitions of the same word, nicht wahr, etc., etc., till it will be
+indeed strange if you can't convict some one of self-contradiction and
+absurdity.
+
+The particular application of this rigoristic treatment to my own little
+account of truth as working seems to be something like what follows.
+I say 'working' is what the 'truth' of our ideas means, and call it a
+definition. But since meanings and things meant, definitions and things
+defined, are equivalent and interchangeable, and nothing extraneous to
+its definition can be meant when a term is used, it follows that who so
+calls an idea true, and means by that word that it works, cannot
+mean anything else, can believe nothing but that it does work, and in
+particular can neither imply nor allow anything about its object or
+deliverance. 'According to the pragmatists,' Mr. Russell writes, 'to say
+"it is true that other people exist" means "it is useful to believe
+that other people exist." But if so, then these two phrases are merely
+different words for the same proposition; therefore when I believe the
+one, I believe the other' (p. 400). [Logic, I may say in passing, would
+seem to require Mr. Russell to believe them both at once, but he ignores
+this consequence, and considers that other people exist' and 'it is
+useful to believe that they do EVEN IF THEY DON'T,' must be identical
+and therefore substitutable propositions in the pragmatist mouth.]
+
+But may not real terms, I now ask, have accidents not expressed in their
+definitions? and when a real value is finally substituted for the result
+of an algebraic series of substituted definitions, do not all these
+accidents creep back? Beliefs have their objective 'content' or
+'deliverance' as well as their truth, and truth has its implications
+as well as its workings. If any one believe that other men exist, it is
+both a content of his belief and an implication of its truth, that they
+should exist in fact. Mr. Russell's logic would seem to exclude,
+'by definition,' all such accidents as contents, implications, and
+associates, and would represent us as translating all belief into a sort
+of belief in pragmatism itself--of all things! If I say that a speech is
+eloquent, and explain 'eloquent' as meaning the power to work in certain
+ways upon the audience; or if I say a book is original, and define
+'original' to mean differing from other books, Russell's logic, if I
+follow it at all, would seem to doom me to agreeing that the speech is
+about eloquence, and the book about other books. When I call a belief
+true, and define its truth to mean its workings, I certainly do not mean
+that the belief is a belief ABOUT the workings. It is a belief about the
+object, and I who talk about the workings am a different subject, with
+a different universe of discourse, from that of the believer of whose
+concrete thinking I profess to give an account.
+
+The social proposition 'other men exist' and the pragmatist proposition
+'it is expedient to believe that other men exist' come from different
+universes of discourse. One can believe the second without being
+logically compelled to believe the first; one can believe the first
+without having ever heard of the second; or one can believe them both.
+The first expresses the object of a belief, the second tells of one
+condition of the belief's power to maintain itself. There is no identity
+of any kind, save the term 'other men' which they contain in common, in
+the two propositions; and to treat them as mutually substitutable, or
+to insist that we shall do so, is to give up dealing with realities
+altogether.
+
+Mr. Ralph Hawtrey, who seems also to serve under the banner of
+abstractionist logic, convicts us pragmatists of absurdity by arguments
+similar to Mr. Russell's. [Footnote: See The New Quarterly, for March,
+1908.]
+
+As a favor to us and for the sake of the argument, he abandons the
+word 'true' to our fury, allowing it to mean nothing but the fact that
+certain beliefs are expedient; and he uses the word 'correctness' (as
+Mr. Pratt uses the word 'trueness') to designate a fact, not about the
+belief, but about the belief's object, namely that it is as the belief
+declares it. 'When therefore,' he writes, 'I say it is correct to say
+that Caesar is dead, I mean "Caesar is dead." This must be regarded as
+the definition of correctness.' And Mr. Hawtrey then goes on to demolish
+me by the conflict of the definitions. What is 'true' for the pragmatist
+cannot be what is 'correct,' he says, 'for the definitions are not
+logically interchangeable; or if we interchange them, we reach the
+tautology:
+
+"Caesar is dead" means "it is expedient to believe that Caesar is dead."
+But what is it expedient to believe? Why, "that Caesar is dead." A
+precious definition indeed of 'Caesar is dead.'
+
+Mr. Hawtrey's conclusion would seem to be that the pragmatic definition
+of the truth of a belief in no way implies--what?--that the believer
+shall believe in his own belief's deliverance?--or that the pragmatist
+who is talking about him shall believe in that deliverance? The two
+cases are quite different. For the believer, Caesar must of course
+really exist; for the pragmatist critic he need not, for the pragmatic
+deliverance belongs, as I have just said, to another universe of
+discourse altogether. When one argues by substituting definition for
+definition, one needs to stay in the same universe.
+
+The great shifting of universes in this discussion occurs when we carry
+the word 'truth' from the subjective into the objective realm, applying
+it sometimes to a property of opinions, sometimes to the facts which the
+opinions assert. A number of writers, as Mr. Russell himself, Mr. G.
+E. Moore, and others, favor the unlucky word 'proposition,' which seems
+expressly invented to foster this confusion, for they speak of truth as
+a property of 'propositions.' But in naming propositions it is almost
+impossible not to use the word 'that.'
+
+THAT Caesar is dead, THAT virtue is its own reward, are propositions.
+
+I do not say that for certain logical purposes it may not be useful to
+treat propositions as absolute entities, with truth or falsehood
+inside of them respectively, or to make of a complex like
+'that--Caesar--is--dead' a single term and call it a 'truth.' But the
+'that' here has the extremely convenient ambiguity for those who wish to
+make trouble for us pragmatists, that sometimes it means the FACT that,
+and sometimes the BELIEF that, Caesar is no longer living. When I then
+call the belief true, I am told that the truth means the fact; when I
+claim the fact also, I am told that my definition has excluded the fact,
+being a definition only of a certain peculiarity in the belief--so that
+in the end I have no truth to talk about left in my possession.
+
+The only remedy for this intolerable ambiguity is, it seems to me, to
+stick to terms consistently. 'Reality,' 'idea' or 'belief,' and the
+'truth of the idea or belief,' which are the terms I have consistently
+held to, seem to be free from all objection.
+
+Whoever takes terms abstracted from all their natural settings,
+identifies them with definitions, and treats the latter more algebraico,
+not only risks mixing universes, but risks fallacies which the man in
+the street easily detects. To prove 'by definition' that the statement
+'Caesar exists' is identical with a statement about 'expediency' because
+the one statement is 'true' and the other is about 'true statements,'
+is like proving that an omnibus is a boat because both are vehicles. A
+horse may be defined as a beast that walks on the nails of his middle
+digits. Whenever we see a horse we see such a beast, just as whenever
+we believe a 'truth' we believe something expedient. Messrs. Russell and
+Hawtrey, if they followed their antipragmatist logic, would have to say
+here that we see THAT IT IS such a beast, a fact which notoriously no
+one sees who is not a comparative anatomist.
+
+It almost reconciles one to being no logician that one thereby escapes
+so much abstractionism. Abstractionism of the worst sort dogs Mr.
+Russell in his own trials to tell positively what the word 'truth'
+means. In the third of his articles on Meinong, in Mind, vol. xiii, p.
+509 (1904), he attempts this feat by limiting the discussion to three
+terms only, a proposition, its content, and an object, abstracting from
+the whole context of associated realities in which such terms are found
+in every case of actual knowing. He puts the terms, thus taken in a
+vacuum, and made into bare logical entities, through every possible
+permutation and combination, tortures them on the rack until nothing is
+left of them, and after all this logical gymnastic, comes out with the
+following portentous conclusion as what he believes to be the correct
+view: that there is no problem at all in truth and falsehood, that some
+propositions are true and some false, just as some roses are red and
+some white, that belief is a certain attitude towards propositions,
+which is called knowledge when they are true, error when they are
+false'--and he seems to think that when once this insight is reached the
+question may be considered closed forever!
+
+In spite of my admiration of Mr. Russell's analytic powers, I wish,
+after reading such an article, that pragmatism, even had it no other
+function, might result in making him and other similarly gifted men
+ashamed of having used such powers in such abstraction from reality.
+Pragmatism saves us at any rate from such diseased abstractionism as
+those pages show.
+
+P. S. Since the foregoing rejoinder was written an article on Pragmatism
+which I believe to be by Mr. Russell has appeared in the Edinburgh
+Review for April, 1909. As far as his discussion of the truth-problem
+goes, altho he has evidently taken great pains to be fair, it seems
+to me that he has in no essential respect improved upon his former
+arguments. I will therefore add nothing further, but simply refer
+readers who may be curious to pp. 272-280 of the said article.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+A DIALOGUE
+
+After correcting the proofs of all that precedes I imagine a residual
+state of mind on the part of my reader which may still keep him
+unconvinced, and which it may be my duty to try at least to dispel. I
+can perhaps be briefer if I put what I have to say in dialogue form. Let
+then the anti-pragmatist begin:--
+
+Anti-Pragmatist:--You say that the truth of an idea is constituted by
+its workings. Now suppose a certain state of facts, facts for example
+of antediluvian planetary history, concerning which the question may be
+asked:
+
+'Shall the truth about them ever be known?' And suppose (leaving the
+hypothesis of an omniscient absolute out of the account) that we assume
+that the truth is never to be known. I ask you now, brother pragmatist,
+whether according to you there can be said to be any truth at all about
+such a state of facts. Is there a truth, or is there not a truth, in
+cases where at any rate it never comes to be known?
+
+Pragmatist:--Why do you ask me such a question?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Because I think it puts you in a bad dilemma.
+
+Prag.:--How so?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Why, because if on the one hand you elect to say that
+there is a truth, you thereby surrender your whole pragmatist theory.
+According to that theory, truth requires ideas and workings to
+constitute it; but in the present instance there is supposed to be no
+knower, and consequently neither ideas nor workings can exist. What then
+remains for you to make your truth of?
+
+Prag.:--Do you wish, like so many of my enemies, to force me to make the
+truth out of the reality itself? I cannot: the truth is something
+known, thought or said about the reality, and consequently numerically
+additional to it. But probably your intent is something different; so
+before I say which horn of your dilemma I choose, I ask you to let me
+hear what the other horn may be.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--The other horn is this, that if you elect to say that there
+is no truth under the conditions assumed, because there are no ideas or
+workings, then you fly in the face of common sense. Doesn't common sense
+believe that every state of facts must in the nature of things be truly
+statable in some kind of a proposition, even tho in point of fact the
+proposition should never be propounded by a living soul?
+
+Prag.:--Unquestionably common sense believes this, and so do I. There
+have been innumerable events in the history of our planet of which
+nobody ever has been or ever will be able to give an account, yet of
+which it can already be said abstractly that only one sort of possible
+account can ever be true. The truth about any such event is thus already
+generically predetermined by the event's nature; and one may accordingly
+say with a perfectly good conscience that it virtually pre-exists.
+Common sense is thus right in its instinctive contention.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Is this then the horn of the dilemma which you stand for?
+Do you say that there is a truth even in cases where it shall never be
+known?
+
+Prag.:--Indeed I do, provided you let me hold consistently to my own
+conception of truth, and do not ask me to abandon it for something which
+I find impossible to comprehend.--You also believe, do you not, that
+there is a truth, even in cases where it never shall be known?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--I do indeed believe so.
+
+Prag.:--Pray then inform me in what, according to you, this truth
+regarding the unknown consists.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Consists?--pray what do you mean by 'consists'? It
+consists in nothing but itself, or more properly speaking it has neither
+consistence nor existence, it obtains, it holds.
+
+Prag.:--Well, what relation does it bear to the reality of which it
+holds?
+
+Anti-Prag.:-How do you mean, 'what relation'? It holds of it, of course;
+it knows it, it represents it.
+
+Prag.:--Who knows it? What represents it?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--The truth does; the truth knows it; or rather not exactly
+that, but any one knows it who possesses the truth. Any true idea of the
+reality represents the truth concerning it.
+
+Prag.:--But I thought that we had agreed that no knower of it, nor any
+idea representing it was to be supposed.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Sure enough!
+
+Prag.:--Then I beg you again to tell me in what this truth consists, all
+by itself, this tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se, on
+the one hand, and all knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the
+other. What is the shape of it in this third estate? Of what stuff,
+mental, physical, or 'epistemological,' is it built? What metaphysical
+region of reality does it inhabit?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--What absurd questions! Isn't it enough to say that it is
+true that the facts are so-and-so, and false that they are otherwise?
+
+Prag.:--'It' is true that the facts are so-and-so--I won't yield to the
+temptation of asking you what is true; but I do ask you whether your
+phrase that 'it is true that' the facts are so-and-so really means
+anything really additional to the bare being so-and-so of the facts
+themselves.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--It seems to mean more than the bare being of the facts. It
+is a sort of mental equivalent for them, their epistemological function,
+their value in noetic terms. Prag.:--A sort of spiritual double or ghost
+of them, apparently! If so, may I ask you where this truth is found.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Where? where? There is no 'where'--it simply obtains,
+absolutely obtains.
+
+Prag.:--Not in any one's mind?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--No, for we agreed that no actual knower of the truth should
+be assumed.
+
+Prag.:--No actual knower, I agree. But are you sure that no notion of a
+potential or ideal knower has anything to do with forming this strangely
+elusive idea of the truth of the facts in your mind?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Of course if there be a truth concerning the facts, that
+truth is what the ideal knower would know. To that extent you can't keep
+the notion of it and the notion of him separate. But it is not him first
+and then it; it is it first and then him, in my opinion.
+
+Prag.:--But you still leave me terribly puzzled as to the status of this
+so-called truth, hanging as it does between earth and heaven, between
+reality and knowledge, grounded in the reality, yet numerically
+additional to it, and at the same time antecedent to any knower's
+opinion and entirely independent thereof. Is it as independent of the
+knower as you suppose? It looks to me terribly dubious, as if it might
+be only another name for a potential as distinguished from an actual
+knowledge of the reality. Isn't your truth, after all, simply what
+any successful knower would have to know in case he existed? And in a
+universe where no knowers were even conceivable would any truth about
+the facts there as something numerically distinguishable from the facts
+themselves, find a place to exist in? To me such truth would not only be
+non-existent, it would be unimaginable, inconceivable.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--But I thought you said a while ago that there is a truth of
+past events, even tho no one shall ever know it.
+
+Prag.:--Yes, but you must remember that I also stipulated for permission
+to define the word in my own fashion. The truth of an event, past,
+present, or future, is for me only another name for the fact that if
+the event ever does get known, the nature of the knowledge is already to
+some degree predetermined. The truth which precedes actual knowledge of
+a fact means only what any possible knower of the fact will eventually
+find himself necessitated to believe about it. He must believe something
+that will bring him into satisfactory relations with it, that will prove
+a decent mental substitute for it. What this something may be is of
+course partly fixed already by the nature of the fact and by the sphere
+of its associations. This seems to me all that you can clearly mean when
+you say that truth pre-exists to knowledge. It is knowledge anticipated,
+knowledge in the form of possibility merely.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--But what does the knowledge know when it comes? Doesn't it
+know the truth? And, if so, mustn't the truth be distinct from either
+the fact or the knowledge?
+
+Prag.:--It seems to me that what the knowledge knows is the fact itself,
+the event, or whatever the reality may be. Where you see three distinct
+entities in the field, the reality, the knowing, and the truth, I see
+only two. Moreover, I can see what each of my two entities is known-as,
+but when I ask myself what your third entity, the truth, is known-as, I
+can find nothing distinct from the reality on the one hand, and the ways
+in which it may be known on the other. Are you not probably misled by
+common language, which has found it convenient to introduce a hybrid
+name, meaning sometimes a kind of knowing and sometimes a reality known,
+to apply to either of these things interchangeably? And has philosophy
+anything to gain by perpetuating and consecrating the ambiguity? If you
+call the object of knowledge 'reality,' and call the manner of its
+being cognized 'truth,' cognized moreover on particular occasions, and
+variously, by particular human beings who have their various businesses
+with it, and if you hold consistently to this nomenclature, it seems to
+me that you escape all sorts of trouble.
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Do you mean that you think you escape from my dilemma?
+
+Prag.:--Assuredly I escape; for if truth and knowledge are terms
+correlative and interdependent, as I maintain they are, then wherever
+knowledge is conceivable truth is conceivable, wherever knowledge
+is possible truth is possible, wherever knowledge is actual truth is
+actual. Therefore when you point your first horn at me, I think of truth
+actual, and say it doesn't exist. It doesn't; for by hypothesis there is
+no knower, no ideas, no workings. I agree, however, that truth possible
+or virtual might exist, for a knower might possibly be brought to birth;
+and truth conceivable certainly exists, for, abstractly taken, there
+is nothing in the nature of antediluvian events that should make the
+application of knowledge to them inconceivable. Therefore when you try
+to impale me on your second horn, I think of the truth in question as a
+mere abstract possibility, so I say it does exist, and side with common
+sense.
+
+Do not these distinctions rightly relieve me from embarrassment? And
+don't you think it might help you to make them yourself?
+
+Anti-Prag.:--Never!--so avaunt with your abominable hair-splitting and
+sophistry! Truth is truth; and never will I degrade it by identifying it
+with low pragmatic particulars in the way you propose.
+
+Prag.:--Well, my dear antagonist, I hardly hoped to convert an eminent
+intellectualist and logician like you; so enjoy, as long as you live,
+your own ineffable conception. Perhaps the rising generation will
+grow up more accustomed than you are to that concrete and empirical
+interpretation of terms in which the pragmatic method consists. Perhaps
+they may then wonder how so harmless and natural an account of truth as
+mine could have found such difficulty in entering the minds of men far
+more intelligent than I can ever hope to become, but wedded by education
+and tradition to the abstractionist manner of thought.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Meaning of Truth, by William James
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