



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 <DW44>s 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 <DW43>-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

*** 