,,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 7opinion1 belief1 statement1 or what not7 and its object4 ',truth1' ,i there say1 'is a property of certain of our ideas4 ,it means their agreement1 as falsity means their disagreement1 with reality4 ,pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course4 ',where our ideas do not copy definitely their object1 what does agreement with that object mean8 444 ,pragmatism asks its usual question4 ,grant an idea or belief to be true1 it says1 what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life8 ,what experiences may be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false8 ,how will the truth be realized8 ,what1 in short1 is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms8 ,the moment pragmatism asks this question1 it sees the answer3 ,,true ,,ideas ,,are ,,those ,,that ,,we ,,can ,,assimilate1 ,,validate1 ,,corroborate1 ,,and ,,verify4 ,,false ,,ideas ,,are ,,those ,,that ,,we ,,cannot4 ,that is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas2 that therefore is the meaning of truth1 for it is all that truth is known as4 ',the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it4 ,truth ,,happens to an idea4 ,it ,,becomes true1 is ,,made true by events4 ,its verity ,,is in fact an event1 a process1 the process namely of its verifying itself1 its veri,f,i,c,a,t,i,o,n4 ,its validity is the process of its valid,a,t,i,o,n4 ,footnote3 ,but ',,verifiability1' ,i add1 'is as good as verification4 ,for one truth-process completed1 there are a million in our lives that function in the state of nascency4 ,they lead us towards direct verification2 lead us into the surroundings of the object they envisage2 and then1 if everything1 runs on harmoniously1 we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it1 and are usually justified by all that happens4' ',to agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings1 or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed4 ,better either intellectually or practically 4444 ,any idea that helps us to deal1 whether practically or intellectually1 with either the reality or its belongings1 that doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations1 that ,,fits1 in fact1 and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting1 will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement4 ,it will be true of that reality4 ',,the ,,true1 to put it very briefly1 ,,is ,,only ,,the ,,expedient ,,in ,,the ,,way ,,of ,,our ,,thinking1 ,,just ,,as ,,the ,,right ,,is ,,only ,,the ,,expedient ,,in ,,the ,,way ,,of ,,our ,,behaving4 ,expedient in almost any fashion1 and expedient in the long run and on the whole1 of course2 for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily4 ,experience1 as we know1 has ways of ,,boiling ,,over1 and making us correct our present formulas4' ,this account of truth1 following upon the similar ones given by ,messrs4 ,dewey and ,schiller1 has occasioned the liveliest discussion4 ,few critics have defended it1 most of them have scouted it4 ,it seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand1 under its apparent simplicity2 and evident also1 ,i think1 that the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning-point in the history of epistemology1 and consequently in that of general philosophy4 ,in order to make my own thought more accessible to those who hereafter may have to study the question1 ,i have collected in the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears directly on the truth-question4 ,my first statement was in #ahhd1 in the article that begins the present volume4 ,the other papers follow in the order of their publication4 ,two or three appear now for the first time4 ,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 us1 and in nothing else4 ,i regret to have given some excuse for this charge1 by the unguarded language in which1 in the book ,pragmatism1 ,i spoke of the truth of the belief of certain philosophers in the absolute4 ,explaining why ,i do not believe in the absolute myself 7p4 #gh71 yet finding that it may secure 'moral holidays' to those who need them1 and is true in so far forth 7if to gain moral holidays be a good71 ,footnote3 ,op4 cit41 p4 #ge4 ,i offered this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my enemies4 ,but they1 as is only too common with such offerings1 trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver4 ,i had counted too much on their good will--oh for the rarity of ,christian charity under the sun6 ,oh for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also6 ,i had supposed it to be matter of common observation that1 of two competing views of the universe which in all other respects are equal1 but of which the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies it1 the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason that it makes the world seem more rational4 ,to choose the first view under such circumstances would be an ascetic act1 an act of philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be guilty4 ,using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts1 ,i had shown the concept of the absolute to ,,mean nothing but the holiday giver1 the banisher of cosmic fear4 ,one's objective deliverance1 when one says 'the absolute exists1' amounted1 on my showing1 just to this1 that 'some justification of a feeling of security in presence of the universe1' exists1 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 prophetic4 ,apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their own minds in any such picture1 so all that ,i can do is to apologize1 and take my offering back4 ,the absolute is true in ,,no way then1 and least of all1 by the verdict of the critics1 in the way which ,i assigned6 ,my treatment of ',god1' 'freedom1' and 'design' was similar4 ,reducing1 by the pragmatic test1 the meaning of each of these concepts to its positive experienceable operation1 ,i showed them all to mean the same thing1 viz41 the presence of 'promise' in the world4 ',god or no ,god8' means 'promise or no promise8' ,it seems to me that the alternative is objective enough1 being a question as to whether the cosmos has one character or another1 even though our own provisional answer be made on subjective grounds4 ,nevertheless christian and non-christian critics alike accuse me of summoning people to say ',god exists1' ,,even ,,when ,,he ,,doesn',t ,,exist1 because forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the saying doesn't really mean that he exists in any shape whatever1 but only that to say so feels good4 ,most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the word 'truth' shall be held to signify1 and not over any of the facts embodied in truth-situations2 for both pragmatists and anti-pragmatists believe in existent objects1 just as they believe in our ideas of them4 ,the difference is that when the pragmatists speak of truth1 they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas1 namely their workableness2 whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to mean something about the objects4 ,since the pragmatist1 if he agrees that an idea is 'really' true1 also agrees to whatever it says about its object2 and since most anti-pragmatists have already come round to agreeing that1 if the object exists1 the idea that it does so is workable2 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 wrangling1 ,i do not show my sense of 'values' by burning it all up4 ,i understand the question and ,i will give my answer4 ,i am interested in another doctrine in philosophy to which ,i give the name of radical empiricism1 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 prevail4 ,radical empiricism consists first of a postulate1 next of a statement of fact1 and finally of a generalized conclusion4 ,the postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience4 ,things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum1 but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate4 ,the statement of fact is that the relations between things1 conjunctive as well as disjunctive1 are just as much matters of direct particular experience1 neither more so nor less so1 than the things themselves4 ,the generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience4 ,the directly apprehended universe needs1 in short1 no extraneous trans-empirical connective support1 but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure4 ,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 conjunction1 and that to make one world out of this separateness1 a higher unifying agency must be there4 ,in the prevalent idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which 'relates' things together by throwing 'categories' over them like a net4 ,the most peculiar and unique1 perhaps1 of all these categories is supposed to be the truth-relation1 which connects parts of reality in pairs1 making of one of them a knower1 and of the other a thing known1 yet which is itself contentless experientially1 neither describable1 explicable1 nor reduceable to lower terms1 and denotable only by uttering the name 'truth4' ,the pragmatist view1 on the contrary1 of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content1 and that everything in it is experienceable4 ,its whole nature can be told in positive terms4 ,the 'workableness' which ideas must have1 in order to be true1 means particular workings1 physical or intellectual1 actual or possible1 which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete experience4 ,were this pragmatic contention admitted1 one great point in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored1 for the relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it1 is held by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort1 but to stand outside of all possible temporal experience2 and on the relation1 so interpreted1 rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate rally4 ,now the anti-pragmatist contentions which ,i try to meet in this volume can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of resistance1 not only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also 7for if the truth-relation were transcendent1 others might be so too71 that ,i feel strongly the strategical importance of having them definitely met and got out of the way4 ,what our critics most persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth1 yet they do not constitute it4 ,it is numerically additional to them1 prior to them1 explanatory ,,of them1 and in no wise to be explained ,,by them1 we are incessantly told4 ,the first point for our enemies to establish1 therefore1 is that ,,something numerically additional and prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea4 ,since the ,,object is additional1 and usually prior1 most rationalists plead ,,it1 and boldly accuse us of denying it4 ,this leaves on the bystanders the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the object--that our account of truth breaks down1 and that our critics have driven us from the field4 ,altho in various places in this volume ,i try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real existence1 ,i will say here again1 for the sake of emphasis1 that the existence of the object1 whenever the idea asserts it 'truly1' is the only reason1 in innumerable cases1 why the idea does work successfully1 if it work at all2 and that it seems an abuse of language1 to say the least1 to transfer the word 'truth' from the idea to the object's existence1 when the falsehood of ideas that won't work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of those that will4 ,i find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries4 ,but once establish the proper verbal custom1 let the word 'truth' represent a property of the idea1 cease to make it something mysteriously connected with the object known1 and the path opens fair and wide1 as ,i believe1 to the discussion of radical empiricism on its merits4 ,the truth of an idea will then mean only its workings1 or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up those workings2 it will mean neither the idea's object1 nor anything 'saltatory' inside the idea1 that terms drawn from experience cannot describe4 ,one word more1 ere ,i end this preface4 ,a distinction is sometimes made between ,dewey1 ,schiller and myself1 as if ,i1 in supposing the object's existence1 made a concession to popular prejudice which they1 as more radical pragmatists1 refuse to make4 ,as ,i myself understand these authors1 we all three absolutely agree in admitting the transcendency of the object 7provided it be an experienceable object7 to the subject1 in the truth-relation4 ,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 facts4 ,his account of knowledge is not only absurd1 but meaningless1 unless independent existences be there of which our ideas take account1 and for the transformation of which they work4 ,but because he and ,schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent' in the sense of being ,,altogether ,,trans-,,experiential1 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 there4 ,footnote3 ,it gives me pleasure to welcome ,professor ,carveth ,read into the pragmatistic church1 so far as his epistemology goes4 ,see his vigorous book1 ,the ,metaphysics of ,nature1 #b;d ,edition1 ,appendix ,a4 7,london1 ,black1 #aijh47 ,the work ,what is ,reality8 by ,francis ,howe ,johnson 7,boston1 #ahia71 of which ,i make the acquaintance only while correcting these proofs1 contains some striking anticipations of the later pragmatist view4 ,the ,psychology of ,thinking1 by ,irving ,e4 ,miller 7,new ,york1 ,macmillan ,co41 #aiji71 which has just appeared1 is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet published1 tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all4 ,while ,i am making references1 ,i cannot refrain from inserting one to the extraordinarily acute article by ,h4 ,v4 ,knox in the ,quarterly ,review for ,april1 #aiji4 ,it seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere critics should so fail to catch their adversary's point of view4 ,what misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the universes of discourse of ,schiller1 ,dewey1 and myself are panoramas of different extent1 and that what the one postulates explicitly the other provisionally leaves only in a state of implication1 while the reader thereupon considers it to be denied4 ,schiller's universe is the smallest1 being essentially a psychological one4 ,he starts with but one sort of thing1 truth-claims1 but is led ultimately to the independent objective facts which they assert1 inasmuch as the most successfully validated of all claims is that such facts are there4 ,my universe is more essentially epistemological4 ,i start with two things1 the objective facts and the claims1 and indicate which claims1 the facts being there1 will work successfully as the latter's substitutes and which will not4 ,i call the former claims true4 ,dewey's panorama1 if ,i understand this colleague1 is the widest of the three1 but ,i refrain from giving my own account of its complexity4 ,suffice it that he holds as firmly as ,i do to objects independent of our judgments4 ,if ,i am wrong in saying this1 he must correct me4 ,i decline in this matter to be corrected at second hand4 ,i have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the critics of my account of truth1 such as ,messrs4 ,taylor1 ,lovejoy1 ,gardiner1 ,bakewell1 ,creighton1 ,hibben1 ,parodi1 ,salter1 ,carus1 ,lalande1 ,mentre1 ,mc,taggart1 ,g4 ,e4 ,moore1 ,ladd and others1 especially not ,professor ,schinz1 who has published under the title of ,anti-pragmatisme an amusing sociological romance4 ,some of these critics seem to me to labor under an inability almost pathetic1 to understand the thesis which they seek to refute4 ,i imagine that most of their difficulties have been answered by anticipation elsewhere in this volume1 and ,i am sure that my readers will thank me for not adding more repetition to the fearful amount that is already there4 #ie ,,irving ,,st41 ,,cambridge 7,,mass471 ,august1 #aiji4 ,,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 ,footnote3 ,read before the ,aristotelian ,society1 ,december #a1 #ahhd1 and first published in ,mind1 vol4 x 7#ahhe74--,this1 and the following articles have received a very slight verbal revision1 consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy4 ,the following inquiry is 7to use a distinction familiar to readers of ,mr4 ,shadworth ,hodgson7 not an inquiry into the 'how it comes1' but into the 'what it is' of cognition4 ,what we call acts of cognition are evidently realized through what we call brains and their events1 whether there be 'souls' dynamically connected with the brains or not4 ,but with neither brains nor souls has this essay any business to transact4 ,in it we shall simply assume that cognition ,,is produced1 somehow1 and limit ourselves to asking what elements it contains1 what factors it implies4 ,cognition is a function of consciousness4 ,the first factor it implies is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition shall take place4 ,having elsewhere used the word 'feeling' to designate generically all states of consciousness considered subjectively1 or without respect to their possible function1 ,i shall then say that1 whatever elements an act of cognition may imply besides1 it at least implies the existence of a ,,feeling4 ,if the reader share the current antipathy to the word 'feeling1' he may substitute for it1 wherever ,i use it1 the word 'idea1' taken in the old broad ,lockian sense1 or he may use the clumsy phrase 'state of consciousness1' or finally he may say 'thought' instead4 ,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 subjective1 or1 what one might almost call a physical1 existence1 but no such self-transcendent function as would be implied in their being pieces of knowledge4 ,our task is again limited here4 ,we are not to ask1 ',how is self-transcendence possible8' ,we are only to ask1 ',how comes it that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed not only to be possible but actual8 ,and what are the marks used by common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest8' ,in short1 our inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology1--hardly anything more4 ,condillac embarked on a quest similar to this by his famous hypothesis of a statue to which various feelings were successively imparted4 ,its first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance4 ,but to avoid all possible complication with the question of genesis1 let us not attribute even to a statue the possession of our imaginary feeling4 ,let us rather suppose it attached to no matter1 nor localized at any point in space1 but left swinging ,,in ,,vacuo1 as it were1 by the direct creative ,,fiat of a god4 ,and let us also1 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 sort1 but limit ourselves to assuming that it is a feeling of ,q4 ,what is true of it under this abstract name will be no less true of it in any more particular shape 7such as fragrance1 pain1 hardness7 which the reader may suppose4 ,now1 if this feeling of ,q be the only creation of the god1 it will of course form the entire universe4 ,and if1 to escape the cavils of that large class of persons who believe that ,,semper ,,idem ,,sentire ,,ac ,,non ,,sentire are the same1 ,footnote3#a ',the ,relativity of ,knowledge1' held in this sense1 is1 it may be observed in passing1 one of the oddest of philosophic superstitions4 ,whatever facts may be cited in its favor are due to the properties of nerve-tissue1 which may be exhausted by too prolonged an excitement4 ,patients with neuralgias that last unremittingly for days can1 however1 assure us that the limits of this nerve-law are pretty widely drawn4 ,but if we physically could get a feeling that should last eternally unchanged1 what atom of logical or psychological argument is there to prove that it would not be felt as long as it lasted1 and felt for just what it is1 all that time8 ,the reason for the opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think that so stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be1 should be allowed to fill eternity with its presence4 ,an interminable acquaintance1 leading to no knowledge-about1--such would be its condition4 we allow the feeling to be of as short a duration as they like1 that universe will only need to last an infinitesimal part of a second4 ,the feeling in question will thus be reduced to its fighting weight1 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 life1--a life1 it will also be noticed1 that has no other moment of consciousness either preceding or following it4 ,well now1 can our little feeling1 thus left alone in the universe1--for the god and we psychological critics may be supposed left out of the account1--can the feeling1 ,i say1 be said to have any sort of a cognitive function8 ,for it to ,,know1 there must be something to be known4 ,what is there1 on the present supposition8 ,one may reply1 'the feeling's content q4' ,but does it not seem more proper to call this the feeling's ,,quality than its content8 ,does not the word 'content' suggest that the feeling has already dirempted itself as an act from its content as an object8 ,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 q8 ,the quality q1 so far1 is an entirely subjective fact which the feeling carries so to speak endogenously1 or in its pocket4 ,if any one pleases to dignify so simple a fact as this by the name of knowledge1 of course nothing can prevent him4 ,but let us keep closer to the path of common usage1 and reserve the name knowledge for the cognition of 'realities1' meaning by realities things that exist independently of the feeling through which their cognition occurs4 ,if the content of the feeling occur nowhere in the universe outside of the feeling itself1 and perish with the feeling1 common usage refuses to call it a reality1 and brands it as a subjective feature of the feeling's constitution1 or at the most as the feeling's ,,dream4 ,for the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense1 then1 it must be self-transcendent2 and we must prevail upon the god to ,,create ,a ,,reality ,,outside ,,of ,,it to correspond to its intrinsic quality ,q4 ,thus only can it be redeemed from the condition of being a solipsism4 ,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 ,,reality4 ,this first instalment of my thesis is sure to be attacked4 ,but one word before defending it ',reality' has become our warrant for calling a feeling cognitive2 but what becomes our warrant for calling anything reality8 ,the only reply is--the faith of the present critic or inquirer4 ,at every moment of his life he finds himself subject to a belief in ,,some realities1 even though his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next4 ,whenever he finds that the feeling he is studying contemplates what he himself regards as a reality1 he must of course admit the feeling itself to be truly cognitive4 ,we are ourselves the critics here2 and we shall find our burden much lightened by being allowed to take reality in this relative and provisional way4 ,every science must make some assumptions4 ,erkenntnisstheoretiker are but fallible mortals4 ,when they study the function of cognition1 they do it by means of the same function in themselves4 ,and knowing that the fountain cannot go higher than its source1 we should promptly confess that our results in this field are affected by our own liability to err4 ,,the ,,most ,,we ,,can ,,claim ,,is1 ,,that ,,what ,,we ,,say ,,about ,,cognition ,,may ,,be ,,counted ,,as ,,true ,,as ,,what ,,we ,,say ,,about ,,anything ,,else4 ,if our hearers agree with us about what are to be held 'realities1' they will perhaps also agree to the reality of our doctrine of the way in which they are known4 ,we cannot ask for more4 ,our terminology shall follow the spirit of these remarks4 ,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 it4 ,we may call such a feeling a dream if we like2 we shall have to see later whether we can call it a fiction or an error4 ,to revert now to our thesis4 ,some persons will immediately cry out1 ',how ,,can a reality resemble a feeling8' ,here we find how wise we were to name the quality of the feeling by an algebraic letter ,q4 ,we flank the whole difficulty of resemblance between an inner state and an outward reality1 by leaving it free to any one to postulate as the reality whatever sort of thing he thinks ,,can resemble a feeling1--if not an outward thing1 then another feeling like the first one1--the mere feeling ,q in the critic's mind for example4 ,evading thus this objection1 we turn to another which is sure to be urged4 ,it will come from those philosophers to whom 'thought1' in the sense of a knowledge of relations1 is the all in all of mental life2 and who hold a merely feeling consciousness to be no better--one would sometimes say from their utterances1 a good deal worse--than no consciousness at all4 ,such phrases as these1 for example1 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 paths3 ',a perception detached from all others1 left out of the heap we call a mind1 being out of all relation1 has no qualities--is simply nothing4 ,we can no more consider it than we can see vacancy4' ',it is simply in itself fleeting1 momentary1 unnameable 7because while we name it it has become another71 and for the very same reason unknowable1 the very negation of knowability4' ',exclude from what we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation1 we find that none are left4' ,altho such citations as these from the writings of ,professor ,green might be multiplied almost indefinitely1 they would hardly repay the pains of collection1 so egregiously false is the doctrine they teach4 ,our little supposed feeling1 whatever it may be1 from the cognitive point of view1 whether a bit of knowledge or a dream1 is certainly no psychical zero4 ,it is a most positively and definitely qualified inner fact1 with a complexion all its own4 ,of course there are many mental facts which it is ,,not4 ,it knows ,q1 if ,q be a reality1 with a very minimum of knowledge4 ,it neither dates nor locates it4 ,it neither classes nor names it4 ,and it neither knows itself as a feeling1 nor contrasts itself with other feelings1 nor estimates its own duration or intensity4 ,it is1 in short1 if there is no more of it than this1 a most dumb and helpless and useless kind of thing4 ,but if we must describe it by so many negations1 and if it can say nothing ,,about itself or ,,about anything else1 by what right do we deny that it is a psychical zero8 ,and may not the 'relationists' be right after all8 ,in the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this riddle2 and a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at4 ,a quotation from a too seldom quoted book1 the ,exploratio ,philosophica of ,john ,grote 7,london1 #ahfe71 p4 #fj1 will form the best introduction to it4 ',our knowledge1' writes ,grote1 'may be contemplated in either of two ways1 or1 to use other words1 we may speak in a double manner of the object of knowledge4 ,that is1 we may either use language thus3 we ,,know a thing1 a man1 etc42 or we may use it thus3 we know such and such things ,,about the thing1 the man1 etc4 ,language in general1 following its true logical instinct1 distinguishes between these two applications of the notion of knowledge1 the one being yvwvai1 noscere1 kennen1 connaitre1 the other being eidevai1 scire1 wissen1 savoir4 ,in the origin1 the former may be considered more what ,i have called phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ,,acquaintance or familiarity with what is known2 which notion is perhaps more akin to the phenomenal bodily communication1 and is less purely intellectual than the other2 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 type1 a ,vorstellung4 ,the other1 which is what we express in judgments or propositions1 what is embodied in ,begriffe or concepts without any necessary imaginative representation1 is in its origin the more intellectual notion of knowledge4 ,there is no reason1 however1 why we should not express our knowledge1 whatever its kind1 in either manner1 provided only we do not confusedly express it1 in the same proposition or piece of reasoning1 in both4' ,now obviously if our supposed feeling of ,q is 7if knowledge at all7 only knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type1 it is milking a he-goat1 as the ancients would have said1 to try to extract from it any deliverance ,,about anything under the sun1 even about itself4 ,and it is as unjust1 after our failure1 to turn upon it and call it a psychical nothing1 as it would be1 after our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat1 to proclaim the non-lactiferous character of the whole goat-tribe4 ,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 issue4 ,it is always the 'speechlessness' of sensation1 its inability to make any 'statement1',footnote3 ,see1 for example1 ,green's ,introduction to ,hume's ,treatise of ,human ,nature1 p4 #cf4 that is held to make the very notion of it meaningless1 and to justify the student of knowledge in scouting it out of existence4 ',significance1' in the sense of standing as the sign of other mental states1 is taken to be the sole function of what mental states we have2 and from the perception that our little primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense1 it is an easy step to call it first meaningless1 next senseless1 then vacuous1 and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible4 ,but in this universal liquidation1 this everlasting slip1 slip1 slip1 of direct acquaintance into knowledge-,,about1 until at last nothing is left about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain1 does not all 'significance' depart from the situation8 ,and when our knowledge about things has reached its never so complicated perfection1 must there not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with it some acquaintance with ,,what things all this knowledge is about8 ,now1 our supposed little feeling gives a ,,what2 and if other feelings should succeed which remember the first1 its ,,what may stand as subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about1 of some judgment1 perceiving relations between it and other ,,whats which the other feelings may know4 ,the hitherto dumb ,q will then receive a name and be no longer speechless4 ,but every name1 as students of logic know1 has its 'denotation'2 and the denotation always means some reality or content1 relationless as extra or with its internal relations unanalyzed1 like the ,q which our primitive sensation is supposed to know4 ,no relation-expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts1' with such contents1 as this4 ,let the ,q be fragrance1 let it be toothache1 or let it be a more complex kind of feeling1 like that of the full-moon swimming in her blue abyss1 it must first come in that simple shape1 and be held fast in that first intention1 before any knowledge ,,about it can be attained4 ,the knowledge ,,about it is ,,it with a context added4 ,undo ,,it1 and what is added cannot be ,c,o,ntext4 ,footnote3 ,if ,a enters and ,b exclaims1 ',didn't you see my brother on the stairs8' we all hold that ,a may answer1 ',i saw him1 but didn't know he was your brother'2 ignorance of brotherhood not abolishing power to see4 ,but those who1 on account of the unrelatedness of the first facts with which we become acquainted1 deny them to be 'known' to us1 ought in consistency to maintain that if ,a did not perceive the relationship of the man on the stairs to ,b1 it was impossible he should have noticed him at all4 ,let us say no more then about this objection1 but enlarge our thesis1 thus3 ,if there be in the universe a ,q other than the ,q in the feeling1 the latter may have acquaintance with an entity ejective to itself2 an acquaintance moreover1 which1 as mere acquaintance1 it would be hard to imagine susceptible either of improvement or increase1 being in its way complete2 and which would oblige us 7so long as we refuse not to call acquaintance knowledge7 to say not only that the feeling is cognitive1 but that all qualities of feeling1 ,,so ,,long ,,as ,,there ,,is ,,anything ,,outside ,,of ,,them ,,which ,,they ,,resemble1 are feelings ,,of qualities of existence1 and perceptions of outward fact4 ,the point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first feeling lies1 it will be noticed1 in the discovery that q does exist elsewhere than in it4 ,in case this discovery were not made1 we could not be sure the feeling was cognitive2 and in case there were nothing outside to be discovered1 we should have to call the feeling a dream4 ,but the feeling itself cannot make the discovery4 ,its own q is the only q it grasps2 and its own nature is not a particle altered by having the self-transcendent function of cognition either added to it or taken away4 ,the function is accidental2 synthetic1 not analytic2 and falls outside and not inside its being4 ,footnote3 ,it seems odd to call so important a function accidental1 but ,i do not see how we can mend the matter4 ,just as1 if we start with the reality and ask how it may come to be known1 we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall ,,reconstruct it in its own more private fashion2 so1 if we start with the feeling and ask how it may come to know1 we can only reply by invoking a reality which shall ,,reconstruct it in its own more public fashion4 ,in either case1 however1 the datum we start with remains just what it was4 ,one may easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference between quality of feeling and feeling of quality1 between receiving and reconstructing the knowledge of a reality4 ,but at the end we must confess that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated dualism of the knower and the known4 ,see ,bowne's ,metaphysics1 ,new ,york1 #ahhb1 pp4 #djc-dab1 and various passages in ,lotze1 e4g41 ,logic1 ,sec4 #cjh4 ',unmediated' is a bad word to have used4--#aiji4 ,a feeling feels as a gun shoots4 ,if there be nothing to be felt or hit1 they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein4 ,if1 however1 something starts up opposite them1 they no longer simply shoot or feel1 they hit and know4 ,but with this arises a worse objection than any yet made4 ,we the critics look on and see a real q and a feeling of q2 and because the two resemble each other1 we say the one knows the other4 ,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 q8 ,suppose1 instead of one q1 a number of real q's in the field4 ,if the gun shoots and hits1 we can easily see which one of them it hits4 ,but how can we distinguish which one the feeling knows8 ,it knows the one it stands for4 ,but which one ,,does it stand for8 ,it declares no intention in this respect4 ,it merely resembles2 it resembles all indifferently2 and resembling1 per se1 is not necessarily representing or standing-for at all4 ,eggs resemble each other1 but do not on that account represent1 stand for1 or know each other4 ,and if you say this is because neither of them is a ,,feeling1 then imagine the world to consist of nothing but toothaches1 which ,,are feelings1 feelings resembling each other exactly1--would they know each other the better for all that8 ,the case of q being a bare quality like that of toothache-pain is quite different from that of its being a concrete individual thing4 ,there is practically no test for deciding whether the feeling of a bare quality means to represent it or not4 ,it can ,,do nothing to the quality beyond resembling it1 simply because an abstract quality is a thing to which nothing can be done4 ,being without context or environment or principium individuationis1 a quiddity with no haecceity1 a platonic idea1 even duplicate editions of such a quality 7were they possible71 would be indiscernible1 and no sign could be given1 no result altered1 whether the feeling ,i meant to stand for this edition or for that1 or whether it simply resembled the quality without meaning to stand for it at all4 ,if now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q1 by assigning to each a ,,context which shall distinguish it from its mates1 we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling knows1 by extending our principle of resemblance to the context too1 and saying the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most exactly duplicates4 ,but here again the theoretic doubt recurs3 duplication and coincidence1 are they knowledge8 ,the gun shows which q it points to and hits1 by ,,breaking it4 ,until the feeling can show us which q it points to and knows1 by some equally flagrant token1 why are we not free to deny that it either points to or knows any one of the ,,real q's at all1 and to affirm that the word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its relation to the reality8 ,well1 as a matter of fact1 every actual feeling ,,does show us1 quite as flagrantly as the gun1 which q it points to2 and practically in concrete cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto left out4 ,let us pass from abstractions to possible instances1 and ask our obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world4 ,let him send me1 for example1 a dream of the death of a certain man1 and let him simultaneously cause the man to die4 ,how would our practical instinct spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition of the reality1 or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a resembling reality with my dream8 ,just such puzzling cases as this are what the 'society for psychical research' is busily collecting and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way4 ,if my dream were the only one of the kind ,i ever had in my life1 if the context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars from the real death's context1 and if my dream led me to no action about the death1 unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence1 and naught besides4 ,but if the death in the dream had a long context1 agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real death2 if ,i were constantly having such dreams1 all equally perfect1 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 neighbors1--we should in all probability have to admit that ,i had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power1 that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just those realities they figured1 and that the word 'coincidence' failed to touch the root of the matter4 ,and whatever doubts any one preserved would completely vanish1 if it should appear that from the midst of my dream ,i had the power of ,,interfering with the course of the reality1 and making the events in it turn this way or that1 according as ,i dreamed they should4 ,then at least it would be certain that my waking critics and my dreaming self were dealing with the ,,same4 ,and thus do men invariably decide such a question4 ,,the ,,falling ,,of ,,the ,,dream',s ,,practical ,,consequences into the real world1 and the ,,extent of the resemblance between the two worlds are the criteria they instinctively use4 ,footnote3 ,the thoroughgoing objector might1 it is true1 still return to the charge1 and1 granting a dream which should completely mirror the real universe1 and all the actions dreamed in which should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in this universe1 still insist that this is nothing more than harmony1 and that it is as far as ever from being made clear whether the dream-world refers to that other world1 all of whose details it so closely copies4 ,this objection leads deep into metaphysics4 ,i do not impugn its importance1 and justice obliges me to say that but for the teachings of my colleague1 ,dr4 ,josiah ,royce1 ,i should neither have grasped its full force nor made my own practical and psychological point of view as clear to myself as it is4 ,on this occasion ,i prefer to stick steadfastly to that point of view2 but ,i hope that ,dr4 ,royce's more fundamental criticism of the function of cognition may ere long see the light4 ,i referred in this note to ,royce's religious aspect of philosophy1 then about to be published4 ,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 q1 and use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former4 ,at the time ,i could not refute this transcendentalist opinion4 ,later1 largely through the influence of ,professor ,d4 ,s4 ,miller 7see his essay ',the meaning of truth and error1' in the ,philosophical ,review for #ahic1 vol4 #b p4 #djc7 ,i came to see that any definitely experienceable workings would serve as intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's intentions would4 ,all feeling is for the sake of action1 all feeling results in action1--to-day no argument is needed to prove these truths4 ,but by a most singular disposition of nature which we may conceive to have been different1 ,,my ,,feelings ,,act ,,upon ,,the ,,realities ,,within ,,my ,,critic',s ,,world4 ,unless1 then1 my critic can prove that my feeling does not 'point to' those realities which it acts upon1 how can he continue to doubt that he and ,i are alike cognizant of one and the same real world8 ,if the action is performed in one world1 that must be the world the feeling intends2 if in another world1 ,,that is the world the feeling has in mind4 ,if your feeling bear no fruits in my world1 ,i call it utterly detached from my world2 ,i call it a solipsism1 and call its world a dream-world4 ,if your toothache do not prompt you to ,,act as if ,i had a toothache1 nor even as if ,i had a separate existence2 if you neither say to me1 ',i know now how you must suffer6' nor tell me of a remedy1 ,i deny that your feeling1 however it may resemble mine1 is really cognizant of mine4 ,it gives no ,,sign of being cognizant1 and such a sign is absolutely necessary to my admission that it is4 ,before ,i can think you to mean my world1 you must affect my world2 before ,i can think you to mean much of it1 you must affect much of it2 and before ,i can be sure you mean it ,,as ,i ,,do1 you must affect it ,,just ,,as ,i ,,should if ,i were in your place4 ,then ,i1 your critic1 will gladly believe that we are thinking1 not only of the same reality1 but that we are thinking it ,,alike1 and thinking of much of its extent4 ,without the practical effects of our neighbor's feelings on our own world1 we should never suspect the existence of our neighbor's feelings at all1 and of course should never find ourselves playing the critic as we do in this article4 ,the constitution of nature is very peculiar4 ,in the world of each of us are certain objects called human bodies1 which move about and act on all the other objects there1 and the occasions of their action are in the main what the occasions of our action would be1 were they our bodies4 ,they use words and gestures1 which1 if we used them1 would have thoughts behind them1--no mere thoughts uberhaupt1 however1 but strictly determinate thoughts4 ,i think you have the notion of fire in general1 because ,i see you act towards this fire in my room just as ,i act towards it1--poke it and present your person towards it1 and so forth4 ,but that binds me to believe that if you feel 'fire' at all1 ,,this is the fire you feel4 ,as a matter of fact1 whenever we constitute ourselves into psychological critics1 it is not by dint of discovering which reality a feeling 'resembles' that we find out which reality it means4 ,we become first aware of which one it means1 and then we suppose that to be the one it resembles4 ,we see each other looking at the same objects1 pointing to them and turning them over in various ways1 and thereupon we hope and trust that all of our several feelings resemble the reality and each other4 ,but this is a thing of which we are never theoretically sure4 ,still1 it would practically be a case of grubelsucht1 if a ruffian were assaulting and drubbing my body1 to spend much time in subtle speculation either as to whether his vision of my body resembled mine1 or as to whether the body he really ,,meant to insult were not some body in his mind's eye1 altogether other from my own4 ,the practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away4 ,if what he have in mind be not ,,my body1 why call we it a body at all8 ,his mind is inferred by me as a term1 to whose existence we trace the things that happen4 ,the inference is quite void if the term1 once inferred1 be separated from its connection with the body that made me infer it1 and connected with another that is not mine at all4 ,no matter for the metaphysical puzzle of how our two minds1 the ruffian's and mine1 can mean the same body4 ,men who see each other's bodies sharing the same space1 treading the same earth1 splashing the same water1 making the same air resonant1 and pursuing the same game and eating out of the same dish1 will never practically believe in a pluralism of solipsistic worlds4 ,where1 however1 the actions of one mind seem to take no effect in the world of the other1 the case is different4 ,this is what happens in poetry and fiction4 ,every one knows ,ivanhoe1 for example2 but so long as we stick to the story pure and simple without regard to the facts of its production1 few would hesitate to admit that there are as many different ,ivanhoes as there are different minds cognizant of the story4 ,footnote3 ,that is1 there is no ,,real ',ivanhoe1' not even the one in ,sir ,walter ,scott's mind as he was writing the story4 ,that one is only the ,,first one of the ,ivanhoe-solipsisms4 ,it is quite true we can make it the real ,ivanhoe if we like1 and then say that the other ,ivanhoes know it or do not know it1 according as they refer to and resemble it or no4 ,this is done by bringing in ,sir ,walter ,scott himself as the author of the real ,ivanhoe1 and so making a complex object of both4 ,this object1 however1 is not a story pure and simple4 ,it has dynamic relations with the world common to the experience of all the readers4 ,sir ,walter ,scott's ,ivanhoe got itself printed in volumes which we all can handle1 and to any one of which we can refer to see which of our versions be the true one1 i4e41 the original one of ,scott himself4 ,we can see the manuscript2 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 experience1--a thing we can by no means do with either the ,ivanhoe or the ,rebecca1 either the ,templar or the ,isaac of ,york1 of the story taken simply as such1 and detached from the conditions of its production4 ,everywhere1 then1 we have the same test3 can we pass continuously from two objects in two minds to a third object which seems to be in ,,both minds1 because each mind feels every modification imprinted on it by the other8 ,if so1 the first two objects named are derivatives1 to say the least1 from the same third object1 and may be held1 if they resemble each other1 to refer to one and the same reality4 ,the fact that all these ,ivanhoes ,,resemble each other does not prove the contrary4 ,but if an alteration invented by one man in his version were to reverberate immediately through all the other versions1 and produce changes therein1 we should then easily agree that all these thinkers were thinking the ,,same ,ivanhoe1 and that1 fiction or no fiction1 it formed a little world common to them all4 ,having reached this point1 we may take up our thesis and improve it again4 ,still calling the reality by the name of q and letting the critic's feeling vouch for it1 we can say that any other feeling will be held cognizant of q1 provided it both resemble q1 and refer to q1 as shown by its either modifying q directly1 or modifying some other reality1 p or r1 which the critic knows to be continuous with q4 ,or more shortly1 thus3 ,,the ,,feeling ,,of q ,,knows ,,whatever ,,reality ,,it ,,resembles1 ,,and ,,either ,,directly ,,or ,,indirectly ,,operates ,,on4 ,if it resemble without operating1 it is a dream2 if it operate without resembling1 it is an error4 ,footnote3 ,among such errors are those cases in which our feeling operates on a reality which it does partially resemble1 and yet does not intend3 as for instance1 when ,i take up your umbrella1 meaning to take my own4 ,i cannot be said here either to know your umbrella1 or my own1 which latter my feeling more completely resembles4 ,i am mistaking them both1 misrepresenting their context1 etc4 ,we have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily one mind1 and the feeling criticised another4 ,but the criticised feeling and its critic may be earlier and later feelings of the same mind1 and here it might seem that we could dispense with the notion of operating1 to prove that critic and criticised are referring to and meaning to represent the ,,same4 ,we think we see our past feelings directly1 and know what they refer to without appeal4 ,at the worst1 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 referred4 ,so we need no 'operating' here1 to make sure that the feeling and its critic mean the same real q4 ,well1 all the better if this is so6 ,we have covered the more complex and difficult case in our text1 and we may let this easier one go4 ,the main thing at present is to stick to practical psychology1 and ignore metaphysical difficulties4 ,one more remark4 ,our formula contains1 it will be observed1 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 ,fichte1 the principle1 namely1 that for knowledge to be constituted there must be knowledge of the knowing mind along with whatever else is known3 not q1 as we have supposed1 but q ,,plus ,,myself1 must be the least ,i can know4 ,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 not4 ,so that ,ferrier's principle1 if it have any relevancy at all1 must have relevancy to the metaphysical possibility of consciousness at large1 and not to the practically recognized constitution of cognitive consciousness4 ,we may therefore pass it by without further notice here4 ,it is to be feared that the reader may consider this formula rather insignificant and obvious1 and hardly worth the labor of so many pages1 especially when he considers that the only cases to which it applies are percepts1 and that the whole field of symbolic or conceptual thinking seems to elude its grasp4 ,where the reality is either a material thing or act1 or a state of the critic's consciousness1 ,i may both mirror it in my mind and operate upon it--in the latter case indirectly1 of course--as soon as ,i perceive it4 ,but there are many cognitions1 universally allowed to be such1 which neither mirror nor operate on their realities4 ,in the whole field of symbolic thought we are universally held both to intend1 to speak of1 and to reach conclusions about--to know in short--particular realities1 without having in our subjective consciousness any mind-stuff that resembles them even in a remote degree4 ,we are instructed about them by language which awakens no consciousness beyond its sound2 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 themselves4 ,as minds may differ here1 let me speak in the first person4 ,i am sure that my own current thinking has ,,words for its almost exclusive subjective material1 words which are made intelligible by being referred to some reality that lies beyond the horizon of direct consciousness1 and of which ,i am only aware as of a terminal ,,more existing in a certain direction1 to which the words might lead but do not lead yet4 ,the ,,subject1 or ,,topic1 of the words is usually something towards which ,i mentally seem to pitch them in a backward way1 almost as ,i might jerk my thumb over my shoulder to point at something1 without looking round1 if ,i were only entirely sure that it was there4 ,the ,,upshot1 or ,,conclusion1 of the words is something towards which ,i seem to incline my head forwards1 as if giving assent to its existence1 tho all my mind's eye catches sight of may be some tatter of an image connected with it1 which tatter1 however1 if only endued with the feeling of familiarity and reality1 makes me feel that the whole to which it belongs is rational and real1 and fit to be let pass4 ,here then is cognitive consciousness on a large scale1 and yet what it knows1 it hardly resembles in the least degree4 ,the formula last laid down for our thesis must therefore be made more complete4 ,we may now express it thus3 ,a ,,percept ,,knows ,,whatever ,,reality ,,it ,,directly ,,or ,,indirectly ,,operates ,,on ,,and ,,resembles2 ,,aconceptual ,,feeling1 ,,or ,,thought ,,knows ,a ,,reality1 ,,whenever ,,it ,,actually ,,or ,,potentially ,,terminates ,,in ,a ,,percept ,,that ,,operates ,,on1 ,,or ,,resembles ,,that ,,reality1 ,,or ,,is ,,otherwise ,,connected ,,with ,,it ,,or ,,with ,,its ,,context4 ,the latter percept may be either sensation or sensorial idea2 and when ,i say the thought must ,,terminate in such a percept1 ,i mean that it must ultimately be capable of leading up thereto1--by the way of practical missing section is an incomplete 'thought about' that reality1 that reality is its 'topic1' etc4 experience1 if the terminal feeling be a sensation2 by the way of logical or habitual suggestion1 if it be only an image in the mind4 ,let an illustration make this plainer4 ,i open the first book ,i take up1 and read the first sentence that meets my eye3 ',newton saw the handiwork of ,god in the heavens as plainly as ,paley in the animal kingdom4' ,i immediately look back and try to analyze the subjective state in which ,i rapidly apprehended this sentence as ,i read it4 ,in the first place there was an obvious feeling that the sentence was intelligible and rational and related to the world of realities4 ,there was also a sense of agreement or harmony between ',newton1' ',paley1' and ',god4' ,there was no apparent image connected with the words 'heavens1' or 'handiwork1' or ',god'2 they were words merely4 ,with 'animal kingdom' ,i think there was the faintest consciousness 7it may possibly have been an image of the steps7 of the ,museum of ,zoology in the town of ,cambridge where ,i write4 ,with ',paley' there was an equally faint consciousness of a small dark leather book2 and with ',newton' a pretty distinct vision of the right-hand lower corner of curling periwig4 ,this is all the mind-stuff ,i can discover in my first consciousness of the meaning of this sentence1 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 book1 and not picked it out for an experiment4 ,and yet my consciousness was truly cognitive4 ,the sentence is 'about realities' which my psychological critic--for we must not forget him--acknowledges to be such1 even as he acknowledges my distinct feeling that they ,,are realities1 and my acquiescence in the general rightness of what ,i read of them1 to be true knowledge on my part4 ,now what justifies my critic in being as lenient as this8 ,this singularly inadequate consciousness of mine1 made up of symbols that neither resemble nor affect the realities they stand for1--how can he be sure it is cognizant of the very realities he has himself in mind8 ,he is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such inadequate and symbolic thoughts1 by developing themselves1 terminate in percepts that practically modified and presumably resembled his own4 ,by 'developing' themselves is meant obeying their tendencies1 following up the suggestions nascently present in them1 working in the direction in which they seem to point1 clearing up the penumbra1 making distinct the halo1 unravelling the fringe1 which is part of their composition1 and in the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content seems consciously to lie4 ,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 eyes4 ,i may satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for him1 by showing him ,,in ,,concreto the very animals and their arrangements1 of which the pages treat4 ,i may get ,newton's works and portraits2 or if ,i follow the line of suggestion of the wig1 ,i may smother my critic in seventeenth-century matters pertaining to ,newton's environment1 to show that the word ',newton' has the same ,,locus and relations in both our minds4 ,finally ,i may1 by act and word1 persuade him that what ,i mean by ,god and the heavens and the analogy of the handiworks1 is just what he means also4 ,my demonstration in the last resort is to his ,,senses4 ,my thought makes me act on his senses much as he might himself act on them1 were he pursuing the consequences of a perception of his own4 ,practically then ,,my thought terminates in ,,his realities4 ,he willingly supposes it1 therefore1 to be ,,of them1 and inwardly to ,,resemble what his own thought would be1 were it of the same symbolic sort as mine4 ,and the pivot and fulcrum and support of his mental persuasion1 is the sensible operation which my thought leads me1 or may lead1 to effect--the bringing of ,paley's book1 of ,newton's portrait1 etc41 before his very eyes4 ,in the last analysis1 then1 we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world1 because ,,we ,,believe ,,our ,,percepts ,,are ,,possessed ,,by ,,us ,,in ,,common4 ,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 else4 ,what ,i am for you is in the first instance a percept of your own4 ,unexpectedly1 however1 ,i open and show you a book1 uttering certain sounds the while4 ,these acts are also your percepts1 but they so resemble acts of yours with feelings prompting them1 that you cannot doubt ,i have the feelings too1 or that the book is one book felt in both our worlds4 ,that it is felt in the same way1 that my feelings of it resemble yours1 is something of which we never can be sure1 but which we assume as the simplest hypothesis that meets the case4 ,as a matter of fact1 we never ,,are sure of it1 and1 as ,,erkenntnisstheoretiker1 we can only say that of feelings that should ,,not resemble each other1 both could not know the same thing at the same time in the same way4 ,footnote3 ,though both might terminate in the same thing and be incomplete thoughts 'about' it4 ,if each holds to its own percept as the reality1 it is bound to say of the other percept1 that1 though it may ,,intend that reality1 and prove this by working change upon it1 yet1 if it do not resemble it1 it is all false and wrong4 ,footnote3 ,the difference between ,idealism and ,realism is immaterial here4 ,what is said in the text is consistent with either theory4 ,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 reality1 and then the reality change yours4 ,in either case you and ,i seem knit into a continuous world1 and not to form a pair of solipsisms4 ,if this be so of percepts1 how much more so of higher modes of thought6 ,even in the sphere of sensation individuals are probably different enough4 ,comparative study of the simplest conceptual elements seems to show a wider divergence still4 ,and when it comes to general theories and emotional attitudes towards life1 it is indeed time to say with ,thackeray1 ',my friend1 two different universes walk about under your hat and under mine4' ,what can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a chaos of mutually repellent solipsisms8 ,through what can our several minds commune8 ,through nothing but the mutual resemblance of those of our perceptual feelings which have this power of modifying one another1 ,,which ,,are ,,mere ,,dumb ,,knowledges-,,of-,,acquaintance1 and which must also resemble their realities or not know them aright at all4 ,in such pieces of knowledge-of-acquaintance all our knowledge-about must end1 and carry a sense of this possible termination as part of its content4 ,these percepts1 these termini1 these sensible things1 these mere matters-of-acquaintance1 are the only realities we ever directly know1 and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution of one of them for another1 and the reduction of the substitute to the status of a conceptual sign4 ,contemned though they be by some thinkers1 these sensations are the mother-earth1 the anchorage1 the stable rock1 the first and last limits1 the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind4 ,to find such sensational termini should be our aim with all our higher thought4 ,they end discussion2 they destroy the false conceit of knowledge2 and without them we are all at sea with each other's meaning4 ,if two men act alike on a percept1 they believe themselves to feel alike about it2 if not1 they may suspect they know it in differing ways4 ,we can never be sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test4 ,footnote3 ',there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice4444 ,it appears1 then1 that the rule for attaining the highest grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows3 ,consider what effects1 which might conceivably have practical bearings1 we conceive the object of our conception to have4 ,then1 our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object4' ,charles ,s4 ,peirce3 ',how to make our ,ideas clear1' in ,popular ,science ,monthly1 ,new ,york1 ,january1 #ahgh1 p4 #bic4 ,this is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air2 they have no practical issue of a sensational kind4 ',scientific' theories1 on the other hand1 always terminate in definite percepts4 ,you can deduce a possible sensation from your theory and1 taking me into your laboratory1 prove that your theory is true of my world by giving me the sensation then and there4 ,beautiful is the flight of conceptual reason through the upper air of truth4 ,no wonder philosophers are dazzled by it still1 and no wonder they look with some disdain at the low earth of feeling from which the goddess launched herself aloft4 ,but woe to her if she return not home to its acquaintance2 ,nirgends haften dann die unsicheren ,sohlen--every crazy wind will take her1 and1 like a fire-balloon at night1 she will go out among the stars4 ,,note4--,the reader will easily see how much of the account of the truth-function developed later in ,pragmatism was already explicit in this earlier article1 and how much came to be defined later4 ,in this earlier article we find distinctly asserted3-- #a4 ,the reality1 external to the true idea2 #b4 ,the critic1 reader1 or epistemologist1 with his own belief1 as warrant for this reality's existence2 #c4 ,the experienceable environment1 as the vehicle or medium connecting knower with known1 and yielding the cognitive ,,relation2 #d4 ,the notion of ,,pointing1 through this medium1 to the reality1 as one condition of our being said to know it2 #e4 ,that of ,,resembling it1 and eventually ,,affecting it1 as determining the pointing to ,,it and not to something else4 #f4 ,the elimination of the 'epistemological gulf1' so that the whole truth-relation falls inside of the continuities of concrete experience1 and is constituted of particular processes1 varying with every object and subject1 and susceptible of being described in detail4 ,the defects in this earlier account are3-- #a4 ,the possibly undue prominence given to resembling1 which altho a fundamental function in knowing truly1 is so often dispensed with2 #b4 ,the undue emphasis laid upon operating on the object itself1 which in many cases is indeed decisive of that being what we refer to1 but which is often lacking1 or replaced by operations on other things related to the object4 #c4 ,the imperfect development of the generalized notion of the ,,workability of the feeling or idea as equivalent to that ,,satisfactory ,,adaptation to the particular reality1 which constitutes the truth of the idea4 ,it is this more generalized notion1 as covering all such specifications as pointing1 fitting1 operating or resembling1 that distinguishes the developed view of ,dewey1 ,schiller1 and myself4 #d4 ,the treatment1 earlier1 of percepts as the only realm of reality4 ,i now treat concepts as a co-ordinate realm4 ,the next paper represents a somewhat broader grasp of the topic on the writer's part4 ,,ii ,,the ,,tigers ,,in ,,india ,footnote3 ,extracts from a presidential address before the ,american ,psychological ,association1 published in the ,psychological ,review1 vol4 ii1 p4 #aje 7#ahie74 ,,there are two ways of knowing things1 knowing them immediately or intuitively1 and knowing them conceptually or representatively4 ,altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively1 most of the things we know1 the tigers now in ,india1 for example1 or the scholastic system of philosophy1 are known only representatively or symbolically4 ,suppose1 to fix our ideas1 that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge2 and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in ,india1 as we sit here4 ,exactly what do we ,,mean by saying that we here know the tigers8 ,what is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is ,,known-,,as1 to use ,shadworth ,hodgson's inelegant but valuable form of words8 ,most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them1 however absent in body1 become in some way present to our thought2 or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to them4 ,a great mystery is usually made of this peculiar presence in absence2 and the scholastic philosophy1 which is only common sense grown pedantic1 would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence1 called ,,intentional ,,existence of the tigers in our mind4 ,at the very least1 people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally ,,pointing towards them as we sit here4 ,but now what do we mean by ,,pointing1 in such a case as this8 ,what is the pointing known-as1 here8 ,to this question ,i shall have to give a very prosaic answer--one that traverses the pre-possessions not only of common sense and scholasticism1 but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers whom ,i have ever read4 ,the answer1 made brief1 is this3 ,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 thought1 and that would lead harmoniously1 if followed out1 into some ideal or real context1 or even into the immediate presence1 of the tigers4 ,it is known as our rejection of a jaguar1 if that beast were shown us as a tiger2 as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown4 ,it is known as our ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don't contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers4 ,it is even known1 if we take the tigers very seriously1 as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited tigers1 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 low4 ,in all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images ,,taken ,,by ,,themselves4 ,they are one phenomenal fact2 the tigers are another2 and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation1 ,,if ,,you ,,once ,,grant ,a ,,connecting ,,world ,,to ,,be ,,there4 ,in short1 the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate1 to use ,hume's language1 as any two things can be2 and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields4,footnote3 ,a stone in one field may 'fit1' we say1 a hole in another field4 ,but the relation of 'fitting1' so long as no one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in1 is only one name for the fact that such an act ,,may happen4 ,similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now4 ,it is only an anticipatory name for a further associative and terminative process that ,,may occur4 ,i hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery1 but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing4 ,,to ,,know ,,an ,,object ,,is ,,here ,,to ,,lead ,,to ,,it ,,through ,a ,,context ,,which ,,the ,,world ,,supplies4 ,all this was most instructively set forth by our colleague ,d4 ,s4 ,miller at our meeting in ,new ,york last ,christmas1 and for re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion1 ,i owe him this acknowledgment4 ,footnote3 ,see ,dr4 ,miller's articles on ,truth and ,error1 and on ,content and ,function1 in the ,philosophical ,review1 ,july1 #ahic1 and ,nov41 #ahie4 ,let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object1 and let the object be the white paper before our eyes4 ,the thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature1 as we saw a moment since1 and there is no context of intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought and thing4 ,there is no 'presence in absence' here1 and no 'pointing1' but rather an allround embracing of the paper by the thought2 and it is clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when the tigers were its object4 ,dotted all through our experience are states of immediate acquaintance just like this4 ,somewhere our belief always does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness1 smoothness1 or squareness of this paper4 ,whether such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of being1 or only provisional suppositions of ours1 held-to till we get better informed1 is quite immaterial for our present inquiry4 ,so long as it is believed in1 we see our object face to face4 ,what now do we mean by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this8 ,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 lair8 ,this address must not become too long1 so ,i must give my answer in the fewest words4 ,and let me first say this3 ,so far as the white paper or other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into some one else's experience1 and we1 in knowing it1 are held to know it there as well as here2 so far1 again1 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 view2 so far it is a case of tigers in ,india again--the things known being absent experiences1 the knowing can only consist in passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary context that the world supplies4 ,but if our own private vision of the paper be considered in abstraction from every other event1 as if it constituted by itself the universe 7and it might perfectly well do so1 for aught we can understand to the contrary71 then the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which1 properly named1 is ,,the ,,datum1 ,,the ,,phenomenon1 ,,or ,,the ,,experience4 ,the paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper1 because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience1 when1 taken in a larger world of which it forms a part1 its connections are traced in different directions4 ,footnote3 ,what is meant by this is that 'the experience' can be referred to either of two great associative systems1 that of the experiencer's mental history1 or that of the experienced facts of the world4 ,of both of these systems it forms part1 and may be regarded1 indeed1 as one of their points of intersection4 ,one might let a vertical line stand for the mental history2 but the same object1 ,o1 appears also in the mental history of different persons1 represented by the other vertical lines4 ,it thus ceases to be the private property of one experience1 and becomes1 so to speak1 a shared or public thing4 ,we can track its outer history in this way1 and represent it by the horizontal line4 7,it is also known representatively at other points of the vertical lines1 or intuitively there again1 so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and wandering1 but ,i make it straight for simplicity's sake47 ,in any case1 however1 it is the same stuff figures in all the sets of lines4 ,,to ,,know ,,immediately1 ,,then1 ,,or ,,intuitively1 ,,is ,,for ,,mental ,,content ,,and ,,object ,,to ,,be ,,identical4 ,this is a very different definition from that which we gave of representative knowledge2 but neither definition involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of knowledge1 both of philosophers and of common men4 ,footnote3 ,the reader will observe that the text is written from the point of view of ,,naif realism or common sense1 and avoids raising the idealistic controversy4 ,,iii ,,humanism ,,and ,,truth ,footnote3 ,reprinted1 with slight verbal revision1 from ,mind1 vol4 xiii1 ,n4 ,s41 p4 #deg 7,october1 #aijd74 ,a couple of interpolations from another article in ,mind1 ',humanism and truth once more1' in vol4 xiv1 have been made4 ,,receiving from the ,editor of ,mind an advance proof of ,mr4 ,bradley's article on ',truth and ,practice1' ,i understand this as a hint to me to join in the controversy over ',pragmatism' which seems to have seriously begun4 ,as my name has been coupled with the movement1 ,i deem it wise to take the hint1 the more so as in some quarters greater credit has been given me than ,i deserve1 and probably undeserved discredit in other quarters falls also to my lot4 ,first1 as to the word 'pragmatism4' ,i myself have only used the term to indicate a method of carrying on abstract discussion4 ,the serious meaning of a concept1 says ,mr4 ,peirce1 lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make4 ,strive to bring all debated conceptions to that' pragmatic' test1 and you will escape vain wrangling3 if it can make no practical difference which of two statements be true1 then they are really one statement in two verbal forms2 if it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false1 then the statement has no real meaning4 ,in neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about3 we may save our breath1 and pass to more important things4 ,all that the pragmatic method implies1 then1 is that truths should ,,have practical ,footnote3 ',practical' in the sense of ,,particular1 of course1 not in the sense that the consequences may not be ,,mental as well as physical4 consequences4 ,in ,england the word has been used more broadly still1 to cover the notion that the truth of any statement ,,consists in the consequences1 and particularly in their being good consequences4 ,here we get beyond affairs of method altogether2 and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different1 and both are important enough to have different names1 ,i think that ,mr4 ,schiller's proposal to call the wider pragmatism by the name of 'humanism' is excellent and ought to be adopted4 ,the narrower pragmatism may still be spoken of as the 'pragmatic method4' ,i have read in the past six months many hostile reviews of ,schiller's and ,dewey's publications2 but with the exception of ,mr4 ,bradley's elaborate indictment1 they are out of reach where ,i write1 and ,i have largely forgotten them4 ,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 detail4 ,mr4 ,bradley in particular can be taken care of by ,mr4 ,schiller4 ,he repeatedly confesses himself unable to comprehend ,schiller's views1 he evidently has not sought to do so sympathetically1 and ,i deeply regret to say that his laborious article throws1 for my mind1 absolutely no useful light upon the subject4 ,it seems to me on the whole an ,,ignoratio ,,elenchi1 and ,i feel free to disregard it altogether4 ,the subject is unquestionably difficult4 ,messrs4 ,dewey's and ,schiller's thought is eminently an induction1 a generalization working itself free from all sorts of entangling particulars4 ,if true1 it involves much restatement of traditional notions4 ,this is a kind of intellectual product that never attains a classic form of expression when first promulgated4 ,the critic ought therefore not to be too sharp and logic-chopping in his dealings with it1 but should weigh it as a whole1 and especially weigh it against its possible alternatives4 ,one should also try to apply it first to one instance1 and then to another to see how it will work4 ,it seems to me that it is emphatically not a case for instant execution1 by conviction of intrinsic absurdity or of self-contradiction1 or by caricature of what it would look like if reduced to skeleton shape4 ,humanism is in fact much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight1 as it were1 borne upon tides 'too deep for sound or foam1' that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates1 that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement1 nor kill by any one decisive stab4 ,such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy1 from classic to romantic taste1 from theistic to pantheistic feeling1 from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life--changes of which we all have been spectators4 ,scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method of confutation by single decisive reasons1 showing that the new view involves self-contradiction1 or traverses some fundamental principle4 ,this is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed4 ,round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there all the same4' ,in reading some of our opponents1 ,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 plus1 or that the notion of transformation is absurd1 for it implies that species tend to their own destruction1 and that would violate the principle that every reality tends to persevere in its own shape4 ,the point of view is too myopic1 too tight and close to take in the inductive argument4 ,wide generalizations in science always meet with these summary refutations in their early days2 but they outlive them1 and the refutations then sound oddly antiquated and scholastic4 ,i cannot help suspecting that the humanistic theory is going through this kind of would-be refutation at present4 ,the one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-minded oneself1 to drop rigorous definitions1 and follow lines of least1 resistance 'on the whole4' ',in other words1' an opponent might say1 'resolve your intellect into a kind of slush4' ',even so1' ,i make reply1--'if you will consent to use no politer word4' ,for humanism1 conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' 7,dewey's term71 has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality4 ,it is in just this temper of renunciation1 so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism1 that the spirit of humanism essentially consists4 ,satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards1 of which some1 for aught we know1 may fail in any given case2 and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight1 may to the end be a sum of ,,pluses and ,,minuses1 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 approached4 ,it means a real change of heart1 a break with absolutistic hopes1 when one takes up this inductive view of the conditions of belief4 ,as ,i understand the pragmatist way of seeing things1 it owes its being to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought about in the older notions of scientific truth4 ',god geometrizes1' it used to be said2 and it was believed that ,euclid's elements literally reproduced his geometrizing4 ,there is an eternal and unchangeable 'reason'2 and its voice was supposed to reverberate in ,barbara and ,celarent4 ,so also of the 'laws of nature1' physical and chemical1 so of natural history classifications--all were supposed to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things1 to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate4 ,the anatomy of the world is logical1 and its logic is that of a university professor1 it was thought4 ,up to about #ahej almost every one believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities4 ,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 another4 ,there are so many geometries1 so many logics1 so many physical and chemical hypotheses1 so many classifications1 each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything1 that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us4 ,we hear scientific laws now treated as so much 'conceptual shorthand1' true so far as they are useful but no farther4 ,our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction1 of approximation instead of exactness1 of plasticity instead of rigor4 ',energetics1' measuring the bare face of sensible phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all their changes of 'level1' is the last word of this scientific humanism1 which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding as to the reason for so curious a congruence between the world and the mind1 but which at any rate makes our whole notion of scientific truth more flexible and genial than it used to be4 ,it is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day1 either in mathematics1 logic1 physics or biology1 conceives himself to be literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of ,god4 ,the main forms of our thinking1 the separation of subjects from predicates1 the negative1 hypothetic and disjunctive judgments1 are purely human habits4 ,the ether1 as ,lord ,salisbury said1 is only a noun for the verb to undulate2 and many of our theological ideas are admitted1 even by those who call them 'true1' to be humanistic in like degree4 ,i fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what originally gave the impulse to ,messrs4 ,dewey's and ,schiller's views4 ,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 'objectivity1' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness1 its 'elegance' or its congruity with our residual beliefs4 ,yielding to these suspicions1 and generalizing1 we fall into something like the humanistic state of mind4 ,truth we conceive to mean everywhere1 not duplication1 but addition2 not the constructing of inner copies of already complete realities1 but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a clearer result4 ,obviously this state of mind is at first full of vagueness and ambiguity4 ',collaborating' is a vague term2 it must at any rate cover conceptions and logical arrangements4 ',clearer' is vaguer still4 ,truth must bring clear thoughts1 as well as clear the way to action4 ',reality' is the vaguest term of all4 ,the only way to test such a programme at all is to apply it to the various types of truth1 in the hope of reaching an account that shall be more precise4 ,any hypothesis that forces such a review upon one has one great merit1 even if in the end it prove invalid3 it gets us better acquainted with the total subject4 ,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-contradiction4 ,i think therefore that a decided effort at sympathetic mental play with humanism is the provisional attitude to be recommended to the reader4 ,when ,i find myself playing sympathetically with humanism1 something like what follows is what ,i end by conceiving it to mean4 ,experience is a process that continually gives us new material to digest4 ,we handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already possessed1 assimilating1 rejecting1 or rearranging in different degrees4 ,some of the apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own1 but most of them are common-sense traditions of the race4 ,there is probably not a common-sense tradition1 of all those which we now live by1 that was not in the first instance a genuine discovery1 an inductive generalization like those more recent ones of the atom1 of inertia1 of energy1 of reflex action1 or of fitness to survive ,the notions of one ,time and of one ,space as single continuous receptacles2 the distinction between thoughts and things1 matter and mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes2 the conception of classes with sub classes within them2 the separation of fortuitous from regularly caused connections2 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 shape4 ,they proved of such sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very structure of our mind4 ,we cannot play fast and loose with them4 ,no experience can upset them4 ,on the contrary1 they apperceive every experience and assign it to its place4 ,to what effect8 ,that we may the better foresee the course of our experiences1 communicate with one another1 and steer our lives by rule4 ,also that we may have a cleaner1 clearer1 more inclusive mental view4 ,the greatest common-sense achievement1 after the discovery of one ,time and one ,space1 is probably the concept of permanently existing things4 ,when a rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby1 he does not look to see where it has gone4 ,non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief4 ,that our perceptions mean ,,beings1 rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not1 becomes an interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that1 once employed1 it never gets forgotten4 ,it applies with equal felicity to things and persons1 to the objective and to the ejective realm4 ,however a ,berkeley1 a ,mill1 or a ,cornelius may ,,criticise it1 it ,,works2 and in practical life we never think of 'going back' upon it1 or reading our incoming experiences in any other terms4 ,we may1 indeed1 speculatively imagine a state of 'pure' experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed2 and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis4 ,but we cannot positively imagine today what the different hypothesis could have been1 for the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the foundations of our life4 ,our thoughts must still employ it if they are to possess reasonableness and truth4 ,this notion of a ,,first in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience which sets us questions1 of a ,,second in the way of fundamental categories1 long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and practically irreversible1 which define the general frame within which answers must fall1 and of a ,,third which gives the detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our present needs1 is1 as ,i take it1 the essence of the humanistic conception4 ,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 ,,other1 of a ,,that1 which the mind1 in ,mr4 ,bradley's phrase1 'encounters1' 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 peace4 ,but whether the ,other1 the universal ,,that1 has itself any definite inner structure1 or whether1 if it have any1 the structure resembles any of our predicated ,,whats1 this is a question which humanism leaves untouched4 ,for us1 at any rate1 it insists1 reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions1 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 old4 ,it is hard to see why either ,mr4 ,bradley's own logic or his metaphysics should oblige him to quarrel with this conception4 ,he might consistently adopt it verbatim et literatim1 if he would1 and simply throw his peculiar absolute round it1 following in this the good example of ,professor ,royce4 ,bergson in ,france1 and his disciples1 ,wilbois the physicist and ,leroy1 are thoroughgoing humanists in the sense defined4 ,professor ,milhaud also appears to be one2 and the great ,poincare misses it by only the breadth of a hair4 ,in ,germany the name of ,simmel offers itself as that of a humanist of the most radical sort4 ,mach and his school1 and ,hertz and ,ostwald must be classed as humanists4 ,the view is in the atmosphere and must be patiently discussed4 ,the best way to discuss it would be to see what the alternative might be4 ,what is it indeed8 ,its critics make no explicit statement1 ,professor ,royce being the only one so far who has formulated anything definite4 ,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 heads4 ,it will force analysis to the front and make it the order of the day4 ,at present the lazy tradition that truth is adaequatio intellectus et rei seems all there is to contradict it with4 ,mr4 ,bradley's only suggestion is that true thought 'must correspond to a determinate being which it cannot be said to make1' and obviously that sheds no new light4 ,what is the meaning of the word to 'correspond'8 ,where is the 'being'8 ,what sort of things are 'determinations1' and what is meant in this particular case by 'not to make'8 ,humanism proceeds immediately to refine upon the looseness of these epithets4 ,we correspond in ,,some way with anything with which we enter into any relations at all4 ,if it be a thing1 we may produce an exact copy of it1 or we may simply feel it as an existent in a certain place4 ,if it be a demand1 we may obey it without knowing anything more about it than its push4 ,if it be a proposition1 we may agree by not contradicting it1 by letting it pass4 ,if it be a relation between things1 we may act on the first thing so as to bring ourselves out where the second will be4 ,if it be something inaccessible1 we may substitute a hypothetical object for it1 which1 having the same consequences1 will cipher out for us real results4 ,in a general way we may simply ,,add ,,our ,,thought ,,to ,,it2 and if it ,,suffers ,,the ,,addition1 and the whole situation harmoniously prolongs and enriches itself1 the thought will pass for true4 ,as for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to1 although they may be outside of the present thought as well as in it1 humanism sees no ground for saying they are outside of finite experience itself4 ,pragmatically1 their reality means that we submit to them1 take account of them1 whether we like to or not1 but this we must perpetually do with experiences other than our own4 ,the whole system of what the present experience must correspond to 'adequately' may be continuous with the present experience itself4 ,reality1 so taken as experience other than the present1 might be either the legacy of past experience or the content of experience to come4 ,its determinations for ,,us are in any case the adjectives which our acts of judging fit to it1 and those are essentially humanistic things4 ,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 shape1 though possibly it might be a shape that would lack something that our thought supplies4 ,that reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control4 ,if it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention2 if a sequence1 we cannot invert it2 if we compare two terms we can come to only one result4 ,there is a push1 an urgency1 within our very experience1 against which we are on the whole powerless1 and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief4 ,that this drift of experience itself is in the last resort due to something independent of all possible experience may or may not be true4 ,there may or may not be an extra-experiential 'ding an sich' that keeps the ball rolling1 or an 'absolute' that lies eternally behind all the successive determinations which human thought has made4 ,but within our experience ,,itself1 at any rate1 humanism says1 some determinations show themselves as being independent of others2 some questions1 if we ever ask them1 can only be answered in one way2 some beings1 if we ever suppose them1 must be supposed to have existed previously to the supposing2 some relations1 if they exist ever1 must exist as long as their terms exist4 ,truth thus means1 according to humanism1 the relation of less fixed parts of experience 7predicates7 to other relatively more fixed parts 7subjects72 and we are not required to seek it in a relation of experience as such to anything beyond itself4 ,we can stay at home1 for our behavior as exponents is hemmed in on every side4 ,the forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by our own objects1 and the notion of truth as something opposed to waywardness or license inevitably grows up ,,solipsistically inside of every human life4 ,so obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic authors 'makes me tired4' ',how can a deweyite discriminate sincerity from bluff8' was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where ,i reported on ,dewey's ,studies4 ',how can the mere ,footnote3 ,i know of no 'mere' pragmatist1 if ,,mereness here means1 as it seems to1 the denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist's ,,thought4 pragmatist feel any duty to think truly8' is the objection urged by ,professor ,royce4 ,mr4 ,bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his own doctrine1 'he must hold any idea1 however mad1 to be the truth1 if any one will have it so4' ,and ,professor ,taylor describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases and calling it truth4 ,such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men's thinking actually goes on seems to me most surprising4 ,these critics appear to suppose that1 if left to itself1 the rudderless raft of our experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere4 ,even ,,tho there were compasses on board1 they seem to say1 there would be no pole for them to point to4 ,there must be absolute sailing-directions1 they insist1 decreed from outside1 and an independent chart of the voyage added to the 'mere' voyage itself1 if we are ever to make a port4 ,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 follow1 the only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human equipment4 ,the 'ought' would be a brutum fulmen unless there were a felt grain inside of our experience that conspired4 ,as a matter of fact the ,,devoutest believers in absolute standards must admit that men fail to obey them4 ,waywardness is here1 in spite of the eternal prohibitions1 and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is no warrant against unlimited error in rebus being incurred4 ,the only ,,real guarantee we have against licentious thinking is the ,,circumpressure of experience itself1 which gets us sick of concrete errors1 whether there be a trans-empirical reality or not4 ,how does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to think8 ,he cannot get direct sight of the absolute2 and he has no means of guessing what it wants of him except by following the humanistic clues4 ,the only truth that he himself will ever practically ,,accept will be that to which his finite experiences lead him of themselves4 ,the state of mind which shudders at the idea of a lot of experiences left to themselves1 and that augurs protection from the sheer name of an absolute1 as if1 however inoperative1 that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security1 is like the mood of those good people who1 whenever they hear of a social tendency that is damnable1 begin to redden and to puff1 and say ',parliament or ,congress ought to make a law against it1' as if an impotent decree would give relief4 ,all the ,,sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture of experience4 ,absolute or no absolute1 the concrete truth ,,for ,,us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine4 ,and yet1 the opponent obstinately urges1 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 rigid4 ,if by this latter believer he means a man who pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it1 the humanist will doubtless prove more flexible2 but no more flexible than the absolutist himself if the latter follows 7as fortunately our present-day absolutists do follow7 empirical methods of inquiry in concrete affairs4 ,to consider hypotheses is surely always better than to ,,dogmatise ins blaue hinein4 ,nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been used to convict the humanist of sin4 ,believing as he does1 that truth lies in rebus1 and is at every moment our own line of most propitious reaction1 he stands forever debarred1 as ,i have heard a learned colleague say1 from trying to convert opponents1 for does not their view1 being ,,their most propitious momentary reaction1 already fill the bill8 ,only the believer in the ante-rem brand of truth can on this theory seek to make converts without self-stultification4 ,but can there be self-stultification in urging any account whatever of truth8 ,can the definition ever contradict the deed8 ',truth is what ,i feel like saying'--suppose that to be the definition4 ',well1 ,i feel like saying that1 and ,i want you to feel like saying it1 and shall continue to say it until ,i get you to agree4' ,where is there any contradiction8 ,whatever truth may be said to be1 that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held to carry4 ,the ,,temper which a saying may comport is an extra-logical matter4 ,it may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than in a humanist1 but it need not be so in another4 ,and the humanist1 for his part1 is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to make one proselyte1 if his nature be enthusiastic enough4 ',but how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you know to have been partly made by yourself1 and which is liable to alter during the next minute8 ,how is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions8' ,this is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of the situation4 ,if they would only follow the pragmatic method and ask3 ',what is truth ,,known-,,as8 ,what does its existence stand for in the way of concrete goods8'--they would see that the name of it is the inbegriff of almost everything that is valuable in our lives4 ,the true is the opposite of whatever is instable1 of whatever is practically disappointing1 of whatever is useless1 of whatever is lying and unreliable1 of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported1 of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory1 of whatever is artificial and eccentric1 of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account4 ,here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth--truth saves us from a world of that complexion4 ,what wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling6 ,in particular what wonder that all little provisional fool's paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit6 ,when absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue1 that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality1 in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths4 ,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 it4 ,just so with us humanists1 when we condemn all noble1 clean-cut1 fixed1 eternal1 rational1 temple-like systems of philosophy4 ,these contradict the ,,dramatic ,,temperament of nature1 as our dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive it4 ,they seem oddly personal and artificial1 even when not bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree4 ,we turn from them to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted1 with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes4 ,footnote3 ,i cannot forbear quoting as an illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist tempers of mind1 in a sphere remote from philosophy1 these remarks on the ,dreyfus 'affaire1' written by one who assuredly had never heard of humanism or pragmatism4 ',autant que la ,revolution1 l',affaire est desormais une de nos origines4 ,si elle n'a pas fait ouvrir le gouffre1 c'est elle du moins qui a rendu patent et visible le long travail souterrain qui1 silencieusement1 avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps d'aujourd'hui1 pour ecarter enfin1 d'un coup soudain1 la ,france des traditionalistes 7poseurs de principes1 chercheurs d'unite1 constructeurs de systemes a priori7 el la ,france eprise du fait positif et de libre examen2--la ,france revolutionnaire et romantique si l'on veut1 celle qui met tres haut l'individu1 qui ne veut pas qu'un juste perisse1 fut-ce pour sauver la nation1 et qui cherche la verite dans toutes ses parties aussi bien que dans une vue d'ensemble 444 ,duclaux ne pouvait pas concevoir qu'on preferat quelque chose a la verite4 ,mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui1 mettant en balance la vie d'un homme et la raison d',etat1 lui avouaient de quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence individuelle1 pour innocente qu'elle fut4 ,c'etaient des classiques1 des gens a qui l'ensemble seul importe4' ,la ,vie de ,emile ,duclaux1 par ,mme4 ,em4 ,d41 ,laval1 #aijf1 pp4 #bdc1 #bdg-bdh4 ,this is surely enough to show that the humanist does not ignore the character of objectivity and independence in truth4 ,let me turn next to what his opponents mean when they say that to be true1 our thoughts must 'correspond4' ,the vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the thoughts must ,,copy the reality--cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cognoscentis2 and philosophy1 without having ever fairly sat down to the question1 seems to have instinctively accepted this idea3 propositions are held true if they copy the eternal thought2 terms are held true if they copy extra-mental realities4 ,implicitly1 ,i think that the copy-theory has animated most of the criticisms that have been made on humanism4 ,a priori1 however1 it is not self-evident that the sole business of our mind with realities should be to copy them4 ,let my reader suppose himself to constitute for a time all the reality there is in the universe1 and then to receive the announcement that another being is to be created who shall know him truly4 ,how will he represent the knowing in advance8 ,what will he hope it to be8 ,i doubt extremely whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as a mere copying4 ,of what use to him would an imperfect second edition of himself in the new comer's interior be8 ,it would seem pure waste of a propitious opportunity4 ,the demand would more probably be for something absolutely new4 ,the reader would conceive the knowing humanistically1 'the new comer1' he would say1 'must ,,take ,,account ,,of ,,my ,,presence ,,by ,,reacting ,,on ,,it ,,in ,,such ,a ,,way ,,that ,,good ,,would ,,accrue ,,to ,,us ,,both4 ,if copying be requisite to that end1 let there be copying2 otherwise not4' ,the essence in any case would not be the copying1 but the enrichment of the previous world4 ,i read the other day1 in a book of ,professor ,eucken's1 a phrase1 ',die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins1' which seems to be pertinent here4 ,why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate1 rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate1 existence8 ,no one who has read ,lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter1 which brands them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing in the thing4 ,the notion of a world complete in itself1 to which thought comes as a passive mirror1 adding nothing to fact1 ,lotze says is irrational4 ,rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact1 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 supplement4 ',knowing1' in short1 may1 for aught we can see beforehand to the contrary1 be ,,only ,,one ,,way ,,of ,,getting ,,into ,,fruitful ,,relations ,,with ,,reality whether copying be one of the relations or not4 ,it is easy to see from what special type of knowing the copy-theory arose4 ,in our dealings with natural phenomena the great point is to be able to foretell4 ,foretelling1 according to such a writer as ,spencer1 is the whole meaning of intelligence4 ,when ,spencer's 'law of intelligence' says that inner and outer relations must 'correspond1' 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 terms4 ,in strict theory the mental terms themselves need not answer to the real terms in the sense of severally copying them1 symbolic mental terms being enough1 if only the real dates and places be copied4 ,but in our ordinary life the mental terms are images and the real ones are sensations1 and the images so often copy the sensations1 that we easily take copying of terms as well as of relations to be the natural significance of knowing4 ,meanwhile much1 even of this common descriptive truth1 is couched in verbal symbols4 ,if our symbols ,,fit the world1 in the sense of determining our expectations rightly1 they may even be the better for not copying its terms4 ,it seems obvious that the pragmatic account of all this routine of phenomenal knowledge is accurate4 ,truth here is a relation1 not of our ideas to non-human realities1 but of conceptual parts of our experience to sensational parts4 ,those thoughts are true which guide us to ,,beneficial ,,interaction with sensible particulars as they occur1 whether they copy these in advance or not4 ,from the frequency of copying in the knowledge of phenomenal fact1 copying has been supposed to be the essence of truth in matters rational also4 ,geometry and logic1 it has been supposed1 must copy archetypal thoughts in the ,creator4 ,but in these abstract spheres there is no need of assuming archetypes4 ,the mind is free to carve so many figures out of space1 to make so many numerical collections1 to frame so many classes and series1 and it can analyze and compare so endlessly1 that the very superabundance of the resulting ideas makes us doubt the 'objective' pre-existence of their models4 ,it would be plainly wrong to suppose a ,god whose thought consecrated rectangular but not polar co-ordinates1 or ,jevons's notation but not ,boole's4 ,yet if1 on the other hand1 we assume ,god to have thought in advance of every ,,possible flight of human fancy in these directions1 his mind becomes too much like a ,hindoo idol with three heads1 eight arms and six breasts1 too much made up of superfoetation and redundancy for us to wish to copy it1 and the whole notion of copying tends to evaporate from these sciences4 ,their objects can be better interpreted as being created step by step by men1 as fast as they successively conceive them4 ,if now it be asked how1 if triangles1 squares1 square roots1 genera1 and the like1 are but improvised human 'artefacts1' their properties and relations can be so promptly known to be 'eternal1' the humanistic answer is easy4 ,if triangles and genera are of our own production we can keep them invariant4 ,we can make them 'timeless' by expressly decreeing that on ,,the ,,things ,,we ,,mean time shall exert no altering effect1 that they are intentionally and it may be fictitiously abstracted from every corrupting real associate and condition4 ,but relations between invariant objects will themselves be invariant4 ,such relations cannot be happenings1 for by hypothesis nothing shall happen to the objects4 ,i have tried to show in the last chapter of my ,principles of ,psychology ,footnote3 ,vol4 ii1 pp4 #fda ff4 that they can only be relations of comparison4 ,no one so far seems to have noticed my suggestion1 and ,i am too ignorant of the development of mathematics to feel very confident of my own view4 ,but if it were correct it would solve the difficulty perfectly4 ,relations of comparison are matters of direct inspection4 ,as soon as mental objects are mentally compared1 they are perceived to be either like or unlike4 ,but once the same1 always the same1 once different1 always different1 under these timeless conditions4 ,which is as much as to say that truths concerning these man-made objects are necessary and eternal4 ,we can change our conclusions only by changing our data first4 ,the whole fabric of the a priori sciences can thus be treated as a man-made product4 ,as ,locke long ago pointed out1 these sciences have no immediate connection with fact4 ,only ,,if a fact can be humanized by being identified with any of these ideal objects1 is what was true of the objects now true also of the facts4 ,the truth itself meanwhile was originally a copy of nothing2 it was only a relation directly perceived to obtain between two artificial mental things4 ,footnote3 ,mental things which are realities of course within the mental world4 ,we may now glance at some special types of knowing1 so as to see better whether the humanistic account fits4 ,on the mathematical and logical types we need not enlarge further1 nor need we return at much length to the case of our descriptive knowledge of the course of nature4 ,so far as this involves anticipation1 tho that ,,may mean copying1 it need1 as we saw1 mean little more than 'getting ready' in advance4 ,but with many distant and future objects1 our practical relations are to the last degree potential and remote4 ,in no sense can we now get ready for the arrest of the earth's revolution by the tidal brake1 for instance2 and with the past1 tho we suppose ourselves to know it truly1 we have no practical relations at all4 ,it is obvious that1 altho interests strictly practical have been the original starting-point of our search for true phenomenal descriptions1 yet an intrinsic interest in the bare describing function has grown up4 ,we wish accounts that shall be true1 whether they bring collateral profit or not4 ,the primitive function has developed its demand for mere exercise4 ,this theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human differentia1 and humanism recognizes its enormous scope4 ,a true idea now means not only one that prepares us for an actual perception4 ,it means also one that might prepare us for a merely possible perception1 or one that1 if spoken1 would suggest possible perceptions to others1 or suggest actual perceptions which the speaker cannot share4 ,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 shape2 and here it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings finds triumphant use4 ,beings acting outside of the thinker explain1 not only his actual perceptions1 past and future1 but his possible perceptions and those of every one else4 ,accordingly they gratify our theoretic need in a supremely beautiful way4 ,we pass from our immediate actual through them into the foreign and the potential1 and back again into the future actual1 accounting for innumerable particulars by a single cause4 ,as in those circular panoramas1 where a real foreground of dirt1 grass1 bushes1 rocks and a broken-down cannon is enveloped by a canvas picture of sky and earth and of a raging battle1 continuing the foreground so cunningly that the spectator can detect no joint2 so these conceptual objects1 added to our present perceptual reality1 fuse with it into the whole universe of our belief4 ,in spite of all berkeleyan criticism1 we do not doubt that they are really there4 ,tho our discovery of any one of them may only date from now1 we unhesitatingly say that it not only ,,is1 but ,,was there1 if1 by so saying1 the past appears connected more consistently with what we feel the present to be4 ,this is historic truth4 ,moses wrote the ,pentateuch1 we think1 because if he didn't1 all our religious habits will have to be undone4 ,julius ,caesar was real1 or we can never listen to history again4 ,trilobites were once alive1 or all our thought about the strata is at sea4 ,radium1 discovered only yesterday1 must always have existed1 or its analogy with other natural elements1 which are permanent1 fails4 ,in all this1 it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory total state of mind4 ,that state of mind1 we say1 sees truth1 and the content of its deliverances we believe4 ,of course1 if you take the satisfactoriness concretely1 as something felt by you now1 and if1 by truth1 you mean truth taken abstractly and verified in the long run1 you cannot make them equate1 for it is notorious that the temporarily satisfactory is often false4 ,yet at each and every concrete moment1 truth for each man is what that man 'troweth' at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself2 and similarly1 abstract truth1 truth verified by the long run1 and abstract satisfactoriness1 long-run satisfactoriness1 coincide4 ,if1 in short1 we compare concrete with concrete and abstract with abstract1 the true and the satisfactory do mean the same thing4 ,i suspect that a certain muddling of matters hereabouts is what makes the general philosophic public so impervious to humanism's claims4 ,the fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change4 ,for the 'trower' at any moment1 truth1 like the visible area round a man walking in a fog1 or like what ,george ,eliot calls 'the wall of dark seen by small fishes' eyes that pierce a span in the wide ,ocean1' is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of which it is the critic1 and which then either suffers alteration or is continued unchanged4 ,the critic sees both the first trower's truth and his own truth1 compares them with each other1 and verifies or confutes4 ,,his field of view is the reality independent of that earlier trower's thinking with which that thinking ought to correspond4 ,but the critic is himself only a trower2 and if the whole process of experience should terminate at that instant1 there would be no otherwise known independent reality with which ,,his thought might be compared4 ,the immediate in experience is always provisionally in this situation4 ,the humanism1 for instance1 which ,i see and try so hard to defend1 is the completest truth attained from my point of view up to date4 ,but1 owing to the fact that all experience is a process1 no point of view can ever be ,,the last one4 ,every one is insufficient and off its balance1 and responsible to later points of view than itself4 ,you1 occupying some of these later points in your own person1 and believing in the reality of others1 will not agree that my point of view sees truth positive1 truth timeless1 truth that counts1 unless they verify and confirm what it sees4 ,you generalize this by saying that any opinion1 however satisfactory1 can count positively and absolutely as true only so far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself2 and if you then forget that this standard perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of the experiences1 you may carelessly go on to say that what distributively holds of each experience1 holds also collectively of all experience1 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 being4 ,this evidently is the popular and traditional position4 ,from the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one another1 philosophers pass to the notion that experience uberhaupt must need an absolute support4 ,the denial of such a notion by humanism lies probably at the root of most of the dislike which it incurs4 ,but is this not the globe1 the elephant and the tortoise over again8 ,must not something end by supporting itself8 ,humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting4 ,somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity4 ,why may not the advancing front of experience1 carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions1 cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean abyss8 ,why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished8 ,and if reality genuinely grows1 why may it not grow in these very determinations which here and now are made8 ,in point of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental determinations1 be these never so 'true4' ,take the 'great bear' or 'dipper' constellation in the heavens4 ,we call it by that name1 we count the stars and call them seven1 we say they were seven before they were counted1 and we say that whether any one had ever noted the fact or not1 the dim resemblance to a long-tailed 7or long-necked87 animal was always truly there4 ,but what do we mean by this projection into past eternity of recent human ways of thinking8 ,did an 'absolute' thinker actually do the counting1 tell off the stars upon his standing number-tally1 and make the bear-comparison1 silly as the latter is8 ,were they explicitly seven1 explicitly bear-like1 before the human witness came8 ,surely nothing in the truth of the attributions drives us to think this4 ,they were only implicitly or virtually what we call them1 and we human witnesses first explicated them and made them 'real4' ,a fact virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization save one is already there4 ,in this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and comparing mind4 ,but the stars 7once the mind considers them7 themselves dictate the result4 ,the counting in no wise modifies their previous nature1 and1 they being what and where they are1 the count cannot fall out differently4 ,it could then ,,always be made4 ,,never could the number seven be questioned1 ,,if ,,the ,,question ,,once ,,were ,,raised4 ,we have here a quasi-paradox4 ,undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before4 ,and yet that something was ,,always ,,true4 ,in one sense you create it1 and in another sense you ,,find it4 ,you have to treat your count as being true beforehand1 the moment you come to treat the matter at all4 ,our stellar attributes must always be called true1 then2 yet none the less are they genuine additions made by our intellect to the world of fact4 ,not additions of consciousness only1 but additions of 'content4' ,they copy nothing that pre-existed1 yet they agree with what pre-existed1 fit it1 amplify it1 relate and connect it with a 'wain1' a number-tally1 or what not1 and build it out4 ,it seems to me that humanism is the only theory that builds this case out in the good direction1 and this case stands for innumerable other kinds of case4 ,in all such eases1 odd as it may sound1 our judgment may actually be said to retroact and to enrich the past4 ,our judgments at any rate change the character of ,,future reality by the acts to which they lead4 ,where these acts are acts expressive of trust1--trust1 e4g41 that a man is honest1 that our health is good enough1 or that we can make a successful effort1--which acts may be a needed antecedent of the trusted things becoming true4 ,professor ,taylor says ,footnote3 ,in an article criticising ,pragmatism 7as he conceives it7 in the ,mc,gill ,university ,quarterly published at ,montreal1 for ,may1 #aijd4 that our trust is at any rate ,,untrue ,,when ,,it ,,is ,,made1 i4 e2 before the action2 and ,i seem to remember that he disposes of anything like a faith in the general excellence of the universe 7making the faithful person's part in it at any rate more excellent7 as a 'lie in the soul4' ,but the pathos of this expression should not blind us to the complication of the facts4 ,i doubt whether ,professor ,taylor would himself be in favor of practically handling trusters of these kinds as liars4 ,future and present really mix in such emergencies1 and one can always escape lies in them by using hypothetic forms4 ,but ,mr4 ,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 become4 ,theoretic truth1 truth of passive copying1 sought in the sole interests of copying as such1 not because copying is ,,good ,,for ,,something1 but because copying ought schlechthin to be1 seems1 if you look at it coldly1 to be an almost preposterous ideal4 ,why should the universe1 existing in itself1 also exist in copies8 ,how ,,can it be copied in the solidity of its objective fulness8 ,and even if it could1 what would the motive be8 ',even the hairs of your head are numbered4' ,doubtless they are1 virtually2 but why1 as an absolute proposition1 ,,ought the number to become copied and known8 ,surely knowing is only one way of interacting with reality and adding to its effect4 ,the opponent here will ask3 ',has not the knowing of truth any substantive value on its own account1 apart from the collateral advantages it may bring8 ,and if you allow theoretic satisfactions to exist at all1 do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home1 and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy1 if she admits them at all8' ,the destructive force of such talk disappears as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly1 and ask1 in our quality of good pragmatists1 just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist4 ,are they not all mere matters of ,,consistency--and emphatically ,,not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind's copies of it1 but of actually felt consistency among judgments1 objects1 and habits of reacting1 in the mind's own experienceable world8 ,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 objects1 or the same kinds of objects1 recur and follow 'law'8 ,if this were so1 what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit as such1 and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these4 ,in point of fact1 this seems to have been the probable case4 ,at life's origin1 any present perception may have been 'true'--if such a word could then be applicable4 ,later1 when reactions became organized1 the reactions became 'true' whenever expectation was fulfilled by them4 ,otherwise they were 'false' or 'mistaken' reactions4 ,but the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction1 so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established1 and a disappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation4 ,here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies4 ,nowadays1 if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects1 our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly4 ,the situation is intellectually unsatisfactory4 ,theoretic truth thus falls ,,within the mind1 being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects--'accord' consisting here in well-definable relations4 ,so long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us1 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 intellectually1 which the majority of us are not4 ,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 cast4 ,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 subjects4 ,we preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out4 ,in some men theory is a passion1 just as music is in others4 ,the form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral profits stop4 ,such men systematize and classify and schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying4 ,too often the results1 glowing with 'truth' for the inventors1 seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders4 ,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 criterion1 and that the absolutists1 for all their pretensions1 are 'in the same boat' concretely with those whom they attack4 ,i am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the extreme4 ,but the whole subject is inductive1 and sharp logic is hardly yet in order4 ,my great trammel has been the non-existence of any definitely stated alternative on my opponents' part4 ,it may conduce to clearness if ,i recapitulate1 in closing1 what ,i conceive the main points of humanism to be4 ,they are these3-- #a4 ,an experience1 perceptual or conceptual1 must conform to reality in order to be true4 #b4 ,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 up4 ,footnote3 ,this is meant merely to exclude reality of an 'unknowable' sort1 of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given4 ,it includes of course any amount if empirical reality independent of the knower4 ,pragmatism1 is thus 'epistemologically' realistic in its account4 #c4 ,by 'conforming1' humanism means taking account-of in such a way as to gain any intellectually and practically satisfactory result4 #d4 ,to 'take account-of' and to be 'satisfactory' are terms that admit of no definition1 so many are the ways in which these requirements can practically be worked out4 #e4 ,vaguely and in general1 we take account of a reality by preserving it in as unmodified a form as possible4 ,but1 to be then satisfactory1 it must not contradict other realities outside of it which claim also to be preserved4 ,that we must preserve all the experience we can and minimize contradiction in what we preserve1 is about all that can be said in advance4 #f4 ,the truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a positive addition to the previous reality1 and later judgments may have to conform to it4 ,yet1 virtually at least1 it may have been true previously4 ,pragmatically1 virtual and actual truth mean the same thing3 the possibility of only one answer1 when once the question is raised4 ,,iv ,,the ,,relation ,,between ,,knower ,,and ,,known ,footnote3 ,extract from an article entitled ',a ,world of ,pure ,experience1' in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 etc41 ,september #bi1aijd4 ,throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities2 and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former1 or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter1 has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome4 ,representative theories put a mental 'representation1' 'image1' or 'content' into the gap1 as a sort of intermediary4 ,commonsense theories left the gap untouched1 declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap4 ,transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers1 and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory act4 ,all the while1 in the very bosom of the finite experience1 every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full4 ,either the knower and the known are3 7#a7 the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts2 or they are 7#b7 two pieces of ,,actual experience belonging to the same subject1 with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them2 or 7#c7 the known is a ,,possible experience either of that subject or another1 to which the said conjunctive transitions ,,would lead1 if sufficiently prolonged4 ,to discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the knower of another1 would be incompatible with the limits of this essay4 ,i have treated of type #a1 the kind of knowledge called perception1 in an article in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 for ,september #a1 #aijd1 called ',does consciousness exist8' ,this is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct 'acquaintance' with a present object4 ,in the other types the mind has 'knowledge-about' an object not immediately there4 ,type #c can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type #b1 so that a brief description of that type will now put the present reader sufficiently at my point of view1 and make him see what the actual meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be4 ,suppose me to be sitting here in my library at ,cambridge1 at ten minutes' walk from ',memorial ,hall1' and to be thinking truly of the latter object4 ,my mind may have before it only the name1 or it may have a clear image1 or it may have a very dim image of the hall1 but such an intrinsic difference in the image makes no difference in its cognitive function4 ,certain extrinsic phenomena1 special experiences of conjunction1 are what impart to the image1 be it what it may1 its knowing office4 ,for instance1 if you ask me what hall ,i mean by my image1 and ,i can tell you nothing2 or if ,i fail to point or lead you towards the ,harvard ,delta2 or if1 being led by you1 ,i am uncertain whether the ,hall ,i see be what ,i had in mind or not2 you would rightly deny that ,i had 'meant' that particular hall at all1 even tho my mental image might to some degree have resembled it4 ,the resemblance would count in that case as coincidental merely1 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 another4 ,on the other hand1 if ,i can lead you to the hall1 and tell you of its history and present uses2 if in its presence ,i feel my idea1 however imperfect it may have been1 to have led hither and to be now ,,terminated2 if the associates of the image and of the felt hall run parallel1 so that each term of the one context corresponds serially1 as ,i walk1 with an answering term of the other2 why then my soul was prophetic1 and my idea must be1 and by common consent would be1 called cognizant of reality4 ,that percept was what ,i ,,meant1 for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention4 ,nowhere is there jar1 but every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one4 ,in this continuing and corroborating1 taken in no transcendental sense1 but denoting definitely felt transitions1 ,,lies ,,all ,,that ,,the ,,knowing ,,of ,a ,,percept ,,by ,,an ,,idea ,,can ,,possibly ,,contain ,,or ,,signify4 ,wherever such transitions are felt1 the first experience ,,knows the last one4 ,where they do not1 or where even as possibles they can not1 intervene1 there can be no pretence of knowing4 ,in this latter case the extremes will be connected1 if connected at all1 by inferior relations--bare likeness or succession1 or by 'withness' alone4 ,knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience4 ,it is ,,made2 and made by relations that unroll themselves in time4 ,whenever certain intermediaries are given1 such that1 as they develop towards their terminus1 there is experience from point to point of one direction followed1 and finally of one process fulfilled1 the result is that ,,their ,,starting-,,point ,,thereby ,,becomes ,a ,,knower ,,and ,,their ,,terminus ,,an ,,object ,,meant ,,or ,,known4 ,that is all that knowing 7in the simple case considered7 can be known-as1 that is the whole of its nature1 put into experiential terms4 ,whenever such is the sequence of our experiences we may freely say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the outset1 even altho ,,at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other1 with no self-transcendency about it1 and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience1 with conjunctively transitional experiences between4 ,that is what we ,,mean here by the object's being 'in mind4' ,of any deeper more real way of its being in mind we have no positive conception1 and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all4 ,i know that many a reader will rebel at this4 ',mere intermediaries1' he will say1 'even tho they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment1 only ,,separate the knower from the known1 whereas what we have in knowledge is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the other1 an apprehension in the etymological sense of the word1 a leaping of the chasm as by lightning1 an act by which two terms are smitten into one over the head of their distinctness4 ,all these dead intermediaries of yours are out of each other1 and outside of their termini still4' ,but do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water8 ,if we knew any more real kind of union aliunde1 we might be entitled to brand all our empirical unions as a sham4 ,but unions by continuous transition are the only ones we know of1 whether in this matter of a knowledge-about that terminates in an acquaintance1 whether in personal identity1 in logical prediction through the copula 'is1' or elsewhere4 ,if anywhere there were more absolute unions1 they could only reveal themselves to us by just such conjunctive results4 ,these are what the unions are worth1 these are all that we can ever practically mean by union1 by continuity4 ,is it not time to repeat what ,lotze said of substances1 that to act like one is to be one8 ,should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous1 in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing8 ,in a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by1 a painted cable will hold a painted ship4 ,in a world where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience1 conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything else4 ,they will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions1 if we have no transphenomenal absolute ready1 to derealize the whole experienced world by1 at a stroke4 ,so much for the essentials of the cognitive relation where the knowledge is conceptual in type1 or forms knowledge 'about' an object4 ,it consists in intermediary experiences 7possible1 if not actual7 of continuously developing progress1 and1 finally1 of fulfilment1 when the sensible percept which is the object is reached4 ,the percept here not only ,,verifies the concept1 proves its function of knowing that percept to be true1 but the percept's existence as the terminus of the chain of intermediaries ,,creates the function4 ,whatever terminates that chain was1 because it now proves itself to be1 what the concept 'had in mind4' ,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 ,,representative1 not in any quasi-miraculous 'epistemological' sense1 but in the definite1 practical sense of being its substitute in various operations1 sometimes physical and sometimes mental1 which lead us to its associates and results4 ,by experimenting on our ideas of reality1 we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences which they severally mean4 ,the ideas form related systems1 corresponding point for point to the systems which the realities form2 and by letting an ideal term call up its associates systematically1 we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in case we had operated on the real world4 ,and this brings us to the general question of substitution4 ,what1 exactly1 in a system of experiences1 does the 'substitution' of one of them for another mean8 ,according to my view1 experience as a whole is a process in time1 whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which1 whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content1 are themselves experiences1 and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate4 ,what the nature of the event called 'superseding' signifies1 depends altogether on the kind of transition that obtains4 ,some experiences simply abolish their predecessors without continuing them in any way4 ,others are felt to increase or to enlarge their meaning1 to carry out their purpose1 or to bring us nearer to their goal4 ,they 'represent' them1 and may fulfil their function better than they fulfilled it themselves4 ,but to 'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience can be conceived and defined in only one possible way4 ,in such a world transitions and arrivals 7or terminations7 are the only events that happen1 tho they happen by so many sorts of path4 ,the only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience2 and the only fulfilment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end4 ,when one experience leads to 7or can lead to7 the same end as another1 they agree in function4 ,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 terminus1 moving from next to next by a great many possible paths4 ,either one of these paths might be a functional substitute for another1 and to follow one rather than another might on occasion be an advantageous thing to do4 ,as a matter of fact1 and in a general way1 the paths that run through conceptual experiences1 that is1 through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the things in which they terminate1 are highly advantageous paths to follow4 ,not only do they yield inconceivably rapid transitions2 but1 owing to the 'universal' character ,footnote3 ,of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also an be conceived as functional1 and defined in terms of transitions1 or of the possibility of such4 which they frequently possess1 and to their capacity for association with one another in great systems1 they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things themselves1 and sweep us on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than the following of trains of sensible perception ever could4 ,wonderful are the new cuts and the short-circuits the thought-paths make4 ,most thought-paths1 it is true1 are substitutes for nothing actual2 they end outside the real world altogether1 in wayward fancies1 utopias1 fictions or mistakes4 ,but where they do re-enter reality and terminate therein1 we substitute them always2 and with these substitutes we pass the greater number of our hours4 ,footnote3 ,this is why ,i called our experiences1 taken all together1 a quasi-chaos4 ,there is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experiences than we commonly suppose4 ,the objective nucleus of every man's experience1 his own body1 is1 it is true1 a continuous percept2 and equally continuous as a percept 7though we may be inattentive to it7 is the material environment of that body1 changing by gradual transition when the body moves4 ,but the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us1 and form conceptual objects merely1 into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare4 ,round their several objective nuclei1 partly shared and common partly discrete of the real physical world1 innumerable thinkers1 pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation1 trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points1 and the rest of the time are quite incongruent2 and around all the nuclei of shared 'reality' floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective1 that are non-substitutional1 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 minds4 ,these exist ,,with one another1 indeed1 and with the objective nuclei1 but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no inter-related system of any kind will ever be made4 ,whosoever feels his experience to be something substitutional even while he has it1 may be said to have an experience that reaches beyond itself4 ,from inside of its own entity it says 'more1' and postulates reality existing elsewhere4 ,for the transcendentalist1 who holds knowing to consist in a salto motale across an 'epistemological chasm1' such an idea presents no difficulty2 but it seems at first sight as if it might be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own4 ,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 fulfils8 ,can the knowledge be there before these elements that constitute its being have come8 ,and1 if knowledge be not there1 how can objective reference occur8 ,the key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as verified and completed1 and the same knowing as in transit and on its way4 ,to recur to the ,memorial ,hall example lately used1 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 ,,that4 ,until established by the end of the process1 its quality of knowing that1 or indeed of knowing anything1 could still be doubted2 and yet the knowing really was there1 as the result now shows4 ,we were ,,virtual knowers of the ,hall long before we were certified to have been its actual knowers1 by the percept's retroactive validating power4 ,just so we are 'mortal' all the time1 by reason of the virtuality of the inevitable event which will make us so when it shall have come4 ,now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage4 ,it never is completed or nailed down4 ,i speak not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves or dissociated 'ions1' or of 'ejects' like the contents of our neighbors' minds2 ,i speak also of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble1 but which we hold for true altho unterminated perceptually1 because nothing says 'no' to us1 and there is no contradicting truth in sight4 ,,to ,,continue ,,thinking ,,unchallenged ,,is1 ,,ninety-,,nine ,,times ,,out ,,of ,a ,,hundred1 ,,our ,,practical ,,substitute ,,for ,,knowing ,,in ,,the ,,completed ,,sense4 ,as each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one1 and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact1 we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure4 ,we live1 as it1 were1 upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest1 and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path4 ,it is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve4 ,our experience1 inter alia1 is of variations of rate and of direction1 and lives in these transitions more than in the journey's end4 ,the experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon--what more could we have ,,done at those moments even if the later verification comes complete8 ,this is what1 as a radical empiricist1 ,i say to the charge that the objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences involves a chasm and a mortal leap4 ,a positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap4 ,being the very original of what we mean by continuity1 it makes a continuum wherever it appears4 ,objective reference is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition4 ,our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view4 ,both are fringed forever by a ,,more that continuously develops1 and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds4 ,the relations1 generally speaking1 are as real here as the terms are1 and the only complaint of the transcendentalist's with which ,i could at all sympathize would be his charge that1 by first making knowledge to consist in external relations as ,i have done1 and by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually there1 ,i have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business1 and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing4 ,only the admission1 such a critic might say1 that our ideas are self-transcendent and 'true' already2 in advance of the experiences that are to terminate them1 can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this1 in which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled4 ,this seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method4 ,what would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination1 be ,,known-,,as8 ,what would it practically result in for ,,us1 were it true8 ,it could only result in our orientation1 in the turning of our expectations and practical tendencies into the right path2 and the right path here1 so long as we and the object are not yet face to face 7or can never get face to face1 as in the case of ejects71 would be the path that led us into the object's nearest neighborhood4 ,where direct acquaintance is lacking1 'knowledge about' is the next best thing1 and an acquaintance with what actually lies about the 'object1 and is most closely related to it1 puts such knowledge within our grasp4 ,ether-waves and your anger1 for example1 are things in which my thoughts will never ,,percteptually terminate1 but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink1 to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their really next effects4 ,even if our ideas did in themselves possess the postulated self-transcendency1 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 ,,us4 ,and this cash-value1 it is needless to say1 is verbatim et liberatim what our empiricist account pays in4 ,on pragmatist principles therefore1 a dispute over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy4 ,call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse1 it makes no difference1 so long as we don't differ about the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits--fruits for us1 of course1 humanistic fruits4 ,the transcendentalist believes his ideas to be self-transcendent only because he finds that in fact they do bear fruits4 ,why need he quarrel with an account of knowledge that insists on naming this effect8 ,why not treat the working of the idea from next to next as the essence of its self-transcendency8 ,why insist that knowing is a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a function of our active life8 ,for a thing to be valid1 says ,lotze1 is the same as to make itself valid4 ,when the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete 7else why its ceaseless changing87 why1 of all things1 should knowing be exempt8 ,why should it not be making itself valid like everything else8 ,that some parts of it may be already valid or verified beyond dispute2 the empirical philosopher1 of course1 like any one else1 may always hope4 ,v ,,the ,,essence ,,of ,,humanism ,footnote3 ,reprinted from the ,journal of ,philosophy1 ,psychology and ,scientific ,methods1 vol4 ii4 ,no4 #e1 ,march #b1 #aije4 ,humanism is a ferment that has 'come to stay4' ,it is not a single hypothesis or theorem1 and it dwells on no new facts4 ,it is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective1 making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight4 ,some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting1 others half unconscious1 even though their own vision may have undergone much change4 ,the result is no small confusion in debate1 the half-conscious humanists often taking part against the radical ones1 as if they wished to count upon the other side4 ,footnote3 ,professor ,baldwin1 for example4 ,his address ',selective ,thinking' 7,psychological ,review1 ,january1 #ahih1 reprinted in his volume1 ',development and ,evolution'7 seems to me an unusually well written pragmatic manifesto4 ,nevertheless in ',the ,limits of ,pragmatism' 7ibid2 ,january1 #aijd71 he 7much less clearly7 joins in the attack4 ,if humanism really be the name for such a shifting of perspective1 it is obvious that the whole scene of the philosophic stage will change in some degree if humanism prevails4 ,the emphasis of things1 their foreground and background distribution1 their sizes and values1 will not keep just the same4 ,footnote3 ,the ethical changes1 it seems to me1 are beautifully made evident in ,professor ,dewey's series of articles1 which will never get the attention they deserve till they are printed in a book4 ,i mean3 ',the ,significance of ,emotions1' ,psychological ,review1 vol4 ii1 #ac2 ',the ,reflex ,arc ,concept in ,psychology1' ibid2 iii1 #ceg2 ',psychology and ,social ,practice1' ibid41 vii1 #aje2 ',interpretation of ,savage ,mind1' ibid2 ix1 #bl#g2 ',green's ,theory of the ,moral ,motive1' ,philosophical ,review1 vol4 i1 #eic2 ',self-realization as the ,moral ,ideal1' ibid2 ii1 #feb2 ',the ,psychology of ,effort1' ibid2 vi1 #dc2 ',the ,evolutionary ,method as ,applied to ,morality1' ibid2 xi1 #ajg1cec2 ',evolution and ,ethics1' ,monist1 vol4 viii1 #cba2 to mention only a few4 ,if such pervasive consequences be involved in humanism1 it is clear that no pains which philosophers may take1 first in defining it1 and then in furthering1 checking1 or steering its progress1 will be thrown away4 ,it suffers badly at present from incomplete definition4 ,its most systematic advocates1 ,schiller and ,dewey1 have published fragmentary programmes only2 and its bearing on many vital philosophic problems has not been traced except by adversaries who1 scenting heresies in advance1 have showered blows on doctrines--subjectivism and scepticism1 for example--that no good humanist finds it necessary to entertain4 ,by their still greater reticences1 the anti-humanists have1 in turn1 perplexed the humanists4 ,much of the controversy has involved the word 'truth4' ,it is always good in debate to know your adversary's point of view authentically4 ,but the critics of humanism never define exactly what the word 'truth' signifies when they use it themselves4 ,the humanists have to guess at their view2 and the result has doubtless been much beating of the air4 ,add to all this1 great individual differences in both camps1 and it becomes clear that nothing is so urgently needed1 at the stage which things have reached at present1 as a sharper definition by each side of its central point of view4 ,whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make sure of what's what and who is who4 ,any one can contribute such a definition1 and1 without it1 no one knows exactly where he stands4 ,if ,i offer my own provisional definition of humanism now and here1 others may improve it1 some adversary may be led to define his own creed more sharply by the contrast1 and a certain quickening of the crystallization of general opinion may result4 ,the essential service of humanism1 as ,i conceive the situation1 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 ,,considered1 ,,experience ,,as ,a ,,whole ,,is ,,self-,,containing ,,and ,,leans ,,on ,,nothing4 ,since this formula also expresses the main contention of transcendental idealism1 it needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous4 ,it seems1 at first sight1 to confine itself to denying theism and pantheism4 ,but1 in fact1 it need not deny either2 everything would depend on the exegesis2 and if the formula ever became canonical1 it would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters4 ,i myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically4 ,if there be a ,god1 he is no absolute all-experiencer1 but simply the experiencer of widest actual conscious span4 ,read thus1 humanism is for me a religion susceptible of reasoned defence1 tho ,i am well aware how many minds there are to whom it can appeal religiously only when it has been monistically translated4 ,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 philosophy1 a philosophy of ',,co1' in which conjunctions do the work4 ,but my primary reason for advocating it is its matchless intellectual economy4 ,it gets rid1 not only of the standing 'problems' that monism engenders 7'problem of evil1' 'problem of freedom1' and the like71 but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes as well4 ,it gets rid1 for example1 of the whole agnostic controversy1 by refusing to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all4 ,it gets rid of any need for an absolute of the bradleyan type 7avowedly sterile for intellectual purposes7 by insisting that the conjunctive relations found within experience are faultlessly real4 ,it gets rid of the need of an absolute of the roycean type 7similarly sterile7 by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge4 ,as the views of knowledge1 reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked1 it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required4 ,i proceed therefore to bring the views which ,i impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly as ,i can4 ,,ii ,if the central humanistic thesis1 printed above in italics1 be accepted1 it will follow that1 if there be any such thing at all as knowing1 the knower and the object known must both be portions of experience4 ,one part of experience must1 therefore1 either 7#a7 ,know another part of experience--in other words1 parts must1 as ,professor ,woodbridge says1 ,footnote3 ,in ,science1 ,november #d1 #aijd1 p4 #eii4 represent ,,one ,,another instead of representing realities outside of 'consciousness'--this case is that of conceptual knowledge2 or else 7#b7 ,they must simply exist as so many ultimate ,,thats or facts of being1 in the first instance2 and then1 as a secondary complication1 and without doubling up its entitative singleness1 any one and the same ,,that in experience must figure alternately as a thing known and as a knowledge of the thing1 by reason of two divergent kinds of context into which1 in the general course of experience1 it gets woven4 ,footnote3 ,this statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who has not read my two articles ',does ,consciousness ,exist8' and ',a ,world of ,pure ,experience' in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 vol4 i1 #aijd4 ,this second case is that of sense-perception4 ,there is a stage of thought that goes beyond common sense1 and of it ,i shall say more presently2 but the common-sense stage is a perfectly definite halting-place of thought1 primarily for purposes of action2 and1 so long as we remain on the common-sense stage of thought1 object and subject ,,fuse in the fact of 'presentation' or sense-perception-the pen and hand which ,i now ,,see writing1 for example1 ,,are the physical realities which those words designate4 ,in this case there is no self-transcendency implied in the knowing4 ,humanism1 here1 is only a more comminuted ,,identitatsphilosophie4 ,in case 7#a71 on the contrary1 the representative experience ,,does ,,transcend ,,itself in knowing the other experience that is its object4 ,no one can talk of the knowledge of the one by the other without seeing them as numerically distinct entities1 of which the one lies beyond the other and away from it1 along some direction and with some interval1 that can be definitely named4 ,but1 if the talker be a humanist1 he must also see this distance-interval concretely and pragmatically1 and confess it to consist of other intervening experiences--of possible ones1 at all events1 if not of actual4 ,to call my present idea of my dog1 for example1 cognitive of the real dog means that1 as the actual tissue of experience is constituted1 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 jumping1 barking1 hairy body4 ,those ,,are the real dog1 the dog's full presence1 for my common sense4 ,if the supposed talker is a profound philosopher1 altho they may not ,,be the real dog for him1 they ,,mean the real dog1 are practical substitutes for the real dog1 as the representation was a practical substitute for them1 that real dog being a lot of atoms1 say1 or of mind-stuff1 that lie ,,where the sense-perceptions lie in his experience as well as in my own4 ,,iii ,the philosopher here stands for the stage of thought that goes beyond the stage of common sense2 and the difference is simply that he 'interpolates' and 'extrapolates1' where common sense does not4 ,for common sense1 two men see the same identical real dog4 ,philosophy1 noting actual differences in their perceptions points out the duality of these latter1 and interpolates something between them as a more real terminus--first1 organs1 viscera1 etc42 next1 cells2 then1 ultimate atoms2 lastly1 mind-stuff perhaps4 ,the original sense-termini of the two men1 instead of coalescing with each other and with the real dog-object1 as at first supposed1 are thus held by philosophers to be separated by invisible realities with which1 at most1 they are conterminous4 ,abolish1 now1 one of the percipients1 and the interpolation changes into 'extrapolation4' ,the sense-terminus of the remaining percipient is regarded by the philosopher as not quite reaching reality4 ,he has only carried the procession of experiences1 the philosopher thinks1 to a definite1 because practical1 halting-place somewhere on the way towards an absolute truth that lies beyond4 ,the humanist sees all the time1 however1 that there is no absolute transcendency even about the more absolute realities thus conjectured or believed in4 ,the viscera and cells are only possible percepts following upon that of the outer body4 ,the atoms again1 tho we may never attain to human means of perceiving them1 are still defined perceptually4 ,the mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind of experience2 and it is possible to frame the hypothesis 7such hypotheses can by no logic be excluded from philosophy7 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 type4 ,even so do you and ,i habitually conceive our two perceptions and the real dog as confluent1 tho only provisionally1 and for the common-sense stage of thought4 ,if my pen be inwardly made of mind-stuff1 there is no confluence ,,now between that mind-stuff and my visual perception of the pen4 ,but conceivably there might come to be such confluence2 for1 in the case of my ,,hand1 the visual sensations and the inward feelings of the hand1 its mind-stuff1 so to speak1 are even now as confluent as any two things can be4 ,there is1 thus1 no breach in humanistic epistemology4 ,whether knowledge be taken as ideally perfected1 or only as true enough to pass muster for practice1 it is hung on one continuous scheme4 ,reality1 howsoever remote1 is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities of experience2 and what knows it is defined as an experience ,,that ',,represents' ,,it1 ,,in ,,the ,,sense ,,of ,,being ,,substitutable ,,for ,,it ,,in ,,our ,,thinking because it leads to the same associates1 ,,or ,,in ,,the ,,sense ,,of ',,pointing ,,to ,,it ,,through ,a ,,chain ,,of ,,other ,,experiences ,,that ,,either ,,intervene ,,or ,,may ,,intervene4 ,absolute reality here bears the same relation to sensation as sensation bears to conception or imagination4 ,both are provisional or final termini1 sensation being only the terminus at which the practical man habitually stops1 while the philosopher projects a 'beyond1' in the shape of more absolute reality4 ,these termini1 for the practical and the philosophical stages of thought respectively1 are self-supporting4 ,they are not 'true' of anything else1 they simply ,,are1 are ,,real4 ,they 'lean on nothing1' as my italicized formula said4 ,rather does the whole fabric of experience lean on them1 just as the whole fabric of the solar system1 including many relative positions1 leans1 for its absolute position in space1 on any one of its constituent stars4 ,here1 again1 one gets a new ,,identitatsphilosophie in pluralistic form4 ,,iv ,if ,i have succeeded in making this at all clear 7tho ,i fear that brevity and abstractness between them may have made me fail71 the reader will see that the 'truth' of our mental operations must always be an intra-experiential affair4 ,a conception is reckoned true by common sense when it can be made to lead to a sensation4 ,the sensation1 which for common sense is not so much 'true' as 'real1' is held to be ,,provisionally true by the philosopher just in so far as it ,,covers 7abuts at1 or occupies the place of7 a still more absolutely real experience1 in the possibility of which1 to some remoter experient1 the philosopher finds reason to believe4 ,meanwhile what actually ,,does count for true to any individual trower1 whether he be philosopher or common man1 is always a result of his ,,apperceptions4 ,if a novel experience1 conceptual or sensible1 contradict too emphatically our pre-existent system of beliefs1 in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is treated as false4 ,only when the older and the newer experiences are congruous enough to mutually apperceive and modify each other1 does what we treat as an advance in truth result4 ,in no case1 however1 need truth consist in a relation between our experiences and something archetypal or trans-experiential4 ,should we ever reach absolutely terminal experiences1 experiences in which we all agreed1 which were superseded by no revised continuations1 these would not be ,,true1 they would be ,,real1 they would simply ,,be1 and be indeed the angles1 corners1 and linchpins of all reality1 on which the truth of everything else would be stayed4 ,only such ,,other things as led to these by satisfactory conjunctions would be 'true4' ,satisfactory connection of some sort with such termini is all that the word 'truth' means4 ,on the common-stage of thought sense-presentations serve as such termini4 ,our ideas and concepts and scientific theories pass for true only so far as they harmoniously lead back to the world of sense4 ,i hope that many humanists will endorse this attempt of mine to trace the more essential features of that way of viewing things4 ,i feel almost certain that ,messrs4 ,dewey and ,schiller will do so4 ,if the attackers will also take some slight account of it1 it may be that discussion will be a little less wide of the mark than it has hitherto been4 ,,vi ,a ,,word ,,more ,,about ,,truth ,footnote3 ,reprint from the ,journal of ,philosophy1 ,july #ah1aijg4 ,my failure in making converts to my conception of truth seems1 if ,i may judge by what ,i hear in conversation1 almost complete4 ,an ordinary philosopher would feel disheartened1 and a common choleric sinner would curse ,god and die1 after such a reception4 ,but instead of taking counsel of despair1 ,i make bold to vary my statements1 in the faint hope that repeated droppings may wear upon the stone1 and that my formulas may seem less obscure if surrounded by something more of a 'mass' whereby to apperceive them4 ,for fear of compromising other pragmatists1 whoe'er they be1 ,i will speak of the conception which ,i am trying to make intelligible1 as my own conception4 ,i first published it in the year #ahhe1 in the first article reprinted in the present book4 ,essential theses of this article were independently supported in #ahic and #ahie by ,professor ,d4 ,s4 ,miller ,footnote3 ,philosophical ,review1 vol4 ii1 p4 #djh1 and ,psychological ,review1 vol4 ii1 p4 #ecc4 and were repeated by me in a presidential address on ',the knowing of things together' ,footnote3 ,the relevant parts of which are printed above1 p4 #dc4 in #ahie4 ,professor ,strong1 in an article in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 etc41 ,footnote3 ,vol4 i1 p4 #bec4 entitled ',a naturalistic theory of the reference of thought to reality1' called our account 'the ,james-,miller theory of cognition1' and1 as ,i understood him1 gave it his adhesion4 ,yet1 such is the difficulty of writing clearly in these penetralia of philosophy1 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 inadequate1 and seems to leave the gist of real cognition out4 ,if such near friends disagree1 what can ,i hope from remoter ones1 and what from unfriendly critics8 ,yet ,i feel so sure that the fault must lie in my lame forms of statement and not in my doctrine1 that ,i am fain to try once more to express myself4 ,are there not some general distinctions which it may help us to agree about in advance8 ,professor ,strong distinguishes between what he calls 'saltatory' and what he calls 'ambulatory' relations4 ',difference1' for example1 is saltatory1 jumping as it were immediately from one term to another1 but 'distance' in time or space is made out of intervening parts of experience through which we ambulate in succession4 ,years ago1 when ,t4 ,h4 ,green's ideas were most influential1 ,i was much troubled by his criticisms of english sensationalism4 ,one of his disciples in particular would always say to me1 ',yes6 ,,terms may indeed be possibly sensational in origin2 but ,,relations1 what are they but pure acts of the intellect coming upon the sensations from above1 and of a higher nature8' ,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 mediated4 ,the terms were spaces1 and the relations were other intervening spaces4 ,footnote3 ,see my ,principles of ,psychology1 vol4 ii1 pp4 #adh-aec4 ,for the ,greenites space-relations had been saltatory1 for me they became thenceforward ambulatory4 ,now the most general way of contrasting my view of knowledge with the popular view 7which is also the view of most epistemologists7 is to call my view ambulatory1 and the other view saltatory2 and the most general way of characterizing the two views is by saying that my view describes knowing as it exists concretely1 while the other view only describes its results abstractly taken4 ,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 saltatory4 ,distance1 for example1 is made abstract by emptying out whatever is particular in the concrete intervals--it is reduced thus to a sole 'difference1' a difference of 'place1' which is a logical or saltatory distinction1 a so-called 'pure relation4' ,the same is true of the relation called 'knowing1' which may connect an idea with a reality4 ,my own account of this relation is ambulatory through and through4 ,i say that we know an object by means of an idea1 whenever we ambulate towards the object under the impulse which the idea communicates4 ,if we believe in so-called 'sensible' realities1 the idea may not only send us towards its object1 but may put the latter into our very hand1 make it our immediate sensation4 ,but1 if1 as most reflective people opine1 sensible realities are not 'real' realities1 but only their appearances1 our idea brings us at least so far1 puts us in touch with reality's most authentic appearances and substitutes4 ,in any case our idea brings us into the object's neighborhood1 practical or ideal1 gets us into commerce with it1 helps us towards its closer acquaintance1 enables us to foresee it1 class it1 compare it1 deduce it1--in short1 to deal with it as we could not were the idea not in our possession4 ,the idea is thus1 when functionally considered1 an instrument for enabling us the better to ,,have ,,to ,,do with the object and to act about it4 ,but it and the object are both of them bits of the general sheet and tissue of reality at large2 and when we say that the idea leads us towards the object1 that only means that it carries us forward through intervening tracts of that reality into the object's closer neighborhood1 into the midst of its associates at least1 be these its physical neighbors1 or be they its logical congeners only4 ,thus carried into closer quarters1 we are in an improved situation as regards acquaintance and conduct2 and we say that through the idea we now ,,know the object better or more truly4 ,my thesis is that the knowing here is ,,made by the ambulation through the intervening experiences4 ,if the idea led us nowhere1 or ,,from that object instead of towards it1 could we talk at all of its having any cognitive quality8 ,surely not1 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 nature4 ,those intermediaries determine what particular knowing function it exerts4 ,the terminus they guide us to tells us what object it 'means1' the results they enrich us with 'verify' or 'refute' it4 ,intervening experiences are thus as indispensable foundations for a concrete relation of cognition as intervening space is for a relation of distance4 ,cognition1 whenever we take it concretely1 means determinate 'ambulation1' through intermediaries1 from a terminus a quo to1 or towards1 a terminus ad quem4 ,as the intermediaries are other than the termini1 and connected with them by the usual associative bonds 7be these 'external' or be they logical1 i4e41 classificatory1 in character71 there would appear to be nothing especially unique about the processes of knowing4 ,they fall wholly within experience2 and we need use1 in describing them1 no other categories than those which we employ in describing other natural processes4 ,but there exist no processes which we cannot also consider abstractly1 eviscerating them down to their essential skeletons or outlines2 and when we have treated the processes of knowing thus1 we are easily led to regard them as something altogether unparalleled in nature4 ,for we first empty idea1 object and intermediaries of all their particularities1 in order to retain only a general scheme1 and then we consider the latter only in its function of giving a result1 and not in its character of being a process4 ,in this treatment the intermediaries shrivel into the form of a mere space of separation1 while the idea and object retain only the logical distinctness of being the end-terms that are separated4 ,in other words1 the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity form a bridge1 evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross1 and then1 the relation of the end-terms having become saltatory1 the whole hocus-pocus of ,erkenntnistheorie begins1 and goes on unrestrained by further concrete considerations4 ,the idea1 in 'meaning' an object separated by an 'epistemological chasm' from itself1 now executes what ,professor ,ladd calls a 'salto mortale'2 in knowing the object's nature1 it now 'transcends' its own4 ,the object in turn becomes 'present' where it is really absent1 etc42 until a scheme remains upon our hands1 the sublime paradoxes of which some of us think that nothing short of an 'absolute' can explain4 ,the relation between idea and object1 thus made abstract and saltatory1 is thenceforward opposed1 as being more essential and previous1 to its own ambulatory self1 and the more concrete description is branded as either false or insufficient4 ,the bridge of intermediaries1 actual or possible1 which in every real case is what carries and defines the knowing1 gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even potentially be there4 ,i believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted1 is the main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory1 and ,i will therefore say a word more on that general point4 ,any vehicle of conjunction1 if all its particularities are abstracted from it1 will leave us with nothing on our hands but the original disjunction which it bridged over4 ,but to escape treating the resultant self-contradiction as an achievement of dialectical profundity1 all we need is to restore some part1 no matter how small1 of what we have taken away4 ,in the case of the epistemological chasm the first reasonable step is to remember that the chasm was filled with ,,some empirical material1 whether ideational or sensational1 which performed ,,some bridging function and saved us from the mortal leap4 ,restoring thus the indispensable modicum of reality to the matter of our discussion1 we find our abstract treatment genuinely useful4 ,we escape entanglement with special cases without at the same time falling into gratuitous paradoxes4 ,we can now describe the general features of cognition1 tell what on the whole it ,,does ,,for ,,us1 in a universal way4 ,we must remember that this whole inquiry into knowing grows up on a reflective level4 ,in any real moment of knowing1 what we are thinking of is our object1 not the way in which we ourselves are momentarily knowing it4 ,we at this moment1 as it happens1 have knowing itself for our object2 but ,i think that the reader will agree that his present knowing of that object is included only abstractly1 and by anticipation1 in the results he may reach4 ,what he concretely has before his mind1 as he reasons1 is some supposed objective instance of knowing1 as he conceives it to go on in some other person1 or recalls it from his own past4 ,as such1 he1 the critic1 sees it to contain both an idea and an object1 and processes by which the knower is guided from the one towards the other4 ,he sees that the idea is remote from the object1 and that1 whether through intermediaries or not1 it genuinely ,,has ,,to ,,do with it4 ,he sees that it thus works beyond its immediate being1 and lays hold of a remote reality2 it jumps across1 transcends itself4 ,it does all this by extraneous aid1 to be sure1 but when the aid has come1 it ,,has done it and the result is secure4 ,why not talk of results by themselves1 then1 without considering means8 ,why not treat the idea as simply grasping or intuiting the reality1 of its having the faculty anyhow1 of shooting over nature behind the scenes and knowing things immediately and directly8 ,why need we always lug in the bridging8--it only retards our discourse to do so4 ,such abstract talk about cognition's results is surely convenient2 and it is surely as legitimate as it is convenient1 ,,so ,,long ,,as ,,we ,,do ,,not ,,forget ,,or ,,positively ,,deny1 ,,what ,,it ,,ignores4 ,we may on occasion say that our idea meant ,,always that particular object1 that it led us there because it was ,,of it intrinsically and essentially4 ,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 thinking4 ,they are positively true accounts of fact ,,as ,,far ,,as ,,they ,,go1 only they leave vast tracts of fact out of the account1 tracts of tact that have to be reinstated to make the accounts literally true of any real case4 ,but if1 not merely passively ignoring the intermediaries1 you actively deny them ,footnote3 ,this is the fallacy which ,i have called 'vicious intellectualism' in my book ,a ,pluralistic ,universe1 ,longmans1 ,green ,co41 #aiji4 to be even potential requisites for the results you are so struck by1 your epistemology goes to irremediable smash4 ,you are as far off the track as an historian would be1 if1 lost in admiration of ,napoleon's personal power1 he were to ignore his marshals and his armies1 and were to accuse you of error in describing his conquests as effected by their means4 ,of such abstractness and one-sidedness ,i accuse most of the critics of my own account4 ,in the second lecture of the book ,pragmatism1 ,i used the illustration of a squirrel scrambling round a tree-trunk to keep out of sight of a pursuing man3 both go round the tree1 but does the man go round the squirrel8 ,it all depends1 ,i said1 on what you mean by going round4' ,in one sense of the word the man 'goes round1' in another sense he does not4 ,i settled the dispute by pragmatically distinguishing the senses4 ,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-round4' ,in such a simple case few people would object to letting the term in dispute be translated into its concreter equivalents4 ,but in the case of a complex function like our knowing they act differently4 ,i give full concrete particular value for the ideas of knowing in every case ,i can think of1 yet my critics insist that 'plain honest ,english knowing' is left out of my account4 ,they write as if the minus were on my side and the plus on theirs4 ,the essence of the matter for me is that altho knowing can be both abstractly and concretely described1 and altho the abstract descriptions are often useful enough1 yet they are all sucked up and absorbed without residuum into the concreter ones1 and contain nothing of any essentially other or higher nature1 which the concrete descriptions can be justly accused of leaving behind4 ,knowing is just a natural process like any other4 ,there is no ambulatory process whatsoever1 the results of which we may not describe1 if we prefer to1 in saltatory terms1 or represent in static formulation4 ,suppose1 e4g41 that we say a man is 'prudent4' ,concretely1 that means that he takes out insurance1 hedges in betting1 looks before he leaps4 ,do such acts ,,constitute the prudence8 ,,are they the man qua prudent8 ,or is the prudence something by itself and independent of them8 ,as a constant habit in him1 a permanent tone of character1 it is convenient to call him prudent in abstraction from any one of his acts1 prudent in general and without specification1 and to say the acts follow from the pre-existing prudence4 ,there are peculiarities in his psycho-physical system that make him act prudently2 and there are tendencies to association in our thoughts that prompt some of them to make for truth and others for error4 ,but would the man be prudent in the absence of each and all of the acts8 ,or would the thoughts be true if they had no associative or impulsive tendencies8 ,surely we have no right to oppose static essences in this way to the moving processes in which they live embedded4 ,my bedroom is above my library4 ,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 other8 ,it means1 you may say1 a pure topographic relation1 a sort of architect's plan among the eternal essences4 ,but that is not the full aboveness1 it is only an abbreviated substitute that on occasion may lead my mind towards truer1 i4e41 fuller1 dealings with the real aboveness4 ,it is not an aboveness ante rem1 it is a post rem extract from the aboveness in rebus4 ,we may indeed talk1 for certain conveniences1 as if the abstract scheme preceded1 we may say ',i must go up stairs because of the essential aboveness1' just as we may say that the man 'does prudent acts because of his ingrained prudence1' or that our ideas 'lead us truly because of their intrinsic truth4' ,but this should not debar us on other occasions from using completer forms of description4 ,a concrete matter of fact always remains identical under any form of description1 as when we say of a line1 now that it runs from left to right1 and now that it runs from right to left4 ,these are but names of one and the same fact1 one more expedient to use at one time1 one at another4 ,the full facts of cognition1 whatever be the way in which we talk about them1 even when we talk most abstractly1 stand inalterably given in the actualities and possibilities of the experience-continuum4 ,footnote #a3 ,the ultimate object or terminus of a cognitive process may in certain instances lie beyond the direct experience of the particular cognizer1 but it1 of course1 must exist as part of the total universe of experience whose constitution1 with cognition in it1 the critic is discussing4 ,but my critics treat my own more concrete talk as if ,,it were the kind that sinned by its inadequacy1 and as if the full continuum left something out4 ,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 logic4' ,our critics say that when we are asked what truth ,,means1 we reply by telling only how it is ,,arrived-,,at4 ,but since a meaning is a logical relation1 static1 independent of time1 how can it possibly be identified1 they say1 with any concrete man's experience1 perishing as this does at the instant of its production8 ,this1 indeed1 sounds profound1 but ,i challenge the profundity4 ,i defy any one to show any difference between logic and psychology here4 ,the logical relation stands to the psychological relation between idea and object only as saltatory abstractness stands to ambulatory concreteness4 ,both relations need a psychological vehicle2 and the 'logical' one is simply the 'psychological' one disemboweled of its fulness1 and reduced to a bare abstractional scheme4 ,a while ago a prisoner1 on being released1 tried to assassinate the judge who had sentenced him4 ,he had apparently succeeded in conceiving the judge timelessly1 had reduced him to a bare logical meaning1 that of being his 'enemy and persecutor1' by stripping off all the concrete conditions 7as jury's verdict1 official obligation1 absence of personal spite1 possibly sympathy7 that gave its full psychological character to the sentence as a particular man's act in time4 ,truly the sentence ,,was inimical to the culprit2 but which idea of it is the truer one1 that bare logical definition of it1 or its full psychological specification8 ,the anti-pragmatists ought in consistency to stand up for the criminal's view of the case1 treat the judge as the latter's logical enemy1 and bar out the other conditions as so much inessential psychological stuff4 ,,ii ,a still further obstacle1 ,i suspect1 stands in the way of my account's acceptance4 ,like ,dewey and like ,schiller1 ,i have had to say that the truth of an idea is determined by its satisfactoriness4 ,but satisfactoriness is a subjective term1 just as idea is2 and truth is generally regarded as 'objective4' ,readers who admit that satisfactoriness is our only ,,mark of truth1 the only sign that we possess the precious article1 will still say that the objective relation between idea and object which the word 'truth' points to is left out of my account altogether4 ,i fear also that the association of my poor name with the 'will to believe' 7which 'will1' it seems to me1 ought to play no part in this discussion7 works against my credit in some quarters4 ,i fornicate with that unclean thing1 my adversaries may think1 whereas your genuine truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan heroics1 and feel as if truth1 to be real truth1 ought to bring eventual messages of death to all our satisfactions4 ,such divergences certainly prove the complexity of the area of our discussion2 but to my mind they also are based on misunderstandings1 which 7tho with but little hope of success7 ,i will try to diminish by a further word of explanation4 ,first1 then1 ,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 absolute1 complete and objective2 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 description4 ,it will fall1 as ,i contend1 entirely within the field of my analysis4 ,to begin with1 it must obtain between an idea and a reality that is the idea's object2 and1 as a predicate1 it must apply to the idea and not to the object1 for objective realities are not ,,true1 at least not in the universe of discourse to which we are now confining ourselves1 for there they are taken as simply ,,being1 while the ideas are true ,,of them4 ,but we can suppose a series of ideas to be successively more and more true of the same object1 and can ask what is the extreme approach to being absolutely true that the last idea might attain to4 ,the maximal conceivable truth in an idea would seem to be that it should lead to an actual merging of ourselves with the object1 to an utter mutual confluence and identification4 ,on the common-sense level of belief this is what is supposed really to take place in sense-perception4 ,my idea of this pen verifies itself through my percept2 and my percept is held to ,,be the pen for the time being--percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as identical4 ,but the physiology of the senses has criticised common sense out of court1 and the pen 'in itself' is now believed to lie beyond my momentary percept4 ,yet the notion once suggested1 of what a completely consummated acquaintance with a reality might be like1 remains over for our speculative purposes4 ,,total ,,conflux ,,of ,,the ,,mind ,,with ,,the ,,reality would be the absolute limit of truth1 there could be no better or more satisfying knowledge than that4 ,such total conflux1 it is needless to say1 is ,,already ,,explicitly ,,provided ,,for1 ,,as ,a ,,possibility1 ,,in ,,my ,,account ,,of ,,the ,,matter4 ,if an idea should ever lead us not only ,,towards1 or ,,up ,,to1 or ,,against1 a reality1 but so close that we and the reality should ,,melt ,,together1 it would be made absolutely true1 according to me1 by that performance4 ,in point of fact philosophers doubt that this ever occurs4 ,what happens1 they think1 is only that we get nearer and nearer to realities1 we approximate more and more to the all-satisfying limit2 and the definition of actually1 as distinguished from imaginably1 complete and objective truth1 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 possible1 literally ,,next to it1 for instance4 ,suppose1 now1 there were an idea that did this for a certain objective reality4 ,suppose that no further approach were possible1 that nothing lay between1 that the next step would carry us right ,,into the reality2 then that result1 being the next thing to conflux1 would make the idea true in the maximal degree that might be supposed practically attainable in the world which we inhabit4 ,well1 ,i need hardly explain that ,,that ,,degree ,,of ,,truth ,,is ,,also ,,provided ,,for ,,in ,,my ,,account ,,of ,,the ,,matter4 ,and if satisfactions are the marks of truth's presence1 we may add that any less true substitute for such a true idea would prove less satisfactory4 ,following its lead1 we should probably find out that we did not quite touch the terminus4 ,we should desiderate a closer approach1 and not rest till we had found it4 ,i am1 of course1 postulating here a standing reality independent of the idea that knows it4 ,i am also postulating that satisfactions grow pari passu with our approximation to such reality4 ,footnote #a3 ,say1 if you prefer to1 that ,d,i,ssatisfactions decrease pari passu with such approximation4 ,the approximation may be of any kind assignable--approximation in time or in space1 or approximation in kind1 which in common speech means 'copying4' ,if my critics challenge this latter assumption1 ,i retort upon them with the former4 ,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 us4 ,each terminus proves provisional by leaving us unsatisfied4 ,the truer idea is the one that pushes farther2 so we are ever beckoned on by the ideal notion of an ultimate completely satisfactory terminus4 ,i1 for one1 obey and accept that notion4 ,i can conceive no other objective ,,content to the notion of ideally perfect truth than that of penetration into such a terminus1 nor can ,i conceive that the notion would ever have grown up1 or that true ideas would ever have been sorted out from false or idle ones1 save for the greater sum of satisfactions1 intellectual or practical1 which the truer ones brought with them4 ,can we imagine a man absolutely satisfied with an idea and with all its relations to his other ideas and to his sensible experiences1 who should yet not take its content as a true account of reality8 ,the matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the matter of the satisfactory4 ,you may put either word first in your ways of talking2 but leave out that whole notion of ,,satisfactory ,,working or ,,leading 7which is the essence of my pragmatistic account7 and call truth a static logical relation1 independent even of ,,possible leadings or satisfactions1 and it seems to me you cut all ground from under you4 ,i fear that ,i am still very obscure4 ,but ,i respectfully implore those who reject my doctrine because they can make nothing of my stumbling language1 to tell us in their own name--und zwar very concretely and articulately6--just how the real1 genuine and absolutely 'objective' truth which they believe in so profoundly1 is constituted and established4 ,they mustn't point to the 'reality' itself1 for truth is only our subjective relation to realities4 ,what is the nominal essence of this relation1 its logical definition1 whether or not it be 'objectively' attainable by mortals8 ,whatever they may say it is1 ,i have the firmest faith that my account will prove to have allowed for it and included it by anticipation1 as one possible case in the total mixture of cases4 ,there is1 in short1 no ,,room for any grade or sort of truth outside of the framework of the pragmatic system1 outside of that jungle of empirical workings and leadings1 and their nearer or ulterior terminations1 of which ,i seem to have written so unskilfully4 ,,vii ,,professor ,,pratt ,,on ,,truth ,i ,footnote3 ,reprinted from the ,journal of ,philosophy1 etc41 ,august #ae1 #aijg 7vol4 iv1 p4 #dfd74 ,professor ,j4 ,b4 ,pratt's paper in the ,journal of ,philosophy for ,june #f1 #aijg1 is so brilliantly written that its misconception of the pragmatist position seems doubly to call for a reply4 ,he asserts that1 for a pragmatist1 truth cannot be a relation between an idea and a reality outside and transcendent of the idea1 but must lie 'altogether within experience1' where it will need 'no reference to anything else to justify it'--no reference to the object1 apparently4 ,the pragmatist must 'reduce everything to psychology1' aye1 and to the psychology of the immediate moment4 ,he is consequently debarred from saying that an idea that eventually gets psychologically verified ,,was already true before the process of verifying was complete2 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 will4 ,whether such a pragmatist as this exists1 ,i know not1 never having myself met with the beast4 ,we can define terms as we like2 and if that be my friend ,pratt's definition of a pragmatist1 ,i can only concur with his anti-pragmatism4 ,but1 in setting up the weird type1 he quotes words from me2 so1 in order to escape being classed by some reader along with so asinine a being1 ,i will reassert my own view of truth once more4 ,truth is essentially a relation between two things1 an idea1 on the one hand1 and a reality outside of the idea1 on the other4 ,this relation1 like all relations1 has its fundamentum1 namely1 the matrix of experiential circumstance1 psychological as well as physical1 in which the correlated terms are found embedded4 ,in the case of the relation between 'heir' and 'legacy' the fundamentum is a world in which there was a testator1 and in which there is now a will and an executor2 in the case of that between idea and object1 it is a world with circumstances of a sort to make a satisfactory verification process1 lying around and between the two terms4 ,but just as a man may be called an heir and treated as one before the executor has divided the estate1 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 enough4 ,where potentiality counts for actuality in so many other cases1 one does not see why it may not so count here4 ,we call a man benevolent not only for his kind acts paid in1 but for his readiness to perform others2 we treat an idea as 'luminous' not only for the light it has shed1 but for that we expect it will shed on dark problems4 ,why should we not equally trust the truth of our ideas8 ,we live on credits everywhere2 and we use our ideas far oftener for calling up things connected with their immediate objects1 than for calling up those objects themselves4 ,ninety-nine times out of a hundred the only use we should make of the object itself1 if we were led up to it by our idea1 would be to pass on to those connected things by its means4 ,so we continually curtail verification-processes1 letting our belief that they are possible suffice4 ,what ,,constitutes ,,the ,,relation known as truth1 ,i now say1 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 length4 ,so long as it exists1 and a satisfactory passage through it between the object and the idea is possible1 that idea will both ,,be true1 and will ,,have ,,been true of that object1 whether fully developed verification has taken place or not4 ,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 idea2 so that the notion that truth could fall altogether inside of the thinker's private experience and be something purely psychological1 is absurd4 ,it is ,,between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms4 ,but the 'intellectualistic' position1 if ,i understand ,mr4 ,pratt rightly1 is that1 altho we can use this fundamentum1 this mass of go-between experience1 for ,,testing truth1 yet the truth-relation in itself remains as something apart4 ,it means1 in ,mr4 ,pratt's words1 merely ',,this ,,simple ,,thing ,,that ,,the ,,object ,,of ,,which ,,one ,,is ,,thinking ,,is ,,as ,,one ,,thinks ,,it4' ,it seems to me that the word 'as1' which qualifies the relation here1 and bears the whole 'epistemological' burden1 is anything but simple4 ,what it most immediately suggests is that the idea should be ,,like the object2 but most of our ideas1 being abstract concepts1 bear almost no resemblance to their objects4 ,the 'as' must therefore1 ,i should say1 be usually interpreted functionally1 as meaning that the idea shall lead us into the same quarters of experience ,,as the object would4 ,experience leads ever on and on1 and objects and our ideas of objects may both lead to the same goals4 ,the ideas being in that case shorter cuts1 we ,,substitute them more and more for their objects2 and we habitually waive direct verification of each one of them1 as their train passes through our mind1 because if an idea leads ,,as the object would lead1 we can say1 in ,mr4 ,pratt's words1 that in so far forth the object is ,,as we think it1 and that the idea1 verified thus in so far forth1 is true enough4 ,mr4 ,pratt will undoubtedly accept most of these facts1 but he will deny that they spell pragmatism4 ,of course1 definitions are free to every one2 but ,i have myself never meant by the pragmatic view of truth anything different from what ,i now describe2 and inasmuch as my use of the term came earlier than my friend's1 ,i think it ought to have the right of way4 ,but ,i suspect that ,professor ,pratt's contention is not solely as to what one must think in order to be called a pragmatist4 ,i am cure that he believes that the truth-relation has something ,,more in it than the fundamentum which ,i assign can account for4 ,useful to test truth by1 the matrix of circumstance1 he thinks1 cannot found the truth-relation in se1 for that is trans-empirical and 'saltatory4' ,well1 take an object and an idea1 and assume that the latter is true of the former--as eternally and absolutely true as you like4 ,let the object be as much 'as' the idea thinks it1 as it is possible for one thing to be 'as' another4 ,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 describable1 and not remain a pure mystery1 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 fundamentum1 ,i will confess my stupidity cheerfully1 and will agree never to publish a line upon this subject of truth again4 ,,ii ,professor ,pratt has returned to the charge in a whole book1 ,footnote #a3 ,j4 ,b4 ,pratt3 ,what is ,pragmatism4 ,new ,york1 ,the ,macmillan ,company1 #aiji4--,the comments ,i have printed were written in ,march1 #aiji1 after some of the articles printed later in the present volume4 which for its clearness and good temper deserves to supersede all the rest of the anti-pragmatistic literature4 ,i wish it might do so2 for its author admits all ,,my essential contentions1 simply distinguishing my account of truth as 'modified' pragmatism from ,schiller's and ,dewey's1 which he calls pragmatism of the 'radical' sort4 ,as ,i myself understand ,dewey and ,schiller1 our views absolutely agree1 in spite of our different modes of statement2 but ,i have enough trouble of my own in life without having to defend my friends1 so ,i abandon them provisionally to the tender mercy of ,professor ,pratt's interpretations1 utterly erroneous tho ,i deem these to be4 ,my reply as regards myself can be very short1 for ,i prefer to consider only essentials1 and ,dr4 ,pratt's whole book hardly takes the matter farther than the article to which ,i retort in ,part ,i of the present paper4 ,he repeats the 'as'-formula1 as if it were something that ,i1 along with other pragmatists1 had denied1 ,footnote3 ,op4 cit41 pp4 #gg-hj4 whereas ,i have only asked those who insist so on its importance to do something more than merely utter it--to explicate it1 for example1 and tell us what its so great importance consists in4 ,i myself agree most cordially that for an idea to be true the object must be 'as' the idea declares it1 but ,i explicate the 'as'-ness as meaning the idea's verifiability4 ,now since ,dr4 ,pratt denies none of these verifying 'workings' for which ,i have pleaded1 but only insists on their inability to serve as the fundamentum of the truth-relation1 it seems that there is really nothing in the line of ,,fact about which we differ1 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 ,dr4 ,pratt's present name for the character of as-ness in the true idea4 ,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 made4 ,take an example where there can be no possible working4 ,suppose ,i have an idea to which ,i give utterance by the vocable 'skrkl1' claiming at the same time that it is true4 ,who now can say that it is ,,false1 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 ,dr4 ,pratt's sense8 ,on the other hand who can say that it is ,,true1 for who can lay his hand on that object and show that it and nothing else is what ,i ,,mean by my word8 ,but yet again1 who can gainsay any one who shall call my word utterly ,,irrelative to other reality1 and treat it as a bare fact in my mind1 devoid of any cognitive function whatever4 ,one of these three alternatives must surely be predicated of it4 ,for it not to be irrelevant 7or not-cognitive in nature71 an object of some kind must be provided which it may refer to4 ,supposing that object provided1 whether 'skrkl' is true or false of it1 depends1 according to ,professor ,pratt1 on no intermediating condition whatever4 ,the trueness or the falsity is even now immediately1 absolutely1 and positively there4 ,i1 on the other hand1 demand a cosmic environment of some kind to establish which of them is there rather than utter irrelevancy4 ,footnote3 ,dr4 ,pratt1 singularly enough1 disposes of this primal postulate of all pragmatic epistemology1 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 work1 and which cannot itself be identified with the experience or any part of it' 7pp4 #afg-afh74 ,the 'experience' means here of course the idea1 or belief2 and the expression 'smuggling in' is to the last degree diverting4 ,if any epistemologist could dispense with a conditioning environment1 it would seem to be the antipragmatist1 with his immediate saltatory trueness1 independent of work done4 ,the mediating pathway which the environment supplies is the very essence of the pragmatist's explanation4 ,i then say1 first1 that unless some sort of a natural path exists between the 'skrkl' and ,,that object1 distinguishable among the innumerable pathways that run among all the realities of the universe1 linking them promiscuously with one another1 there is nothing there to constitute even the ,,possibility ,,of ,,its ,,referring to that object rather than to any other4 ,i say furthermore that unless it have some ,,tendency ,,to ,,follow ,,up ,,that ,,path1 there is nothing to constitute its ,,intention to refer to the object in question4 ,finally1 ,i say that unless the path be strown with possibilities of frustration or encouragement1 and offer some sort of terminal satisfaction or contradiction1 there is nothing to constitute its agreement or disagreement with that object1 or to constitute the as-ness 7or 'not-as-ness'7 in which the trueness 7or falseness7 is said to consist4 ,i think that ,dr4 ,pratt ought to do something more than repeat the name 'trueness1' in answer to my pathetic question whether that there be not some ,,constitution to a relation as important as this4 ,the pathway1 the tendency1 the corroborating or contradicting progress1 need not in every case be experienced in full1 but ,i don't see1 if the universe doesn't contain them among its possibilities of furniture1 what ,,logical ,,material ,,for ,,defining the trueness of my idea is left4 ,but if it do contain them1 they and they only are the logical material required4 ,i am perplexed by the superior importance which ,dr4 ,pratt attributes to abstract trueness over concrete verifiability in an idea1 and ,i wish that he might be moved to explain4 ,it is prior to verification1 to be sure1 but so is the verifiability for which ,i contend prior1 just as a man's 'mortality' 7which is nothing but the possibility of his death7 is prior to his death1 but it can hardly be that this abstract priority of all possibility to its correlative fact is what so obstinate a quarrel is about4 ,i think it probable that ,dr4 ,pratt is vaguely thinking of something concreter than this4 ,the trueness of an idea must mean ,,something ,,definite ,,in ,,it ,,that ,,determines ,,its ,,tendency ,,to ,,work1 and indeed towards this object rather than towards that4 ,undoubtedly there is something of this sort in the idea1 just as there is something in man that accounts for his tendency towards death1 and in bread that accounts for its tendency to nourish4 ,what that something is in the case of truth psychology tells us3 the idea has associates peculiar to itself1 motor as well as ideational2 it tends by its place and nature to call these into being1 one after another2 and the appearance of them in succession is what we mean by the 'workings' of the idea4 ,according to what they are1 does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to light4 ,these tendencies have still earlier conditions which1 in a general way1 biology1 psychology and biography can trace4 ,this whole chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things in which new relations1 not simply causal1 can now be found1 or into which they can now be introduced1--the relations namely which we epistemologists study1 relations of adaptation1 of substitutability1 of instrumentality1 of reference and of truth4 ,the prior causal conditions1 altho there could be no knowing of any kind1 true or false1 without them1 are but preliminary to the question of what makes the ideas true or false when once their tendencies have been obeyed4 ,the tendencies must exist in some shape anyhow1 but their fruits are truth1 falsity1 or irrelevancy1 according to what they concretely turn out to be4 ,they are not 'saltatory' at any rate1 for they evoke their consequences contiguously1 from next to next only2 and not until the final result of the whole associative sequence1 actual or potential1 is in our mental sight1 can we feel sure what its epistemological significance1 if it have any1 may be4 ,true knowing is1 in fine1 not substantially1 in itself1 or 'as such1' inside of the idea from the first1 any more than mortality ,,as ,,such is inside of the man1 or nourishment ,,as ,,such inside of the bread4 ,something else is there first1 that practically ,,makes ,,for knowing1 dying or nourishing1 as the case may be4 ,that something is the 'nature' namely of the first term1 be it idea1 man1 or bread1 that operates to start the causal chain of processes which1 when completed1 is the complex fact to which we give whatever functional name best fits the case4 ,another nature1 another chain of cognitive workings2 and then either another object known or the same object known differently1 will ensue4 ,dr4 ,pratt perplexes me again by seeming to charge ,dewey and ,schiller ,footnote3 ,page #bjj 7,i am not sure that he charges me7 with an account of truth which would allow the object believed in not to exist1 even if the belief in it were true4 ',since the truth of an idea1' he writes1 'means merely the fact that the idea works1 that fact is all that you mean when you say the idea is true' 7p4 #bjf74 ',,when ,,you ,,say ,,the ,,idea ,,is ,,true'--does that mean true for ,,you1 the critic1 or true for the believer whom you are describing8 ,the critic's trouble over this seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively1 whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings4' ',but is the object ,,really true or not8'--the critic then seems to ask1--as if the pragmatist were bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of his epistemology and tell us what realities indubitably exist4 ',one world at a time1' would seem to be the right reply here4 ,one other trouble of ,dr4 ,pratt's must be noticed4 ,it concerns the 'transcendence' of the object4 ,when our ideas have worked so as to bring us flat up against the object1 ,,next to it1 'is our relation to it then ambulatory or saltatory8' ,dr4 ,pratt asks4 ,if ,,your headache be my object1 ',,my experiences break off where yours begin1' ,dr4 ,pratt writes1 and 'this fact is of great importance1 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 object4 ,if this comes at all when ,i know your headache1 it comes not with the object1 but quite on my side of the epistemological gulf4 ,the gulf is still there to be transcended4' 7p4 #aeh74 ,some day of course1 or even now somewhere in the larger life of the universe1 different men's headaches may become confluent or be 'co-conscious4' ,here and now1 however1 headaches do transcend each other and1 when not felt1 can be known only conceptually4 ,my idea is that you really have a headache2 it works well with what ,i see of your expression1 and with what ,i hear you say2 but it doesn't put me in possession of the headache itself4 ,i am still at one remove1 and the headache 'transcends' me1 even tho it be in nowise transcendent of human experience generally4 ,bit the 'gulf' here is that which the pragmatist epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses1 by saying there must be an object and an idea4 ,the idea however doesn't immediately leap the gulf1 it only works from next to next so as to bridge it1 fully or approximately4 ,if it bridges it1 in the pragmatist's vision of his hypothetical universe1 it can be called a 'true' idea4 ,if it only ,,might bridge it1 but doesn't1 or if it throws a bridge distinctly ,,at it1 it still has1 in the onlooking pragmatist's eyes1 what ,professor ,pratt calls 'trueness4' ,but to ask the pragmatist thereupon whether1 when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object1 it is ,,really true or has ,,real trueness1--in other words whether the headache he supposes1 and supposes the thinker he supposes1 to believe in1 be a real headache or not1--is to step from his hypothetical universe of discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact4 ,,viii ,,the ,,pragmatist ,,account ,,of ,,truth ,,and ,,its ,,misunderstanders ,footnote3 ,reprint from the ,philosophical ,review1 ,january1 #aijh 7vol4 xvii1 p4 #a74 ,the account of truth given in my volume entitled ,pragmatism1 continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that ,i am tempted to make a final brief reply4 ,my ideas may well deserve refutation1 but they can get none till they are conceived of in their proper shape4 ,the fantastic character of the current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism assumes4 ,persons who are familiar with a conception move about so easily in it that they understand each other at a hint1 and can converse without anxiously attending to their ,p's and ,q's4 ,i have to admit1 in view of the results1 that we have assumed too ready an intelligence1 and consequently in many places used a language too slipshod4 ,we should never have spoken elliptically4 ,the critics have boggled at every word they could boggle at1 and refused to take the spirit rather than the letter of our discourse4 ,this seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in the whole point of view4 ,it also shows1 ,i think1 that the second stage of opposition1 which has already begun to express itself in the stock phrase that 'what is new is not true1 and what is true not new1' in pragmatism1 is insincere4 ,if we said nothing in any degree new1 why was our meaning so desperately hard to catch8 ,the blame cannot be laid wholly upon our obscurity of speech1 for in other subjects we have attained to making ourselves understood4 ,but recriminations are tasteless2 and1 as far as ,i personally am concerned1 ,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 it1 so that a reader may very naturally have grown confused4 ,for this ,i am to blame1--likewise for omitting certain explicit cautions1 which the pages that follow will now in part supply4 ,,first ,,misunderstanding3 ,,pragmatism ,,is ,,only ,a ,,re-,,editing ,,of ,,positivism4 ,this seems the commonest mistake4 ,scepticism1 positivism1 and agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing that everybody knows what the word 'truth' means1 without further explanation4 ,but the former doctrines then either suggest or declare that real truth1 absolute truth1 is inaccessible to us1 and that we must fain put up with relative or phenomenal truth as its next best substitute4 ,by scepticism this is treated as an unsatisfactory state of affairs1 while positivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it1 call real truth sour grapes1 and consider phenomenal truth quite sufficient for all our 'practical' purposes4 ,in point of fact1 nothing could be farther from all this than what pragmatism has to say of truth4 ,its thesis is an altogether previous one4 ,it leaves off where these other theories begin1 having contented itself with the word truth's ,,definition4 ',no matter whether any mind extant in the universe possess truth or not1' it asks1 'what does the notion of truth signify ,,ideally8' ',what kind of things would true judgments be ,,in ,,case they existed8' ,the answer which pragmatism offers is intended to cover the most complete truth that can be conceived of1 'absolute' truth if you like1 as well as truth of the most relative and imperfect description4 ,this question of what truth would be like if it did exist1 belongs obviously to a purely speculative field of inquiry4 ,it is not a theory about any sort of reality1 or about what kind of knowledge is actually possible2 it abstracts from particular terms altogether1 and defines the nature of a possible relation between two of them4 ,as ,kant's question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous philosophers1 so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to have escaped attention hitherto1 but even so subtile1 it would seem1 that when openly broached now1 dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to apprehend it1 and deem the pragmatist to be treating of something wholly different4 ,he insists1 they say 7,i quote an actual critic71 'that the greater problems are insoluble by human intelligence1 that our need of knowing truly is artificial and illusory1 and that our reason1 incapable of reaching the foundations of reality1 must turn itself exclusively towards ,,action4' ,there could not be a worse misapprehension4 ,,second ,,misunderstanding3 ,,pragmatism ,,is ,,primarily ,,an ,,appeal ,,to ,,action4 ,the name 'pragmatism1' with its suggestions of action1 has been an unfortunate choice1 ,i have to admit1 and has played into the hands of this mistake4 ,but no word could protect the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature of the inquiry that1 when ,dr4 ,schiller speaks of ideas 'working' well1 the only thing they think of is their immediate workings in the physical environment1 their enabling us to make money1 or gain some similar 'practical' advantage4 ,ideas do work thus1 of course1 immediately or remotely2 but they work indefinitely inside of the mental world also4 ,not crediting us with this rudimentary insight1 our critics treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers1 doctors1 financiers1 and men of action generally1 who need some sort of a rough and ready weltanschauung1 but have no time or wit to study genuine philosophy4 ,it is usually described as a characteristically ,american movement1 a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought1 excellently fitted for the man on the street1 who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately4 ,it is quite true that1 when the refined theoretic question that pragmatism begins with is once answered1 secondary corollaries of a practical sort follow4 ,investigation shows that1 in the function called truth1 previous realities are not the only independent variables4 ,to a certain extent our ideas1 being realities1 are also independent variables1 and1 just as they follow other reality and fit it1 so1 in a measure1 does other reality follow and fit them4 ,when they add themselves to being1 they partly redetermine the existent1 so that reality as a whole appears incompletely definable unless ideas also are kept account of4 ,this pragmatist doctrine1 exhibiting our ideas as complemental factors of reality1 throws open 7since our ideas are instigators of our action7 a wide window upon human action1 as well as a wide license to originality in thought4 ,but few things could be sillier than to ignore the prior epistemological edifice in which the window is built1 or to talk as if pragmatism began and ended at the window4 ,this1 nevertheless1 is what our critics do almost without exception4 ,they ignore our primary step and its motive1 and make the relation to action1 which is our secondary achievement1 primary4 ,,third ,,misunderstanding3 ,,pragmatists ,,cut ,,themselves ,,off ,,from ,,the ,,right ,,to ,,believe ,,in ,,ejective ,,realities4 ,they do so1 according to the critics1 by making the truth of our beliefs consist in their verifiability1 and their verifiability in the way in which they do work for us4 ,professor ,stout1 in his otherwise admirable and hopeful review of ,schiller in ,mind for ,october1 #ahig1 considers that this ought to lead ,schiller 7could he sincerely realize the effects of his own doctrine7 to the absurd consequence of being unable to believe genuinely in another man's headache1 even were the headache there4 ,he can only 'postulate' it for the sake of the working value of the postulate to himself4 ,the postulate guides certain of his acts and leads to advantageous consequences2 but the moment he understands fully that the postulate is true ,,only 767 in this sense1 it ceases 7or should cease7 to be true for him that the other man really ,,has a headache4 ,all that makes the postulate most precious then evaporates3 his interest in his fellow-man 'becomes a veiled form of self-interest1 and his world grows cold1 dull1 and heartless4' ,such an objection makes a curious muddle of the pragmatist's universe of discourse4 ,within that universe the pragmatist finds some one with a headache or other feeling1 and some one else who postulates that feeling4 ,asking on what condition the postulate is 'true' the pragmatist replies that1 for the postulator at any rate1 it is true just in proportion as to believe in it works in him the fuller sum of satisfactions4 ,what is it that is satisfactory here8 ,surely to ,,believe in the postulated object1 namely1 in the really existing feeling of the other man4 ,but how 7especially if the postulator were himself a thoroughgoing pragmatist7 could it ever be satisfactory to him ,,not to believe in that feeling1 so long as1 in ,professor ,stout's words1 disbelief 'made the world seem to him cold1 dull1 and heartless'8 ,disbelief would seem1 on pragmatist principles1 quite out of the question under such conditions1 unless the heartlessness of the world were made probable already on other grounds4 ,and since the belief in the headache1 true for the subject assumed in the pragmatist's universe of discourse1 is also true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing purposes has assumed that entire universe1 why is it not true in that universe absolutely8 ,the headache believed in is a reality there1 and no extant mind disbelieves it1 neither the critic's mind nor his subject's6 ,have our opponents any better brand of truth in this real universe of ours that they can show us8 ,footnote3 ,i see here a chance to forestall a criticism which some one may make on ,lecture ,,iii of my ,pragmatism1 where1 on pp4 #if-ajj1 ,i said that ',god' and ',matter' might be regarded as synonymous terms1 so long as no differing future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions4 ,the passage was transcribed from my address at the ,california ,philosophical ,union1 reprinted in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 vol4 i1 p4 #fgc4 ,i had no sooner given the address than ,i perceived a flaw in that part of it2 but ,i have left the passage unaltered ever since1 because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value4 ,the flaw was evident when1 as a case analogous to that of a godless universe1 ,i thought of what ,i called an 'automatic sweetheart1' meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden1 laughing1 talking1 blushing1 nursing us1 and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her4 ,would any one regard her as a full equivalent8 ,certainly not1 and why8 ,because1 framed as we are1 our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and recognition1 love and admiration4 ,the outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression1 as a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in4 ,pragmatically1 then1 belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work1 and is point of fact no one treats it as a serious hypothesis4 ,the godless universe would be exactly similar4 ,even if matter could do every outward thing that ,god does1 the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily1 because the chief call for a ,god on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically4 ,matter disappoints this craving of our ego1 so ,god remains for most men the truer hypothesis1 and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons4 ,so much for the third misunderstanding1 which is but one specification of the following still wider one4 ,,fourth ,,misunderstanding3 ,,no ,,pragmatist ,,can ,,be ,a ,,realist ,,in ,,his ,,epistemology4 ,this is supposed to follow from his statement that the truth of our beliefs consists in general in their giving satisfaction4 ,of course satisfaction per se is a subjective condition2 so the conclusion is drawn that truth falls wholly inside of the subject1 who then may manufacture it at his pleasure4 ,true beliefs become thus wayward affections1 severed from all responsibility to other parts of experience4 ,it is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist's opinion1 ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse4 ,the terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there4 ,the pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with ideas4 ,what1 now1 he asks1 can make those ideas true of that reality8 ,ordinary epistemology contents itself with the vague statement that the ideas must 'correspond' or 'agree'2 the pragmatist insists on being more concrete1 and asks what such 'agreement' may mean in detail4 ,he finds first that the ideas must point to or lead towards ,,that reality and no other1 and then that the pointings and leadings must yield satisfaction as their result4 ,so far the pragmatist is hardly less abstract than the ordinary slouchy epistemologist2 but as he defines himself farther1 he grows more concrete4 ,the entire quarrel of the intellectualist with him is over his concreteness1 intellectualism contending that the vaguer and more abstract account is here the more profound4 ,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 belong1 intermediary verifying bits of experience with which the mind at one end1 and the reality at the other1 are joined4 ,the 'satisfaction1' in turn1 is no abstract satisfaction ueberhaupt1 felt by an unspecified being1 but is assumed to consist of such satisfactions 7in the plural7 as concretely existing men actually do find in their beliefs4 ,as we humans are constituted in point of fact1 we find that to believe in other men's minds1 in independent physical realities1 in past events1 in eternal logical relations1 is satisfactory4 ,we find hope satisfactory4 ,we often find it satisfactory to cease to doubt4 ,above all we find ,,consistency satisfactory1 consistency between the present idea and the entire rest of our mental equipment1 including the whole order of our sensations1 and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference1 and our whole stock of previously acquired truths4 ,the pragmatist1 being himself a man1 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 discussion1 is willing to treat our satisfactions as possibly really true guides to it1 not as guides true solely for ,,us4 ,it would seem here to be the duty of his critics to show with some explicitness why1 being our subjective feelings1 these satisfactions can not yield 'objective' truth4 ,the beliefs which they accompany 'posit' the assumed reality1 'correspond' and 'agree' with it1 and 'fit' it in perfectly definite and assignable ways1 through the sequent trains of thought and action which form their verification1 so merely to insist on using these words abstractly instead of concretely is no way of driving the pragmatist from the field1--his more concrete account virtually includes his critic's4 ,if our critics have any definite idea of a truth more objectively grounded than the kind we propose1 why do they not show it more articulately8 ,as they stand1 they remind one of ,hegel's man who wanted 'fruit1' but rejected cherries1 pears1 and grapes1 because they were not fruit in the abstract4 ,we offer them the full quart-pot1 and they cry for the empty quart-capacity4 ,but here ,i think ,i hear some critic retort as follows3 ',if satisfactions are all that is needed to make truth1 how about the notorious fact that errors are so often satisfactory8 ,and how about the equally notorious fact that certain true beliefs may cause the bitterest dissatisfaction8 ,isn't it clear that not the satisfaction which it gives1 but the relation of the belief ,,to ,,the ,,reality is all that makes it true8 ,suppose there were no such reality1 and that the satisfactions yet remained3 would they not then effectively work falsehood8 ,can they consequently be treated distinctively as the truth-builders8 ,it is the ,,inherent ,,relation ,,to ,,reality of a belief that gives us that specific ,,truth-satisfaction1 compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest humbug4 ,the satisfaction of ,,knowing ,,truly is thus the only one which the pragmatist ought to have considered4 ,as a ,,psychological ,,sentiment1 the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him1 but then only as a concomitant of truth1 not as a constituent4 ,what ,,constitutes truth is not the sentiment1 but the purely logical or objective function of rightly cognizing the reality1 and the pragmatist's failure to reduce this function to lower values is patent4' ,such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me a tissue of confusion4 ,to begin with1 when the pragmatist says 'indispensable1' it confounds this with 'sufficient4' ,the pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building1 but ,i have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to4 ,if the reality assumed were cancelled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse1 he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining1 in spite of all their satisfactoriness4 ,for him1 as for his critic1 there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about4 ,ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre4 ,this is why as a pragmatist ,i have so carefully posited 'reality' ,,ab ,,initio1 and why1 throughout my whole discussion1 ,i remain an epistemological realist4 ,footnote3 ,i need hardly remind the reader that both sense-percepts and percepts of ideal relation 7comparisons1 etc47 should be classed among the realities4 ,the bulk of our mental 'stock' consists of truths concerning these terms4 ,the anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further confusion of imagining that1 in undertaking to give him an account of what truth formally means1 we are assuming at the same time to provide a warrant for it1 trying to define the occasions when he can be sure of materially possessing it4 ,our making it hinge on a reality so 'independent' that when it comes1 truth comes1 and when it goes1 truth goes with it1 disappoints this naive expectation1 so he deems our description unsatisfactory4 ,i suspect that under this confusion lies the still deeper one of not discriminating sufficiently between the two notions1 truth and reality4 ,realities are not ,,true1 they ,,are2 and beliefs are true ,,of them4 ,but ,i suspect that in the anti-pragmatist mind the two notions sometimes swap their attributes4 ,the reality itself1 ,i fear1 is treated as if 'true' and conversely4 ,whoso tells us of the one1 it is then supposed1 must also be telling us of the other2 and a true idea must in a manner ,,be1 or at least ,,yield without extraneous aid1 the reality it cognitively is possessed of4 ,to this absolute-idealistic demand pragmatism simply opposes its non possumus4 ,if there is to be truth1 it says1 both realities and beliefs about them must conspire to make it2 but whether there ever is such a thing1 or how anyone can be sure that his own beliefs possess it1 it never pretends to determine4 ,that truth-satisfaction par excellence which may tinge a belief unsatisfactory in other ways1 it easily explains as the feeling of consistency with the stock of previous truths1 or supposed truths1 of which one's whole past experience may have left one in possession4 ,but are not all pragmatists sure that their own belief is right8 their enemies will ask at this point2 and this leads me to the ,,fifth ,,misunderstanding3 ,,what ,,pragmatists ,,say ,,is ,,inconsistent ,,with ,,their ,,saying ,,so4 ,a correspondent puts this objection as follows3 ',when you say to your audience1 pragmatism is the truth concerning truth1 the first truth is different from the second4 ,about the first you and they are not to be at odds2 you are not giving them liberty to take or leave it according as it works satisfactorily or not for their private uses4 ,yet the second truth1 which ought to describe and include the first1 affirms this liberty4 ,thus the ,,intent of your utterance seems to contradict the ,,content of it4' ,general scepticism has always received this same classic refutation4 ',you have to dogmatize1' the rationalists say to the sceptics1' whenever you express the sceptical position2 so your lives keep contradicting your thesis4' ,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 ways1 after all1 of killing off live mental attitudes4 ,general scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude4 ,it is a permanent torpor of the will1 renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers1 and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking4 ,this is why it is so irritating4 ,your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into a formal proposition1--he simply chooses it as a habit4 ,he provokingly hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes1 but he is not illogical or stupid1--on the contrary1 he often impresses us by his intellectual superiority4 ,this is the ,,real scepticism that rationalists have to meet1 and their logic does not even touch it4 ,no more can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior3 his act of utterance1 so far from contradicting1 accurately exemplifies the matter which he utters4 ,what is the matter which he utters8 ,in part1 it is this1 that truth1 concretely considered1 is an attribute of our beliefs1 and that these are attitudes that follow satisfactions4 ,the ideas around which the satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypotheses that challenge or summon a belief to come and take its stand upon them4 ,the pragmatist's idea of truth is just such a challenge4 ,he finds it ultra-satisfactory to accept it1 and takes his own stand accordingly4 ,but1 being gregarious as they are1 men seek to spread their beliefs1 to awaken imitation1 to infect others4 ,why should not ,,you also find the same belief satisfactory8 thinks the pragmatist1 and forthwith endeavors to convert you4 ,you and he will then believe similarly2 you will hold up your subject-end of a truth1 which will be a truth objective and irreversible if the reality holds up the object-end by being itself present simultaneously4 ,what there is of self-contradiction in all this ,i confess ,i cannot discover4 ,the pragmatist's conduct in his own case seems to me on the contrary admirably to illustrate his universal formula2 and of all epistemologists1 he is perhaps the only one who is irreproachably self-consistent4 ,,sixth ,,misunderstanding3 ,,pragmatism ,,explains ,,not ,,what ,,truth ,,is1 ,,but ,,only ,,how ,,it ,,is ,,arrived ,,at4 ,in point of fact it tells us both1 tells us what it is incidentally to telling us how it is arrived at1--for what ,,is arrived at except just what the truth is8 ,if ,i tell you how to get to the railroad station1 don't ,i implicitly introduce you to the ,,what1 to the being and nature of that edifice8 ,it is quite true that the abstract ,,word 'how' hasn't the same meaning as the abstract ,,word 'what1' but in this universe of concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats asunder4 ,the reasons why ,i find it satisfactory to believe that any idea is true1 the ,,how of my arriving at that belief1 may be among the very reasons why the idea ,,is true in reality4 ,if not1 ,i summon the anti-pragmatist to explain the impossibility articulately4 ,his trouble seems to me mainly to arise from his fixed inability to understand how a concrete statement can possibly mean as much1 or be as valuable1 as an abstract one4 ,i said above that the main quarrel between us and our critics was that of concreteness ,,versus abstractness4 ,this is the place to develop that point farther4 ,in the present question1 the links of experience sequent upon an idea1 which mediate between it and a reality1 form and for the pragmatist indeed ,,are1 the ,,concrete relation of truth that may obtain between the idea and that reality4 ,they1 he says1 are all that we mean when we speak of the idea 'pointing' to the reality1 'fitting' it1 'corresponding' with it1 or 'agreeing' with it1--they or other similar mediating trains of verification4 ,such mediating events make the idea 'true4' ,the idea itself1 if it exists at all1 is also a concrete event3 so pragmatism insists that truth in the singular is only a collective name for truths in the plural1 these consisting always of series of definite events2 and that what intellectualism calls the truth1 the inherent truth1 of any one such series is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act1 for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a way that we consider satisfactory4 ,the pragmatist himself has no objection to abstractions4 ,elliptically1 and 'for short1' he relies on them as much as any one1 ending upon innumerable occasions that their comparative emptiness makes of them useful substitutes for the overfulness of the facts he meets1 with4 ,but he never ascribes to them a higher grade of reality4 ,the full reality of a truth for him is always some process of verification1 in which the abstract property of connecting ideas with objects truly is workingly embodied4 ,meanwhile it is endlessly serviceable to be able to talk of properties abstractly and apart from their working1 to find them the same in innumerable cases1 to take them 'out of time1' and to treat of their relations to other similar abstractions4 ,we thus form whole universes of platonic ideas ante rem1 universes in posse1 tho none of them exists effectively except in rebus4 ,countless relations obtain there which nobody experiences as obtaining1--as1 in the eternal universe of musical relations1 for example1 the notes of ,aennchen von ,tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them4 ,even so the music of the future sleeps now1 to be awakened hereafter4 ,or1 if we take the world of geometrical relations1 the thousandth decimal of 'pi' sleeps there1 tho no one may ever try to compute it4 ,or1 if we take the universe of 'fitting1' countless coats 'fit' backs1 and countless boots 'fit' feet1 on which they are not practically ,,fitted2 countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually4 ,in the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities1 and countless truths are valid1 tho no thinker ever thinks them4 ,for the anti-pragmatist these prior timeless relations are the presupposition of the concrete ones1 and possess the profounder dignity and value4 ,the actual workings of our ideas in verification-processes are as naught in comparison with the 'obtainings' of this discarnate truth within them4 ,for the pragmatist1 on the contrary1--all discarnate truth is static1 impotent1 and relatively spectral1 full truth being the truth that energizes and does battle4 ,can any one suppose that the sleeping quality of truth would ever have been abstracted or have received a name1 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 verification8 ,surely no more than the abstract property of 'fitting' would have received a name1 if in our world there had been no backs or feet or gaps in walls to be actually fitted4 ,,existential truth is incidental to the actual competition of opinions4 ,,essential truth1 the truth of the intellectualists1 the truth with no one thinking it1 is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on1 like the music that no ear has listened to4 ,it is less real1 not more real1 than the verified article2 and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship4 ,as well might a pencil insist that the outline is the essential thing in all pictorial representation1 and chide the paint-brush and the camera for omitting it1 forgetting that ,,their pictures not only contain the whole outline1 but a hundred other things in addition4 ,pragmatist truth contains the whole of intellectualist truth and a hundred other things in addition4 ,intellectualist truth is then only pragmatist truth in posse4 ,that on innumerable occasions men do substitute truth in posse or verifiability1 for verification or truth in act1 is a fact to which no one attributes more importance than the pragmatist3 he emphasizes the practical utility of such a habit4 ,but he does not on that account consider truth in posse1--truth not alive enough ever to have been asserted or questioned or contradicted1 to be the metaphysically prior thing1 to which truths in act are tributary and subsidiary4 ,when intellectualists do this1 pragmatism charges them with inverting the real relation4 ,truth in posse ,,means only truths in act2 and he insists that these latter take precedence in the order of logic as well as in that of being4 ,,seventh ,,minunderstanding3 ,,pragmatism ,,ignores ,,the ,,theoretical ,,interest4 ,this would seem to be an absolutely wanton slander1 were not a certain excuse to be found in the linguistic affinities of the word 'pragmatism1' and in certain offhand habits of speech of ours which assumed too great a generosity on our reader's part4 ,when we spoke of the meaning of ideas consisting in their 'practical' consequences1 or of the 'practical' differences which our beliefs make to us2 when we said that the truth of a belief consists in its 'working' value1 etc42 our language evidently was too careless1 for by 'practical' we were almost unanimously held to mean ,,opposed to theoretical or genuinely cognitive1 and the consequence was punctually drawn that a truth in our eyes could have no relation to any independent reality1 or to any other truth1 or to anything whatever but the acts which we might ground on it or the satisfactions they might bring4 ,the mere existence of the idea1 all by itself1 if only its results were satisfactory1 would give full truth to it1 it was charged1 in our absurd pragmatist epistemology4 ,the solemn attribution of this rubbish to us was also encouraged by two other circumstances4 ,first1 ideas ,,are practically useful in the narrow sense1 false ideas sometimes1 but most often ideas which we can verify by the sum total of all their leadings1 and the reality of whose objects may thus be considered established beyond doubt4 ,that these ideas should be true in advance of and apart from their utility1 that1 in other words1 their objects should be really there1 is the very condition of their having that kind of utility1--the objects they connect us with are so important that the ideas which serve as the objects' substitutes grow important also4 ,this manner of their practical working was the first thing that made truths good in the eyes of primitive men2 and buried among all the other good workings by which true beliefs are characterized1 this kind of subsequential utility remains4 ,the second misleading circumstance was the emphasis laid by ,schiller and ,dewey on the fact that1 unless a truth be relevant to the mind's momentary predicament1 unless it be germane to the 'practical' situation1--meaning by this the quite particular perplexity1--it is no good to urge it4 ,it doesn't meet our interests any better than a falsehood would under the same circumstances4 ,but why our predicaments and perplexities might not be theoretical here as well as narrowly practical1 ,i wish that our critics would explain4 ,they simply assume that no pragmatist ,,can admit a genuinely theoretic interest4 ,having used the phrase 'cash-value' of an idea1 ,i am implored by one correspondent to alter it1 'for every one thinks you mean only pecuniary profit and loss4' ,having said that the true is 'the expedient in our thinking1' ,i am rebuked in this wise by another learned correspondent3 ',the word expedient has no other meaning than that of self-interest4 ,the pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries4 ,a philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound4' ,but the word 'practical' is so habitually loosely used that more indulgence might have been expected4 ,when one says that a sick man has now practically recovered1 or that an enterprise has practically failed1 one usually means ,i just the opposite of practically in the literal sense4 ,one means that1 altho untrue in strict practice1 what one says is true in theory1 true virtually1 certain to be true4 ,again1 by the practical one often means the distinctively concrete1 the individual1 particular1 and effective1 as opposed to the abstract1 general1 and inert4 ,to speak for myself1 whenever ,i have emphasized the practical nature of truth1 this is mainly what has been in my mind4 ',pragmata' are things in their plurality2 and in that early ,california address1 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 experience1 whether passive or active1 expressly added these qualifying words3 the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular than in the fact that it must be active1--by 'active' meaning here 'practical' in the narrow literal sense4 ,footnote3 ,the ambiguity of the word 'practical' comes out well in these words of a recent would-be reporter of our views3 ',pragmatism is an ,anglo-,saxon reaction against the intellectualism and rationalism of the ,latin mind4444 ,man1 each individual man is the measure of things4 ,he is able to conceive one but relative truths1 that is to say1 illusions4 ,what these illusions are worth is revealed to him1 not by general theory1 but by individual practice4 ,pragmatism1 which consists in experiencing these illusions of the mind and obeying them by acting them out1 is a ,,philosophy ,,without ,,words1 a philosophy of ,,gestures ,,and ,,of ,,acts1 which abandons what is general and olds only to what is particular4' 7,bourdeau1 in ,journal des4 debats1 ,october #hi1 #aijg47 ,but particular consequences can perfectly well be of a theoretic nature4 ,every remote fact which we infer from an idea is a particular theoretic consequence which our mind practically works towards4 ,the loss of every old opinion of ours which we see that we shall have to give up if a new opinion be true1 is a particular theoretic as well as a particular practical consequence4 ,after man's interest in breathing freely1 the greatest of all his interests 7because it never fluctuates or remits1 as most of his physical interests do71 is his interest in consistency1 in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions4 ,we tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose4 ,is the present candidate for belief perhaps contradicted by principle number one8 ,is it compatible with fact number two8 and so forth4 ,the particular operations here are the purely logical ones of analysis1 deduction1 comparison1 etc42 and altho general terms may be used ad libitum1 the satisfactory practical working of the candidate--idea consists in the consciousness yielded by each successive theoretic consequence in particular4 ,it is therefore simply idiotic to repeat that pragmatism takes no account of purely theoretic interests4 ,all it insists on is that verity in act means ,,verifications1 and that these are always particulars4 ,even in exclusively theoretic matters1 it insists that vagueness and generality serve to verify nothing4 ,,eighth ,,misunderstanding3 ,,pragmatism ,,is ,,shut ,,up ,,to ,,solipsism4 ,i have already said something about this misconception under the third and fourth heads1 above1 but a little more may be helpful4 ,the objection is apt to clothe itself in words like these3 ',you make truth to consist in every value except the cognitive value proper2 you always leave your knower at many removes 7or1 at the uttermost1 at one remove7 from his real object2 the best you do is to let his ideas carry him towards it2 it remains forever outside of him1' etc4 ,i think that the leaven working here is the rooted intellectualist persuasion that1 to know a reality1 an idea must in some inscrutable fashion possess or be it4 ,footnote3 ,sensations may1 indeed1 possess their objects or coalesce with them1 as common sense supposes that they do2 and intuited differences between concepts may coalesce with the 'eternal' objective differences2 but to simplify our discussion4 here we can afford to abstract from these very special cases of knowing4 ,for pragmatism this kind of coalescence is inessential4 ,as a rule our cognitions are only processes of mind off their balance and in motion towards real termini2 and the reality of the termini1 believed in by the states of mind in question1 can be guaranteed only by some wider knower ,footnote3 ,the transcendental idealist thinks that1 in some inexplicable way1 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 knowing1 as he apprehends it4 ,pragmatists can leave the question of identity open2 but they cannot do without the wider knower any more than they can do without the reality1 if they want to prove a case of knowing4 ,they themselves play the part of the absolute knower for the universe of discourse which serves them as material for epistemologizing4 ,they warrant the reality there1 and the subject's true knowledge1 there1 of it4 ,but whether what they themselves say about that whole universe is objectively true1 i4e41 whether the pragmatic theory of truth is true really1 they cannot warrant1--they can only believe it ,to their hearers they can only propose it1 as ,i propose it to my readers1 as something to be verified ambulando1 or by the way is which its consequences may confirm it4 ,but if there is no reason extant in the universe why they should be doubted1 the beliefs are true in the only sense in which anything can be true anyhow3 they are practically and concretely true1 namely4 ,true in the mystical mongrel sense of an ,identitatsphilosophie they need not be2 nor is there any intelligible reason why they ever need be true otherwise than verifiably and practically4 ,it is reality's part to possess its own existence2 it is thought's part to get into 'touch' with it by innumerable paths of verification4 ,i fear that the 'humanistic' developments of pragmatism may cause a certain difficulty here4 ,we get at one truth only through the rest of truth2 and the reality1 everlastingly postulated as that which all our truth must keep in touch with1 may never be given to us save in the form of truth other than that which we are now testing4 ,but since ,dr4 ,schiller has shown that all our truths1 even the most elemental1 are affected by race-inheritance with a human coefficient1 reality per se thus may appear only as a sort of limit2 it may be held to shrivel to the mere ,,place for an object1 and what is known may be held to be only matter of our psyche that we fill the place with4 ,it must be confessed that pragmatism1 worked in this humanistic way1 is ,,compatible with solipsism4 ,it joins friendly hands with the agnostic part of kantism1 with contemporary agnosticism1 and with idealism generally4 ,but worked thus1 it is a metaphysical theory about the matter of reality1 and flies far beyond pragmatism's own modest analysis of the nature of the knowing function1 which analysis may just as harmoniously be combined with less humanistic accounts of reality4 ,one of pragmatism's merits is that it is so purely epistemological4 ,it must assume realities2 but it prejudges nothing as to their constitution1 and the most diverse metaphysics can use it as their foundation4 ,it certainly has no special affinity with solipsism4 ,as ,i look back over what ,i have written1 much of it gives me a queer impression1 as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that readers might well laugh at my pomposity4 ,it may be1 however1 that concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious4 ,the whole originality of pragmatism1 the whole point in it1 is its use of the concrete way of seeing4 ,it begins with concreteness1 and returns and ends with it4 ,dr4 ,schiller1 with his two 'practical' aspects of truth1 7#a7 relevancy to situation1 and 7#b7 subsequential utility1 is only filling the cup of concreteness to the brim for us4 ,once seize that cup1 and you cannot misunderstand pragmatism4 ,it seems as if the power of imagining the world concretely ,,might have been common enough to let our readers apprehend us better1 as if they might have read between our lines1 and1 in spite of all our infelicities of expression1 guessed a little more correctly what our thought was4 ,but alas6 this was not on fate's programme1 so we can only think1 with the ,german ditty3-- ,es waer' zu schoen gewesen1 ,es hat nicht sollen sein4 ,,ix ,,the ,,meaning ,,of ,,the ,,word ,,truth ,footnote3 ,remarks at the meeting of the ,american ,philosophical ,association1 ,cornell ,university1 ,december1 #aijg4 ,my account of truth is realistic1 and follows the epistemological dualism of common sense4 ,suppose ,i say to you ',the thing exists'--is that true or not8 ,how can you tell8 ,not till my statement has developed its meaning farther is it determined as being true1 false1 or irrelevant to reality altogether4 ,but if now you ask 'what thing8' and ,i reply 'a desk'2 if you ask 'where8' and ,i point to a place2 if you ask 'does it exist materially1 or only in imagination8' and ,i say 'materially'2 if moreover ,i say ',i mean that desk' and then grasp and shake a desk which you see just as ,i have described it1 you are willing to call my statement true4 ,but you and ,i are commutable here2 we can exchange places2 and1 as you go bail for my desk1 so ,i can go bail for yours4 ,this notion of a reality independent of either of us1 taken from ordinary social experience1 lies at the base of the pragmatist definition of truth4 ,with some such reality any statement1 in order to be counted true1 must agree4 ,pragmatism defines 'agreeing' to mean certain ways of 'working1' be they actual or potential4 ,thus1 for my statement 'the desk exists' to be true of a desk recognized as real by you1 it must be able to lead me to shake your desk1 to explain myself by words that suggest that desk to your mind1 to make a drawing that is like the desk you see1 etc4 ,only in such ways as this is there sense in saying it agrees with ,,that reality1 only thus does it gain for me the satisfaction of hearing you corroborate me4 ,reference then to something determinate1 and some sort of adaptation to it worthy of the name of agreement1 are thus constituent elements in the definition of any statement of mine as 'true'4 ,you cannot get at either the reference or the adaptation without using the notion of the workings4 ,,that the thing is1 ,,what it is1 and ,,which it is 7of all the possible things with that what7 are points determinable only by the pragmatic method4 ,the 'which' means a possibility of pointing1 or of otherwise singling out the special object2 the 'what' means choice on our part of an essential aspect to conceive it by 7and this is always relative to what ,dewey calls our own 'situation'72 and the 'that' means our assumption of the attitude of belief1 the reality-recognizing attitude4 ,surely for understanding what the word 'true' means as applied to a statement1 the mention of such workings is indispensable4 ,surely if we leave them out the subject and the object of the cognitive relation float-in the same universe1 'tis true--but vaguely and ignorantly and without mutual contact or mediation4 ,our critics nevertheless call the workings inessential4 ,no functional possibilities 'make' our beliefs true1 they say2 they are true inherently1 true positively1 born 'true' as the ,count of ,chambord was born ',henri-,cinq4' ,pragmatism insists1 on the contrary1 that statements and beliefs are thus inertly and statically true only by courtesy3 they practically pass for true2 but you ,,cannot ,,define ,,what ,,you ,,mean by calling them true without referring to their functional possibilities4 ,these give its whole ,,logical ,,content to that relation to reality on a belief's part to which the name 'truth' is applied1 a relation which otherwise remains one of mere coexistence or bare withness4 ,the foregoing statements reproduce the essential content of the lecture on ,truth in my book ,,pragmatism4 ,schiller's doctrine of 'humanism1' ,dewey's ',studies in logical theory1' and my own 'radical empiricism1' all involve this general notion of truth as 'working1' either actual or conceivable4 ,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 constitution4 ,x ,,the ,,existence ,,of ,,julius ,,caesar ,footnote3 ,originally printed under the title of ',truth versus ,truthfulness1' in the ,journal of ,philosophy4 ,my account of truth is purely logical and relates to its definition only4 ,i contend that you cannot tell what the ,,word 'true' ,,means1 as applied to a statement1 without invoking the ,,concept ,,of ,,the ,,statements ,,workings4 ,assume1 to fix our ideas1 a universe composed of two things only3 imperial ,caesar dead and turned to clay1 and me1 saying ',caesar really existed4' ,most persons would naively deem truth to be thereby uttered1 and say that by a sort of actio in distans my statement had taken direct hold of the other fact4 ,but have my words so certainly denoted ,,that ,caesar8--or so certainly connoted ,,his individual attributes8 ,to fill out the complete measure of what the epithet 'true' may ideally mean1 my thought ought to bear a fully determinate and unambiguous 'one-to-one-relation' to its own particular object4 ,in the ultrasimple universe imagined the reference is uncertified4 ,were there two ,caesars we shouldn't know which was meant4 ,the conditions of truth thus seem incomplete in this universe of discourse so that it must be enlarged4 ,transcendentalists enlarge it by invoking an absolute mind which1 as it owns all the facts1 can sovereignly correlate them4 ,if it intends that my statement ,,shall refer to that identical ,caesar1 and that the attributes ,i have in mind ,,shall mean his attributes1 that intention suffices to make the statement true4 ,i1 in turn1 enlarge the universe by admitting finite intermediaries between the two original facts4 ,caesar ,,had1 and my statement ,,has1 effects2 and if these effects in any way run together1 a concrete medium and bottom is provided for the determinate cognitive relation1 which1 as a pure ,,actio ,,in ,,distans1 seemed to float too vaguely and unintelligibly4 ,the real ,caesar1 for example1 wrote a manuscript of which ,i see a real reprint1 and say 'the ,caesar ,i mean is the author of ,,that4' ,the workings of my thought thus determine both its denotative and its connotative significance more fully4 ,it now defines itself as neither irrelevant to the real ,caesar1 nor false in what it suggests of him4 ,the absolute mind1 seeing me thus working towards ,caesar through the cosmic intermediaries1 might well say3 ',such workings only specify in detail what ,i meant myself by the statement being true4 ,i decree the cognitive relation between the two original facts to mean that just that kind of concrete chain of intermediaries exists or can exist4' ,but the chain involves facts prior to the statement the logical conditions of whose truth we are defining1 and facts subsequent to it2 and this circumstance1 coupled with the vulgar employment of the terms truth and fact as synonyms1 has laid my account open to misapprehension4 ',how1' it is confusedly asked1 'can ,caesar's existence1 a truth already #bjjj years old1 depend for its truth on anything about to happen now8 ,how can my acknowledgment of it be made true by the acknowledgment's own effects8 ,the effects may indeed confirm my belief1 but the belief was made true already by the fact that ,caesar really did exist4' ,well1 be it so1 for if there were no ,caesar1 there could1 of course1 be no positive truth about him--but then distinguish between 'true' as being positively and completely so established1 and 'true' as being so only 'practically1' elliptically1 and by courtesy1 in the sense of not being positively irrelevant or ,u,ntrue4 ,remember also that ,caesar's having existed in fact may make a present statement false or irrelevant as well as it may make it true1 and that in neither case does it itself have to alter4 ,it being given1 whether truth1 untruth1 or irrelevancy shall be also given depends on something coming from the statement itself4 ,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 account4 ,truth meaning agreement with reality1 the mode of the agreeing is a practical problem which the subjective term of the relation alone can solve4 ,,note4 ,this paper was originally followed by a couple of paragraphs meant to conciliate the intellectualist opposition4 ,since you love the word 'true' so1 and since you despise so the concrete working of our ideas1 ,i said1 keep the word 'truth' for the saltatory and incomprehensible relation you care so much for1 and ,i will say of thoughts that know their objects in an intelligible sense that they are 'truthful4' ,like most offerings1 this one has been spurned1 so ,i revoke it1 repenting of my generosity4 ,professor ,pratt1 in his recent book1 calls any objective state of ,,facts 'a truth1' and uses the word 'trueness' in the sense of 'truth' as proposed by me4 ,mr4 ,hawtrey 7see below1 page #bha7 uses 'correctness' in the same sense4 ,apart from the general evil of ambiguous vocabularies1 we may really forsake all hope1 if the term 'truth' is officially to lose its status as a property of our beliefs and opinions1 and become recognized as a technical synonym for 'fact4' ,,xi ,,the ,,absolute ,,and ,,the ,,strenuous ,,life ,footnote3 ,reprinted from the ,journal of ,philosophy1 etc41 #aijf4 ,professor ,w4 ,a4 ,brown1 in the ,journal for ,august #ae1 approves my pragmatism for allowing that a belief in the absolute may give holidays to the spirit1 but takes me to task for the narrowness of this concession1 and shows by striking examples how great a power the same belief may have in letting loose the strenuous life4 ,i have no criticism whatever to make upon his excellent article1 but let me explain why 'moral holidays' were the only gift of the absolute which ,i picked out for emphasis4 ,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 complete4 ,the former1 or 'pluralistic' belief1 was the one that my pragmatism favored4 ,both beliefs confirm our strenuous moods4 ,pluralism actually demands them1 since it makes the world's salvation depend upon the energizing of its several parts1 among which we are4 ,monism permits them1 for however furious they may be1 we can always justify ourselves in advance for indulging them by the thought that they ,,will ,,have ,,been expressions of the absolute's perfect life4 ,by escaping from your finite perceptions to the conception of the eternal whole1 you can hallow any tendency whatever4 ,tho the absolute ,,dictates nothing1 it will ,,sanction anything and everything after the fact1 for whatever is once there will have to be regarded as an integral member of the universe's perfection4 ,quietism and frenzy thus alike receive the absolute's permit to exist4 ,those of us who are naturally inert may abide in our resigned passivity2 those whose energy is excessive may grow more reckless still4 ,history shows how easily both quietists and fanatics have drawn inspiration from the absolutistic scheme4 ,it suits sick souls and strenuous ones equally well4 ,one cannot say thus of pluralism4 ,its world is always vulnerable1 for some part may go astray2 and having no 'eternal' edition of it to draw comfort from1 its partisans must always feel to some degree insecure4 ,if1 as pluralists1 we grant ourselves moral holidays1 they can only be provisional breathing-spells1 intended to refresh us for the morrow's fight4 ,this forms one permanent inferiority of pluralism from the pragmatic point of view4 ,it has no saving message for incurably sick souls4 ,absolutism1 among its other messages1 has that message1 and is the only scheme that has it necessarily4 ,that constitutes its chief superiority and is the source of its religious power4 ,that is why1 desiring to do it full justice1 ,i valued its aptitude for moral-holiday giving so highly4 ,its claims in that way are unique1 whereas its affinities with strenuousness are less emphatic than those of the pluralistic scheme4 ,in the last lecture of my book ,i candidly admitted this inferiority of pluralism4 ,it lacks the wide indifference that absolutism shows4 ,it is bound to disappoint many sick souls whom absolutism can console4 ,it seems therefore poor tactics for absolutists to make little of this advantage4 ,the needs of sick souls are surely the most urgent2 and believers in the absolute should rather hold it to be great merit in their philosophy that it can meet them so well4 ,the pragmatism or pluralism which ,i defend has to fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood1 a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees4 ,to minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties1 quietistic religion1 sure of salvation ,,any ,,how1 has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on1 even in the church4 ,which side is right here1 who can say8 ,within religion1 emotion is apt to be tyrannical2 but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths in sight4 ,i conceive this to be the more strenuous type of emotion2 but ,i have to admit that its inability to let loose quietistic raptures is a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy which ,i profess4 ,,xii ,,professor ,,hebert ,,on ,,pragmatism ,footnote3 ,reprint from the ,journal of ,philosophy for ,december #c1 #aijh 7vol4 v1 p4 #fhi71 of a review of ,le ,pragmatisme et ses ,diverses ,formes ,anglo-,americaines1 by ,marcel ,hebert4 7,paris3 ,librairie critique ,emile ,nourry4 #aijh4 ,pp4 #aje47 ,professor ,marcel ,hebert is a singularly erudite and liberal thinker 7a seceder1 ,i believe1 from the ,catholic priesthood7 and an uncommonly direct and clear writer4 ,his book ,le ,divin is one of the ablest reviews of the general subject of religious philosophy which recent years have produced2 and in the small volume the title of which is copied above he has1 perhaps1 taken more pains not to do injustice to pragmatism than any of its numerous critics4 ,yet the usual fatal misapprehension of its purposes vitiates his exposition and his critique4 ,his pamphlet seems to me to form a worthy hook1 as it were1 on which to hang one more attempt to tell the reader what the pragmatist account of truth really means4 ,m4 ,hebert takes it to mean what most people take it to mean1 the doctrine1 namely1 that whatever proves subjectively expedient in the way of our thinking is 'true' in the absolute and unrestricted sense of the word1 whether it corresponds to any objective state of things outside of our thought or not4 ,assuming this to be the pragmatist thesis1 ,m4 ,hebert opposes it at length4 ,thought that proves itself to be thus expedient may1 indeed1 have every ,,other kind of value for the thinker1 he says1 but cognitive value1 representative value1 ,,valeur ,,de ,,connaissance ,,proprement ,,dite1 it has not2 and when it does have a high degree of general utility value1 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 lives4 ,only by thus representing things truly do we reap the useful fruits4 ,but the fruits follow on the truth1 they do not constitute it2 so ,m4 ,hebert accuses pragmatism of telling us everything about truth except what it essentially is4 ,he admits1 indeed1 that the world is so framed that when men have true ideas of realities1 consequential utilities ensue in abundance2 and no one of our critics1 ,i think1 has shown as concrete a sense of the variety of these utilities as he has2 but he reiterates that1 whereas such utilities are secondary1 we insist on treating them as primary1 and that the connaissance objective from which they draw all their being is something which we neglect1 exclude1 and destroy4 ,the utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize1 he says--and in the main he allows that they do harmonize--but they are not logically identical for that4 ,he admits that subjective interests1 desires1 impulses may even have the active 'primacy' in our intellectual life4 ,cognition awakens only at their spur1 and follows their cues and aims2 yet1 when it ,,is awakened1 it is objective cognition proper and not merely another name for the impulsive tendencies themselves in the state of satisfaction4 ,the owner of a picture ascribed to ,corot gets uneasy when its authenticity is doubted4 ,he looks up its origin and is reassured4 ,but his uneasiness does not make the proposition false1 any more than his relief makes the proposition true1 that the actual ,corot was the painter4 ,pragmatism1 which1 according to ,m4 ,hebert1 claims that our sentiments ,,make truth and falsehood1 would oblige us to conclude that our minds exert no genuinely cognitive function whatever4 ,this subjectivist interpretation of our position seems to follow from my having happened to write 7without supposing it necessary to explain that ,i was treating of cognition solely on its subjective side7 that in the long run the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking1 much as the good is the expedient in the way of our behavior6 ,having previously written that truth means 'agreement with reality1' and insisted that the chief part of the expediency of any one opinion is its agreement with the rest of acknowledged truth1 ,i apprehended no exclusively subjectivistic reading of my meaning4 ,my mind was so filled with the notion of objective reference that ,i never dreamed that my hearers would let go of it2 and the very last accusation ,i expected was that in speaking of ideas and their satisfactions1 ,i was denying realities outside4 ,my only wonder now is that critics should have found so silly a personage as ,i must have seemed in their eyes1 worthy of explicit refutation4 ,the object1 for me1 is just as much one part of reality as the idea is another part4 ,the truth of the idea is one relation of it to the reality1 just as its date and its place are other relations4 ,all three relations ,,consist of intervening parts of the universe which can in every particular case be assigned and catalogued1 and which differ in every instance of truth1 just as they differ with every date and place4 ,the pragmatist thesis1 as ,dr4 ,schiller and ,i hold it1--,i prefer to let ,professor ,dewey speak for himself1--is that the relation called 'truth' is thus concretely ,,definable4 ,ours is the only articulate attempt in the field to say positively what truth actually ,,consists ,,of4 ,our denouncers have literally nothing to oppose to it as an alternative4 ,for them1 when an idea is true1 it ,,is true1 and there the matter terminates2 the word 'true' being indefinable4 ,the relation of the true idea to its object1 being1 as they think1 unique1 it can be expressed in terms of nothing else1 and needs only to be named for any one to recognize and understand it4 ,moreover it is invariable and universal1 the same in every single instance of truth1 however diverse the ideas1 the realities1 and the other relations between them may be4 ,our pragmatist view1 on the contrary1 is that the truth-relation is a definitely experienceable relation1 and therefore describable as well as namable2 that it is not unique in kind1 and neither invariable nor universal4 ,the relation to its object that makes an idea true in any given instance1 is1 we say1 embodied in intermediate details of reality which lead towards the object1 which vary in every instance1 and which in every instance can be concretely traced4 ,the chain of workings which an opinion sets up ,,is the opinion's truth1 falsehood1 or irrelevancy1 as the case may be4 ,every idea that a man has works some consequences in him1 in the shape either of bodily actions or of other ideas4 ,through these consequences the man's relations to surrounding realities are modified4 ,he is carried nearer to some of them and farther from others1 and gets now the feeling that the idea has worked satisfactorily1 now that it has not4 ,the idea has put him into touch with something that fulfils its intent1 or it has not4 ,this something is the ,,man',s ,,object1 primarily4 ,since the only realities we can talk about are such ,,objects-,,believed-,,in1 the pragmatist1 whenever he says 'reality1' means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality1 what he believes at the moment to be such4 ,sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence4 ,the idea1 for example1 may be that a certain door opens into a room where a glass of beer may be bought4 ,if opening the door leads to the actual sight and taste of the beer1 the man calls the idea true4 ,or his idea may be that of an abstract relation1 say of that between the sides and the hypothenuse of a triangle1 such a relation being1 of course1 a reality quite as much as a glass of beer is4 ,if the thought of such a relation leads him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare the figures they make1 he may at last1 perceiving one equality after another1 ,,see the relation thought of1 by a vision quite as particular and direct as was the taste of the beer4 ,if he does so1 he calls ,,that idea1 also1 true4 ,his idea has1 in each case1 brought him into closer touch with a reality felt at the moment to verify just that idea4 ,each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively2 and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences1 mental or physical1 which the idea was able to set up4 ,these 'workings' differ in every single instance1 they never transcend experience1 they consist of particulars1 mental or sensible1 and they admit of concrete description in every individual case4 ,pragmatists are unable to see what you can possibly ,,mean by calling an idea true1 unless you mean that between it as a terminus a quo in some one's mind and some particular reality as a terminus ad quem1 such concrete workings do or may intervene4 ,their direction constitutes the idea's reference to that reality1 their satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto1 and the two things together constitute the 'truth' of the idea for its possessor4 ,without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up4 ,the anti-pragmatist view is that the workings are but evidences of the truth's previous inherent presence in the idea1 and that you can wipe the very possibility of them out of existence and still leave the truth of the idea as solid as ever4 ,but surely this is not a counter-theory of truth to ours4 ,it is the renunciation of all articulate theory4 ,it is but a claim to the right to call certain ideas true anyhow2 and this is what ,i meant above by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us no real alternative1 and that our account is literally the only positive theory extant4 ,what meaning1 indeed1 can an idea's truth have save its power of adapting us either mentally or physically to a reality8 ,how comes it1 then1 that our critics so uniformly accuse us of subjectivism1 of denying the reality's existence8 ,it comes1 ,i think1 from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our analysis4 ,however independent and elective realities may be1 we can talk about them1 in framing our accounts of truth1 only as so many objects believed-in4 ,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 in1 that the notion of an ,,absolute reality inevitably arises as a grenzbegriff1 equivalent to that of an object that shall never be superseded1 and belief in which shall be endgueltig4 ,cognitively we thus live under a sort of rule of three3 as our private concepts represent the sense-objects to which they lead us1 these being public realities independent of the individual1 so these sense-realities may1 in turn1 represent realities of a hypersensible order1 electrons1 mind-stuff4 ,god1 or what not1 existing independently of all human thinkers4 ,the notion of such final realities1 knowledge of which would be absolute truth1 is an outgrowth of our cognitive experience from which neither pragmatists nor anti-pragmatists escape4 ,they form an inevitable regulative postulate in every one's thinking4 ,our notion of them is the most abundantly suggested and satisfied of all our beliefs1 the last to suffer doubt4 ,the difference is that our critics use this belief as their sole paradigm1 and treat any one who talks of human realities as if he thought the notion of reality 'in itself' illegitimate4 ,meanwhile1 reality-in-itself1 so far as by them ,,talked ,,of1 is only a human object2 they postulate it just as we postulate it2 and if we are subjectivists they are so no less4 ,realities in themselves can be there ,,for any one1 whether pragmatist or anti-pragmatist1 only by being believed2 they are believed only by their notions appearing true2 and their notions appear true only because they work satisfactorily4 ,satisfactorily1 moreover1 for the particular thinker's purpose4 ,there is no idea which is ,,the true idea1 of anything4 ,whose is ,,the true idea of the absolute8 ,or to take ,m4 ,hebert's example1 what is ,,the true idea of a picture which you possess8 ,it is the idea that most satisfactorily meets your present interest4 ,the interest may be in the picture's place1 its age1 its 'tone1' its subject1 its dimensions1 its authorship1 its price1 its merit1 or what not4 ,if its authorship by ,corot have been doubted1 what will satisfy the interest aroused in you at that moment will be to have your claim to own a ,corot confirmed2 but1 if you have a normal human mind1 merely calling it a ,corot will not satisfy other demands of your mind at the same time4 ,for ,,them to be satisfied1 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 part4 ,m4 ,hebert accuses us of holding that the proprietary satisfactions of themselves suffice to make the belief true1 and that1 so far as we are concerned1 no actual ,corot need ever have existed4 ,why we should be thus cut off from the more general and intellectual satisfactions1 ,i know not2 but whatever the satisfactions may be1 intellectual or proprietary1 they belong to the subjective side of the truth-relation4 ,they found our beliefs2 our beliefs are in realities2 if no realities are there1 the beliefs are false but if realities are there1 how they can even be ,,known without first being ,,believed2 or how ,,believed except by our first having ideas of them that work satisfactorily1 pragmatists find it impossible to imagine4 ,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 verifications4 ,m4 ,hebert will probably agree to this1 when put in this way1 so ,i do not see our inferiority to him in the matter of connaissance proprement dite4 ,some readers will say that1 altho ,i may possibly believe in realities beyond our ideas ,dr4 ,schiller1 at any rate1 does not4 ,this is a great misunderstanding1 for ,schiller's doctrine and mine are identical1 only our exposition follow different directions4 ,he starts from the subjective pole of the chain1 the individual with his beliefs1 as the more concrete and immediately given phenomenon4 ',an individual claims his belief to be true1' ,schiller says1 'but what does he mean by true8 and how does he establish the claim8' ,with these questions we embark on a psychological inquiry4 ,to be true1 it appears1 means1 ,,for ,,that ,,individual1 to work satisfactorily for him2 and the working and the satisfaction1 since they vary from case to case1 admit of no universal description4 ,what works is true and represents a reality1 for the individual for whom it works4 ,if he is infallible1 the reality is 'really' there2 if mistaken it is not there1 or not there as he thinks it4 ,we all believe1 when our ideas work satisfactorily2 but we don't yet know who of us is infallible2 so that the problem of truth and that of error are ,,ebenburtig and arise out of the same situations4 ,schiller1 remaining with the fallible individual1 and treating only of reality-for-him1 seems to many of his readers to ignore reality-in-itself altogether4 ,but that is because he seeks only to tell us how truths are attained1 not what the content of those truths1 when attained1 shall be4 ,it may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in transsubjective realities4 ,it certainly ,,seems the truest for no rival belief is as voluminously satisfactory1 and it is probably ,dr4 ,schiller's own belief2 but he is not required1 for his immediate purpose1 to profess it4 ,still less is he obliged to assume it in advance as the basis of his discussion4 ,i1 however1 warned by the ways of critics1 adopt different tactics4 ,i start from the object-pole of the idea-reality chain and follow it in the opposite direction from ,schiller's4 ,anticipating the results of the general truth-processes of mankind1 ,i begin with the abstract notion of an objective reality4 ,i postulate it1 and ask on my own account1 ,i ,,vouching ,,for ,,this ,,reality1 what would make any one else's idea of it true for me as well as for him4 ,but ,i find no different answer from that which ,schiller gives4 ,if the other man's idea leads him1 not only to believe that the reality is there1 but to use it as the reality's temporary substitute1 by letting it evoke adaptive thoughts and acts similar to those which the reality itself would provoke1 then it is true in the only intelligible sense1 true through its particular consequences1 and true for me as well as for the man4 ,my account is more of a logical definition2 ,schiller's is more of a psychological description4 ,both treat an absolutely identical matter of experience1 only they traverse it in opposite ways4 ,possibly these explanations may satisfy ,m4 ,hebert1 whose little book1 apart from the false accusation of subjectivism1 gives a fairly instructive account of the pragmatist epistemology4 ,,xiii ,,abstractionism ,,and ',,relativismus' ,abstract concepts1 such as elasticity1 voluminousness1 disconnectedness1 are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which we find it useful to single out4 ,useful1 because we are then reminded of other things that offer those same aspects2 and1 if the aspects carry consequences in those other things1 we can return to our first things1 expecting those same consequences to accrue4 ,to be helped to anticipate consequences is always a gain1 and such being the help that abstract concepts give us1 it is obvious that their use is fulfilled only when we get back again into concrete particulars by their means1 bearing the consequences in our minds1 and enriching our notion of the original objects therewithal4 ,without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars by1 we are like men hopping on one foot4 ,using concepts along with the particulars1 we become bipedal4 ,we throw our concept forward1 get a foothold on the consequence1 hitch our line to this1 and draw our percept up1 travelling thus with a hop1 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 heads4 ,animals have to do this1 but men raise their heads higher and breathe freely in the upper conceptual air4 ,the enormous esteem professed by all philosophers for the conceptual form of consciousness is easy to understand4 ,from ,plato's time downwards it has been held to be our sole avenue to essential truth4 ,concepts are universal1 changeless1 pure2 their relations are eternal2 they are spiritual1 while the concrete particulars which they enable us to handle are corrupted by the flesh4 ,they are precious in themselves1 then1 apart from their original use1 and confer new dignity upon our life4 ,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 lost4 ,that function is of course to enlarge mentally our momentary experiences by ,,adding to them the consequences conceived2 but unfortunately1 that function is not only too often forgotten by philosophers in their reasonings1 but is often converted into its exact opposite1 and made a means of diminishing the original experience by ,,denying 7implicitly or explicitly7 all its features save the one specially abstracted to conceive it by4 ,this itself is a highly abstract way of stating my complaint1 and it needs to be redeemed from obscurity by showing instances of what is meant4 ,some beliefs very dear to my own heart have been conceived in this viciously abstract way by critics4 ,one is the 'will to believe1' so called2 another is the indeterminism of certain futures2 a third is the notion that truth may vary with the standpoint of the man who holds it4 ,i believe that the perverse abuse of the abstracting function has led critics to employ false arguments against these doctrines1 and often has led their readers to false conclusions4 ,i should like to try to save the situation1 if possible1 by a few counter-critical remarks4 ,let me give the name of 'vicious abstractionism' to a way of using concepts which may be thus described3 ,we conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it1 and classing it under that2 then1 instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring1 we proceed to use our concept privatively2 reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken1 treating it as a case of 'nothing but' that concept1 and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged4 ,footnote3 ,let not the reader confound the fallacy here described with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in the mood 'celarent' of the logic-books4 ,abstraction1 functioning in this way1 becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought4 ,it mutilates things2 it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities2 and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe may1 ,i am convinced1 be traced to this relatively simple source4 ,,the ,,viciously ,,privative ,,employment ,,of ,,abstract ,,characters ,,and ,,class ,,names is1 ,i am persuaded1 one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind4 ,to proceed immediately to concrete examples1 cast a glance at the belief in 'free will1' demolished with such specious persuasiveness recently by the skilful hand of ,professor ,fullerton4 ,footnote3 ,popular ,science ,monthly1 ,n4 ,y41 vols4 lviii and lix4 ,when a common man says that his will is free1 what does he mean8 ,he means that there are situations of bifurcation inside of his life in which two futures seem to him equally possible1 for both have their roots equally planted in his present and his past4 ,either1 if realized1 will grow out of his previous motives1 character and circumstances1 and will continue uninterruptedly the pulsations of his personal life4 ,but sometimes both at once are incompatible with physical nature1 and then it seems to the naive observer as if he made a choice between them ,,now1 and that the question of which future is to be1 instead of having been decided at the foundation of the world1 were decided afresh at every passing moment in ,i which fact seems livingly to grow1 and possibility seems1 in turning itself towards one act1 to exclude all others4 ,he who takes things at their face-value here may indeed be deceived4 ,he may far too often mistake his private ignorance of what is predetermined for a real indetermination of what is to be4 ,yet1 however imaginary it may be1 his picture of the situation offers no appearance of breach between the past and future4 ,a train is the same train1 its passengers are the same passengers1 its momentum is the same momentum1 no matter which way the switch which fixes its direction is placed4 ,for the indeterminist there is at all times enough past for all the different futures in sight1 and more besides1 to find their reasons in it1 and whichever future comes will slide out of that past as easily as the train slides by the switch4 ,the world1 in short1 is just as ,,continuous ,,with ,,itself for the believers in free will as for the rigorous determinists1 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 only1 ,,not ,,before--direct existing motions without altering their amount4 ,were there such spots of indifference1 the rigorous determinists think1 the future and the past would be separated absolutely1 for1 ,,abstractly ,,taken1 ,,the ,,word ',,indifferent' ,,suggests ,,disconnection ,,solely4 ,whatever is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached4 ,take the term thus strictly1 and you see1 they tell us1 that if any spot of indifference is found upon the broad highway between the past and the future1 then no connection of any sort whatever1 no continuous momentum1 no identical passenger1 no common aim or agent1 can be found on both sides of the shunt or switch which there is moved4 ,the place is an impassable chasm4 ,mr4 ,fullerton writes--the italics are mine--as follows3-- ',in so far as my action is free1 what ,i have been1 what ,i am1 what ,i have always done or striven to do1 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 ,,existence4444 ,the possibility is a hideous one2 and surely even the most ardent free-willist will1 when he contemplates it frankly1 excuse me for hoping that if ,i am free ,i am at least not very free1 and that ,i may reasonably expect to find ,,some degree of consistency in my life and actions4 444 ,suppose that ,i have given a dollar to a blind beggar4 ,can ,i1 if it is really an act of free-will1 be properly said to have given the money8 ,was it given because ,i was a man of tender heart1 etc41 etc48 444 ,what has all this to do with acts of free-will8 ,if they are free1 they must not be conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort1 by the misery of the beggar1 by the pity in the heart of the passer-by4 ,they must be causeless1 not determined4 ,they must drop from a clear sky out of the void1 for just in so far as they can be accounted for1 they are not free4' ,footnote3 ,loc4 cit41 vol4 lviii1 pp4 #ahi1 #ahh4 ,heaven forbid that ,i should get entangled here in a controversy about the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large1 for ,i am only trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of some of the doctrine's assailants4 ,the moments of bifurcation1 as the indeterminist seems to himself to experience them1 are moments both of re-direction and of continuation4 ,but because in the 'either--or' of the re-direction we hesitate1 the determinist abstracts this little element of discontinuity from the superabundant continuities of the experience1 and cancels in its behalf all the connective characters with which the latter is filled4 ,choice1 for him1 means henceforward ,d,i,sconnection pure and simple1 something undetermined in advance ,,in ,,any ,,respect ,,whatever1 and a life of choices must be a raving chaos1 at no two moments of which could we be treated as one and the same man4 ,if ,nero were 'free' at4 the moment of ordering his mother's murder1 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart ,footnote3 ,some ,dogmas of ,religion1 p4 #agi4 assures us that no one would have the right at any other moment to call him a bad man1 for he would then be an absolutely other ,nero4 ,a polemic author ought not merely to destroy his victim4 ,he ought to try a bit to make him feel his error--perhaps not enough to convert him1 but enough to give him a bad conscience and to weaken the energy of his defence4 ,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 grow4 ,to treat the negative character of one abstracted element as annulling all the positive features with which it coexists1 is no way to change any actual indeterminist's way of looking on the matter1 tho it may make the gallery applaud4 ,turn now to some criticisms of the 'will to believe1' as another example of the vicious way in which abstraction is currently employed4 ,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 concreteness4 ,in those situations the mind has alternatives before it so vast that the full evidence for either branch is missing1 and yet so significant that simply to wait for proof1 and to doubt while waiting1 might often in practical respects be the same thing as weighing down the negative side4 ,is life worth while at all8 ,is there any general meaning in all this cosmic weather8 ,is anything being permanently bought by all this suffering8 ,is there perhaps a transmundane experience in ,being1 something corresponding to a 'fourth dimension1' which1 if we had access to it1 might patch up some of this world's zerrissenheit and make things look more rational than they at first appear8 ,is there a superhuman consciousness of which our minds are parts1 and from which inspiration and help may come8 ,such are the questions in which the right to take sides practically for yes or no is affirmed by some of us1 while others hold that this is methodologically inadmissible1 and summon us to die professing ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every one to refuse to believe4 ,i say nothing of the personal inconsistency of some of these critics1 whose printed works furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to believe1 in spite of their denunciations of it as a phrase and as a recommended thing4 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart1 whom ,i will once more take as an example1 is sure that 'reality is rational and righteous' and 'destined sub specie temporis to become perfectly good'2 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 mind4 ,mankind is made on too uniform a pattern for any of us to escape successfully from acts of faith4 ,we have a lively vision of what a certain view of the universe would mean for us4 ,we kindle or we shudder at the thought1 and our feeling runs through our whole logical nature and animates its workings4 ,it ,,can',t be that1 we feel2 it ,,must be this4 ,it must be what it ,,ought to be1 and ,,ought to be this2 and then we seek for every reason1 good or bad1 to make this which so deeply ought to be1 seem objectively the probable thing4 ,we show the arguments against it to be insufficient1 so that it ,,may be true2 we represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of syllogistic proof4 ,we reinforce it by remembering the enlargement of our world by music1 by thinking of the promises of sunsets and the impulses from vernal woods4 ,and the essence of the whole experience1 when the individual swept through it says finally ',i believe1' is the intense concreteness of his vision1 the individuality of the hypothesis before him1 and the complexity of the various concrete motives and perceptions that issue in his final state4 ,but see now how the abstractionist treats this rich and intricate vision that a certain state of things must be true4 ,he accuses the believer of reasoning by the following syllogism3-- ,all good desires must be fulfilled2 ,the desire to believe this proposition is a good desire2 ,ergo1 this proposition must be believed4 ,he substitutes this abstraction for the concrete state of mind of the believer1 pins the naked absurdity of it upon him1 and easily proves that any one who defends him must be the greatest fool on earth4 ,as if any real believer ever thought in this preposterous way1 or as if any defender of the legitimacy of men's concrete ways of concluding ever used the abstract and general premise1 ',all desires must be fulfilled'6 ,nevertheless1 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart solemnly and laboriously refutes the syllogism in sections #dg to #eg of the above-cited book4 ,he shows that there is no fixed link in the dictionary between the abstract concepts 'desire1' 'goodness' and 'reality'2 and he ignores all the links which in the single concrete case the believer feels and perceives to be there6 ,he adds3-- ',when the reality of a thing is uncertain1 the argument encourages us to suppose that our approval of a thing can determine its reality4 ,and when this unhallowed link has once been established1 retribution overtakes us4 ,for when the reality of the thing is independently certain1 we then have to admit that the reality of the thing should determine our approval of that thing4 ,i find it difficult to imagine a more degraded position4' ,one here feels tempted to quote ironically ,hegel's famous equation of the real with the rational to his english disciple1 who ends his chapter with the heroic words3-- ',for those who do not pray1 there remains the resolve that1 so far as their strength may permit1 neither the pains of death nor the pains of life shall drive them to any comfort in that which they hold to be false1 or drive them from any comfort discomfort8 in that which they hold to be true4' ,how can so ingenious-minded a writer fail to see how far over the heads of the enemy all his arrows pass8 ,when ,mr4 ,mc,taggart himself believes that the universe is run by the dialectic energy of the absolute idea1 his insistent desire to have a world of that sort is felt by him to be no chance example of desire in general1 but an altogether peculiar insight-giving passion to which1 in this if in no other instance1 he would be stupid not to yield4 ,he obeys its concrete singularity1 not the bare abstract feature in it of being a 'desire4' ,his situation is as particular as that of an actress who resolves that it is best for her to marry and leave the stage1 of a priest who becomes secular1 of a politician who abandons public life4 ,what sensible man would seek to refute the concrete decisions of such persons by tracing them to abstract premises1 such as that 'all actresses must marry1' 'all clergymen must be laymen1' 'all politicians should resign their posts'8 ,yet this type of refutation1 absolutely unavailing though it be for purposes of conversion1 is spread by ,mr4 ,mc,taggart through many pages of his book4 ,for the aboundingness of our real reasons he substitutes one narrow point4 ,for men's real probabilities he gives a skeletonized abstraction which no man was ever tempted to believe4 ,the abstraction in my next example is less simple1 but is quite as flimsy as a weapon of attack4 ,empiricists think that truth in general is distilled from single men's beliefs2 and the so-called pragmatists 'go them one better' by trying to define what it consists in when it comes4 ,it consists1 ,i have elsewhere said1 in such a working on the part of the beliefs as may bring the man into satisfactory relations with objects to which these latter point4 ,the working is of course a concrete working in the actual experience of human beings1 among their ideas1 feelings1 perceptions1 beliefs and acts1 as well as among the physical things of their environment1 and the relations must be understood as being possible as well as actual4 ,in the chapter on truth of my book ,pragmatism ,i have taken pains to defend energetically this view4 ,strange indeed have been the misconceptions of it by its enemies1 and many have these latter been4 ,among the most formidable-sounding onslaughts on the attempt to introduce some concreteness into our notion of what the truth of an idea may mean1 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 things1' which ,plato in his immortal dialogue1 the ,thaeatetus1 is unanimously said to have laid away so comfortably in its grave two thousand years ago4 ,the two cleverest brandishers of this objection to make truth concrete1 ,professors ,rickert and ,munsterberg1 write in ,german1 ,footnote3 ,munsterberg's book has just appeared in an ,english version3 ,the ,eternal ,values1 ,boston1 #aiji4 and 'relativismus' is the name they give to the heresy which they endeavor to uproot4 ,the first step in their campaign against 'relativismus' is entirely in the air4 ,they accuse relativists--and we pragmatists are typical relativists--of being debarred by their self-adopted principles1 not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy1 of believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and absolute1 but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth1 in the pragmatic sense1 of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree1 and which no man should ever wish to change4 ,both charges fall wide of their mark4 ,i myself1 as a pragmatist1 believe in my own account of truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his4 ,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 frame4 ,i expect1 namely1 that the more fully men discuss and test my account1 the more they will agree that it fits1 and the less will they desire a change4 ,i may of course be premature in this confidence1 and the glory of being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision and correction of my scheme1 which later will then be judged untrue in just the measure in which it departs from that finally satisfactory formulation4 ,to admit1 as we pragmatists do1 that we are liable to correction 7even tho we may not expect it7 involves the use on our part of an ideal standard4 ,rationalists themselves are1 as individuals1 sometimes sceptical enough to admit the abstract possibility of their own present opinions being corrigible and revisable to some degree1 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 explain4 ,if1 along with the notion of the standard1 they could also claim its exclusive warrant for their own fulminations now1 it would be important to them indeed4 ,but absolutists like ,rickert freely admit the sterility of the notion1 even in their own hands4 ,truth is what we ,,ought to believe1 they say1 even tho no man ever did or shall believe it1 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 facts4 ,pragmatically1 then1 this part of the dispute is idle4 ,no relativist who ever actually walked the earth ,footnote3 ,of course the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the logic-books1 who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement1 not even the one he now makes1 is true1 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 exist4 has denied the regulative character in his own thinking of the notion of absolute truth4 ,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 is4 ,since the better absolutists agree in this1 admitting that the proposition ',there is absolute truth' is the only absolute truth of which we can be sure1 ,footnote3 ,compare ,bickert's ,gegenstand der ,erkentniss1 pp4 #ahg1 #ach4 ,munsterberg's version of this first truth is that ',es gibt eine ,welt1'--see his ,philosophie der ,werte1 pp4 #ch and #gd ,and1 after all1 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 all1 but a dogma adopted by the will which any one who turns his back on duty may disregard6 ,but if it all reverts to 'the will to believe1' pragmatists have that privilege as well as their critics4 further debate is practically unimportant1 so we may pass to their next charge4 ,it is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most apparent4 ,the antipragmatist1 in postulating absolute truth1 refuses to give any account of what the words may mean4 ,for him they form a self-explanatory term4 ,the pragmatist1 on the contrary1 articulately defines their meaning4 ,truth absolute1 he says1 means an ideal set of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of experience be expected to converge4 ,in this definition of absolute truth he not only postulates that there is a tendency to such convergence of opinions1 to such ultimate consensus1 but he postulates the other factors of his definition equally1 borrowing them by anticipation from the true conclusions expected to be reached4 ,he postulates the existence of opinions1 he postulates the experience that will sift them1 and the consistency which that experience will show4 ,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 analogy2 and he insists that human opinion has already reached a pretty stable equilibrium regarding them1 and that if its future development fails to alter them1 the definition itself1 with all its terms included1 will be part of the very absolute truth which it defines4 ,the hypothesis will1 in short1 have worked successfully all round the circle and proved self-corroborative1 and the circle will be closed4 ,the anti-pragmatist1 however1 immediately falls foul of the word 'opinion' here1 abstracts it from the universe of life1 and uses it as a bare dictionary-substantive1 to deny the rest of the assumptions which it coexists withal4 ,the dictionary says that an opinion is 'what some one thinks or believes4' ,this definition leaves every one's opinion free to be autogenous1 or unrelated either to what any one else may think or to what the truth may be4 ,therefore1 continue our abstractionists1 we must conceive it as essentially thus unrelated1 so that even were a billion men to sport the same opinion1 and only one man to differ1 we could admit no collateral circumstances which might presumptively make it more probable that he1 not they1 should be wrong4 ,truth1 they say1 follows not the counting of noses1 nor is it only another name for a majority vote4 ,it is a relation that antedates experience1 between our opinions and an independent something which the pragmatist account ignores1 a relation which1 tho the opinions of individuals should to all eternity deny it1 would still remain to qualify them as false4 ,to talk of opinions without referring to this independent something1 the anti-pragmatist assures us1 is to play ,hamlet with ,hamlet's part left out4 ,but when the pragmatist speaks of opinions1 does he mean any such insulated and unmotived abstractions as are here supposed8 ,of course not1 he means men's opinions in the flesh1 as they have really formed themselves1 opinions surrounded by their causes and the influences they obey and exert1 and along with the whole environment of social communication of which they are a part and out of which they take their rise4 ,moreover the 'experience' which the pragmatic definition postulates is the independent something which the anti-pragmatist accuses him of ignoring4 ,already have men grown unanimous in the opinion that such experience is of an independent reality1 the existence of which all opinions must acknowledge1 in order to be true4 ,already do they agree that in the long run it is useless to resist experience's pressure2 that the more of it a man has1 the better position he stands in1 in respect of truth2 that some men1 having had more experience1 are therefore better authorities than others2 that some are also wiser by nature and better able to interpret the experience they have had2 that it is one part of such wisdom to compare notes1 discuss1 and follow the opinion of our betters2 and that the more systematically and thoroughly such comparison and weighing of opinions is pursued1 the truer the opinions that survive are likely to be4 ,when the pragmatist talks of opinions1 it is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly and interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind2 and when the anti-pragmatist tries to floor him because the word 'opinion' can also be taken abstractly and as if it had no environment1 he simply ignores the soil out of which the whole discussion grows4 ,his weapons cut the air and strike no blow4 ,no one gets wounded in the war against caricatures of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the ,german onslaughts upon 'relativismus' consists4 ,refuse to use the word 'opinion' abstractly1 keep it in its real environment1 and the withers of pragmatism remain unwrung4 ,that men do exist who are 'opinionated1' in the sense that their opinions are self-willed1 is unfortunately a fact that must be admitted1 no matter what one's notion of truth in general may be4 ,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 proved4 ,truth may well consist of certain opinions1 and does indeed consist of nothing but opinions1 tho not every opinion need be true4 ,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 now4 ,,xiv ,,two ,,english ,,critics ,mr4 ,bertrand ,russell's article entitled ',transatlantic ,truth1' ,footnote3 ,in the ,albany ,review for ,january1 #aijh4 has all the clearness1 dialectic subtlety1 and wit which one expects from his pen1 but it entirely fails to hit the right point of view for apprehending our position4 ,when1 for instance1 we say that a true proposition is one the consequences of believing which are good1 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 good1 and that his belief must primarily be in that fact1--an obvious absurdity1 for that fact is the deliverance of a new proposition1 quite different from the first one and is1 moreover1 a fact usually very hard to verify1 it being 'far easier1' as ,mr4 ,russell justly says1 'to settle the plain question of fact3 ,have popes always been infallible8' than to settle the question whether the effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole good4' ,we affirm nothing as silly as ,mr4 ,russell supposes4 ,good consequences are not proposed by us merely as a sure sign1 mark1 or criterion1 by which truth's presence is habitually ascertained1 tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a sign2 they are proposed rather as the lurking motive inside of every truth-claim1 whether the 'trower' be conscious of such motive1 or whether he obey it blindly4 ,they are proposed as the causa existendi of our beliefs1 not as their logical cue or premise1 and still less as their objective deliverance or content4 ,they assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports4 ,no truth-claimer except the pragmatist himself need ever be aware of the part played in his own mind by consequences1 and he himself is aware of it only abstractly and in general1 and may at any moment be quite oblivious of it with respect to his own beliefs4 ,mr4 ,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 exist4 ,this is the usual slander repeated to satiety by our critics4 ,they forget that in any concrete account of what is denoted by 'truth' in human life1 the word can only be used relatively to some particular trower4 ,thus1 ,i may hold it true that ,shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name1 and may express my opinion to a critic4 ,if the critic be both a pragmatist and a baconian1 he will in his capacity of pragmatist see plain that the workings of my opinion1 ,i being who ,i am1 make it perfectly true for me1 while in his capacity of baconian he still believes that ,shakespeare never wrote the plays in question4 ,but most anti-pragmatist critics take the wont 'truth' as something absolute1 and easily play on their reader's readiness to treat his ,,owe truths as the absolute ones4 ,if the reader whom they address believes that ,a does not exist1 while we pragmatists show that those for whom tho belief that it exists works satisfactorily will always call it true1 he easily sneers at the naivete of our contention1 for is not then the belief in question 'true1' tho what it declares as fact has1 as the reader so well knows1 no existence8 ,mr4 ,russell speaks of our statement as an 'attempt to get rid of fact' and naturally enough considers it 'a failure' 7p4 #daj74 ',the old notion of truth reappears1' he adds--that notion being1 of course1 that when a belief is true1 its object does exist4 ,it is1 of course1 ,,bound to exist1 on sound pragmatic principles4 ,concepts signify consequences4 ,how is the world made different for me by my conceiving an opinion of mine under the concept 'true'8 ,first1 an object must be findable there 7or sure signs of such an object must be found7 which shall agree with the opinion4 ,second1 such an opinion must not be contradicted by anything else ,i am aware of4 ,but in spite of the obvious pragmatist requirement that when ,i have said truly that something exists1 it ,,shall exist1 the slander which ,mr4 ,russell repeats has gained the widest currency4 ,mr4 ,russell himself is far too witty and athletic a ratiocinator simply to repeat the slander dogmatically4 ,being nothing if not mathematical and logical1 he must prove the accusation secundum artem1 and convict us not so much of error as of absurdity4 ,i have sincerely tried to follow the windings of his mind in this procedure1 but for the life of me ,i can only see in it another example of what ,i have called 7above1 p4 #bdi7 vicious abstractionism4 ,the abstract world of mathematics and pure logic is so native to ,mr4 ,russell that he thinks that we describers of the functions of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathematical terms and functions4 ,a mathematical term1 as a1 b1 c1 x1 y1 sin41 log41 is self-sufficient1 and terms of this sort1 once equated1 can be substituted for one another in endless series without error4 ,mr4 ,russell1 and also ,mr4 ,hawtrey1 of whom ,i shall speak presently1 seem to think that in our mouth also such terms as 'meaning1' 'truth1' 'belief1' 'object1' 'definition1' are self-sufficients with no context of varying relation that might be further asked about4 ,what a word means is expressed by its definition1 isn't it8 ,the definition claims to be exact and adequate1 doesn't it8 ,then it can be substituted for the word--since the two are identical--can't it8 ,then two words with the same definition can be substituted for one another1 n'est--ce pas8 ,likewise two definitions of the same word1 nicht wahr1 etc41 etc41 till it will be indeed strange if you can't convict some one of self-contradiction and absurdity4 ,the particular application of this rigoristic treatment to my own little account of truth as working seems to be something like what follows4 ,i say 'working' is what the 'truth' of our ideas means1 and call it a definition4 ,but since meanings and things meant1 definitions and things defined1 are equivalent and interchangeable1 and nothing extraneous to its definition can be meant when a term is used1 it follows that who so calls an idea true1 and means by that word that it works1 cannot mean anything else1 can believe nothing but that it does work1 and in particular can neither imply nor allow anything about its object or deliverance4 ',according to the pragmatists1' ,mr4 ,russell writes1 'to say it is true that other people exist means it is useful to believe that other people exist4 ,but if so1 then these two phrases are merely different words for the same proposition2 therefore when ,i believe the one1 ,i believe the other' 7p4 #djj74 ,logic1 ,i may say in passing1 would seem to require ,mr4 ,russell to believe them both at once1 but he ignores this consequence1 and considers that other people exist' and 'it is useful to believe that they do ,,even ,,if ,,they ,,don',t1' must be identical and therefore substitutable propositions in the pragmatist mouth4 ,but may not real terms1 ,i now ask1 have accidents not expressed in their definitions8 and when a real value is finally substituted for the result of an algebraic series of substituted definitions1 do not all these accidents creep back8 ,beliefs have their objective 'content' or 'deliverance' as well as their truth1 and truth has its implications as well as its workings4 ,if any one believe that other men exist1 it is both a content of his belief and an implication of its truth1 that they should exist in fact4 ,mr4 ,russell's logic would seem to exclude1 'by definition1' all such accidents as contents1 implications1 and associates1 and would represent us as translating all belief into a sort of belief in pragmatism itself--of all things6 ,if ,i say that a speech is eloquent1 and explain 'eloquent' as meaning the power to work in certain ways upon the audience2 or if ,i say a book is original1 and define 'original' to mean differing from other books1 ,russell's logic1 if ,i follow it at all1 would seem to doom me to agreeing that the speech is about eloquence1 and the book about other books4 ,when ,i call a belief true1 and define its truth to mean its workings1 ,i certainly do not mean that the belief is a belief ,,about the workings4 ,it is a belief about the object1 and ,i who talk about the workings am a different subject1 with a different universe of discourse1 from that of the believer of whose concrete thinking ,i profess to give an account4 ,the social proposition 'other men exist' and the pragmatist proposition 'it is expedient to believe that other men exist' come from different universes of discourse4 ,one can believe the second without being logically compelled to believe the first2 one can believe the first without having ever heard of the second2 or one can believe them both4 ,the first expresses the object of a belief1 the second tells of one condition of the belief's power to maintain itself4 ,there is no identity of any kind1 save the term 'other men' which they contain in common1 in the two propositions2 and to treat them as mutually substitutable1 or to insist that we shall do so1 is to give up dealing with realities altogether4 ,mr4 ,ralph ,hawtrey1 who seems also to serve under the banner of abstractionist logic1 convicts us pragmatists of absurdity by arguments similar to ,mr4 ,russell's4 ,footnote3 ,see ,the ,new ,quarterly1 for ,march1 #aijh4 ,as a favor to us and for the sake of the argument1 he abandons the word 'true' to our fury1 allowing it to mean nothing but the fact that certain beliefs are expedient2 and he uses the word 'correctness' 7as ,mr4 ,pratt uses the word 'trueness'7 to designate a fact1 not about the belief1 but about the belief's object1 namely that it is as the belief declares it4 ',when therefore1' he writes1 ',i say it is correct to say that ,caesar is dead1 ,i mean ,caesar is dead4 ,this must be regarded as the definition of correctness4' ,and ,mr4 ,hawtrey then goes on to demolish me by the conflict of the definitions4 ,what is 'true' for the pragmatist cannot be what is 'correct1' he says1 'for the definitions are not logically interchangeable2 or if we interchange them1 we reach the tautology3 ,caesar is dead means it is expedient to believe that ,caesar is dead4 ,but what is it expedient to believe8 ,why1 that ,caesar is dead4 ,a precious definition indeed of ',caesar is dead4' ,mr4 ,hawtrey's conclusion would seem to be that the pragmatic definition of the truth of a belief in no way implies--what8--that the believer shall believe in his own belief's deliverance8--or that the pragmatist who is talking about him shall believe in that deliverance8 ,the two cases are quite different4 ,for the believer1 ,caesar must of course really exist2 for the pragmatist critic he need not1 for the pragmatic deliverance belongs1 as ,i have just said1 to another universe of discourse altogether4 ,when one argues by substituting definition for definition1 one needs to stay in the same universe4 ,the great shifting of universes in this discussion occurs when we carry the word 'truth' from the subjective into the objective realm1 applying it sometimes to a property of opinions1 sometimes to the facts which the opinions assert4 ,a number of writers1 as ,mr4 ,russell himself1 ,mr4 ,g4 ,e4 ,moore1 and others1 favor the unlucky word 'proposition1' which seems expressly invented to foster this confusion1 for they speak of truth as a property of 'propositions4' ,but in naming propositions it is almost impossible not to use the word 'that4' ,,that ,caesar is dead1 ,,that virtue is its own reward1 are propositions4 ,i do not say that for certain logical purposes it may not be useful to treat propositions as absolute entities1 with truth or falsehood inside of them respectively1 or to make of a complex like 'that--,caesar--is--dead' a single term and call it a 'truth4' ,but the 'that' here has the extremely convenient ambiguity for those who wish to make trouble for us pragmatists1 that sometimes it means the ,,fact that1 and sometimes the ,,belief that1 ,caesar is no longer living4 ,when ,i then call the belief true1 ,i am told that the truth means the fact2 when ,i claim the fact also1 ,i am told that my definition has excluded the fact1 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 possession4 ,the only remedy for this intolerable ambiguity is1 it seems to me1 to stick to terms consistently4 ',reality1' 'idea' or 'belief1' and the 'truth of the idea or belief1' which are the terms ,i have consistently held to1 seem to be free from all objection4 ,whoever takes terms abstracted from all their natural settings1 identifies them with definitions1 and treats the latter more algebraico1 not only risks mixing universes1 but risks fallacies which the man in the street easily detects4 ,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 statements1' is like proving that an omnibus is a boat because both are vehicles4 ,a horse may be defined as a beast that walks on the nails of his middle digits4 ,whenever we see a horse we see such a beast1 just as whenever we believe a 'truth' we believe something expedient4 ,messrs4 ,russell and ,hawtrey1 if they followed their antipragmatist logic1 would have to say here that we see ,,that ,,it ,,is such a beast1 a fact which notoriously no one sees who is not a comparative anatomist4 ,it almost reconciles one to being no logician that one thereby escapes so much abstractionism4 ,abstractionism of the worst sort dogs ,mr4 ,russell in his own trials to tell positively what the word 'truth' means4 ,in the third of his articles on ,meinong1 in ,mind1 vol4 xiii1 p4 #eji 7#aijd71 he attempts this feat by limiting the discussion to three terms only1 a proposition1 its content1 and an object1 abstracting from the whole context of associated realities in which such terms are found in every case of actual knowing4 ,he puts the terms1 thus taken in a vacuum1 and made into bare logical entities1 through every possible permutation and combination1 tortures them on the rack until nothing is left of them1 and after all this logical gymnastic1 comes out with the following portentous conclusion as what he believes to be the correct view3 that there is no problem at all in truth and falsehood1 that some propositions are true and some false1 just as some roses are red and some white1 that belief is a certain attitude towards propositions1 which is called knowledge when they are true1 error when they are false'--and he seems to think that when once this insight is reached the question may be considered closed forever6 ,in spite of my admiration of ,mr4 ,russell's analytic powers1 ,i wish1 after reading such an article1 that pragmatism1 even had it no other function1 might result in making him and other similarly gifted men ashamed of having used such powers in such abstraction from reality4 ,pragmatism saves us at any rate from such diseased abstractionism as those pages show4 ,p4 ,s4 ,since the foregoing rejoinder was written an article on ,pragmatism which ,i believe to be by ,mr4 ,russell has appeared in the ,edinburgh ,review for ,april1 #aiji4 ,as far as his discussion of the truth-problem goes1 altho he has evidently taken great pains to be fair1 it seems to me that he has in no essential respect improved upon his former arguments4 ,i will therefore add nothing further1 but simply refer readers who may be curious to pp4 #bgb-bhj of the said article4 ,,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 unconvinced1 and which it may be my duty to try at least to dispel4 ,i can perhaps be briefer if ,i put what ,i have to say in dialogue form4 ,let then the anti-pragmatist begin3-- ,anti-,pragmatist3--,you say that the truth of an idea is constituted by its workings4 ,now suppose a certain state of facts1 facts for example of antediluvian planetary history1 concerning which the question may be asked3 ',shall the truth about them ever be known8' ,and suppose 7leaving the hypothesis of an omniscient absolute out of the account7 that we assume that the truth is never to be known4 ,i ask you now1 brother pragmatist1 whether according to you there can be said to be any truth at all about such a state of facts4 ,is there a truth1 or is there not a truth1 in cases where at any rate it never comes to be known8 ,pragmatist3--,why do you ask me such a question8 ,anti-,prag43--,because ,i think it puts you in a bad dilemma4 ,prag43--,how so8 ,anti-,prag43--,why1 because if on the one hand you elect to say that there is a truth1 you thereby surrender your whole pragmatist theory4 ,according to that theory1 truth requires ideas and workings to constitute it2 but in the present instance there is supposed to be no knower1 and consequently neither ideas nor workings can exist4 ,what then remains for you to make your truth of8 ,prag43--,do you wish1 like so many of my enemies1 to force me to make the truth out of the reality itself8 ,i cannot3 the truth is something known1 thought or said about the reality1 and consequently numerically additional to it4 ,but probably your intent is something different2 so before ,i say which horn of your dilemma ,i choose1 ,i ask you to let me hear what the other horn may be4 ,anti-,prag43--,the other horn is this1 that if you elect to say that there is no truth under the conditions assumed1 because there are no ideas or workings1 then you fly in the face of common sense4 ,doesn't common sense believe that every state of facts must in the nature of things be truly statable in some kind of a proposition1 even tho in point of fact the proposition should never be propounded by a living soul8 ,prag43--,unquestionably common sense believes this1 and so do ,i4 ,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 account1 yet of which it can already be said abstractly that only one sort of possible account can ever be true4 ,the truth about any such event is thus already generically predetermined by the event's nature2 and one may accordingly say with a perfectly good conscience that it virtually pre-exists4 ,common sense is thus right in its instinctive contention4 ,anti-,prag43--,is this then the horn of the dilemma which you stand for8 ,do you say that there is a truth even in cases where it shall never be known8 ,prag43--,indeed ,i do1 provided you let me hold consistently to my own conception of truth1 and do not ask me to abandon it for something which ,i find impossible to comprehend4--,you also believe1 do you not1 that there is a truth1 even in cases where it never shall be known8 ,anti-,prag43--,i do indeed believe so4 ,prag43--,pray then inform me in what1 according to you1 this truth regarding the unknown consists4 ,anti-,prag43--,consists8--pray what do you mean by 'consists'8 ,it consists in nothing but itself1 or more properly speaking it has neither consistence nor existence1 it obtains1 it holds4 ,prag43--,well1 what relation does it bear to the reality of which it holds8 ,anti-,prag43-,how do you mean1 'what relation'8 ,it holds of it1 of course2 it knows it1 it represents it4 ,prag43--,who knows it8 ,what represents it8 ,anti-,prag43--,the truth does2 the truth knows it2 or rather not exactly that1 but any one knows it who possesses the truth4 ,any true idea of the reality represents the truth concerning it4 ,prag43--,but ,i thought that we had agreed that no knower of it1 nor any idea representing it was to be supposed4 ,anti-,prag43--,sure enough6 ,prag43--,then ,i beg you again to tell me in what this truth consists1 all by itself1 this tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se1 on the one hand1 and all knowledge of them1 actual or potential1 on the other4 ,what is the shape of it in this third estate8 ,of what stuff1 mental1 physical1 or 'epistemological1' is it built8 ,what metaphysical region of reality does it inhabit8 ,anti-,prag43--,what absurd questions6 ,isn't it enough to say that it is true that the facts are so-and-so1 and false that they are otherwise8 ,prag43--',it' is true that the facts are so-and-so--,i won't yield to the temptation of asking you what is true2 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 themselves4 ,anti-,prag43--,it seems to mean more than the bare being of the facts4 ,it is a sort of mental equivalent for them1 their epistemological function1 their value in noetic terms4 ,prag43--,a sort of spiritual double or ghost of them1 apparently6 ,if so1 may ,i ask you where this truth is found4 ,anti-,prag43--,where8 where8 ,there is no 'where'--it simply obtains1 absolutely obtains4 ,prag43--,not in any one's mind8 ,anti-,prag43--,no1 for we agreed that no actual knower of the truth should be assumed4 ,prag43--,no actual knower1 ,i agree4 ,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 mind8 ,anti-,prag43--,of course if there be a truth concerning the facts1 that truth is what the ideal knower would know4 ,to that extent you can't keep the notion of it and the notion of him separate4 ,but it is not him first and then it2 it is it first and then him1 in my opinion4 ,prag43--,but you still leave me terribly puzzled as to the status of this so-called truth1 hanging as it does between earth and heaven1 between reality and knowledge1 grounded in the reality1 yet numerically additional to it1 and at the same time antecedent to any knower's opinion and entirely independent thereof4 ,is it as independent of the knower as you suppose8 ,it looks to me terribly dubious1 as if it might be only another name for a potential as distinguished from an actual knowledge of the reality4 ,isn't your truth1 after all1 simply what any successful knower would have to know in case he existed8 ,and in a universe where no knowers were even conceivable would any truth about the facts there as something numerically distinguishable from the facts themselves1 find a place to exist in8 ,to me such truth would not only be non-existent1 it would be unimaginable1 inconceivable4 ,anti-,prag43--,but ,i thought you said a while ago that there is a truth of past events1 even tho no one shall ever know it4 ,prag43--,yes1 but you must remember that ,i also stipulated for permission to define the word in my own fashion4 ,the truth of an event1 past1 present1 or future1 is for me only another name for the fact that if the event ever does get known1 the nature of the knowledge is already to some degree predetermined4 ,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 it4 ,he must believe something that will bring him into satisfactory relations with it1 that will prove a decent mental substitute for it4 ,what this something may be is of course partly fixed already by the nature of the fact and by the sphere of its associations4 ,this seems to me all that you can clearly mean when you say that truth pre-exists to knowledge4 ,it is knowledge anticipated1 knowledge in the form of possibility merely4 ,anti-,prag43--,but what does the knowledge know when it comes8 ,doesn't it know the truth8 ,and1 if so1 mustn't the truth be distinct from either the fact or the knowledge8 ,prag43--,it seems to me that what the knowledge knows is the fact itself1 the event1 or whatever the reality may be4 ,where you see three distinct entities in the field1 the reality1 the knowing1 and the truth1 ,i see only two4 ,moreover1 ,i can see what each of my two entities is known-as1 but when ,i ask myself what your third entity1 the truth1 is known-as1 ,i can find nothing distinct from the reality on the one hand1 and the ways in which it may be known on the other4 ,are you not probably misled by common language1 which has found it convenient to introduce a hybrid name1 meaning sometimes a kind of knowing and sometimes a reality known1 to apply to either of these things interchangeably8 ,and has philosophy anything to gain by perpetuating and consecrating the ambiguity8 ,if you call the object of knowledge 'reality1' and call the manner of its being cognized 'truth1' cognized moreover on particular occasions1 and variously1 by particular human beings who have their various businesses with it1 and if you hold consistently to this nomenclature1 it seems to me that you escape all sorts of trouble4 ,anti-,prag43--,do you mean that you think you escape from my dilemma8 ,prag43--,assuredly ,i escape2 for if truth and knowledge are terms correlative and interdependent1 as ,i maintain they are1 then wherever knowledge is conceivable truth is conceivable1 wherever knowledge is possible truth is possible1 wherever knowledge is actual truth is actual4 ,therefore when you point your first horn at me1 ,i think of truth actual1 and say it doesn't exist4 ,it doesn't2 for by hypothesis there is no knower1 no ideas1 no workings4 ,i agree1 however1 that truth possible or virtual might exist1 for a knower might possibly be brought to birth2 and truth conceivable certainly exists1 for1 abstractly taken1 there is nothing in the nature of antediluvian events that should make the application of knowledge to them inconceivable4 ,therefore when you try to impale me on your second horn1 ,i think of the truth in question as a mere abstract possibility1 so ,i say it does exist1 and side with common sense4 ,do not these distinctions rightly relieve me from embarrassment8 ,and don't you think it might help you to make them yourself8 ,anti-,prag43--,never6--so avaunt with your abominable hair-splitting and sophistry6 ,truth is truth2 and never will ,i degrade it by identifying it with low pragmatic particulars in the way you propose4 ,prag43--,well1 my dear antagonist1 ,i hardly hoped to convert an eminent intellectualist and logician like you2 so enjoy1 as long as you live1 your own ineffable conception4 ,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 consists4 ,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 become1 but wedded by education and tradition to the abstractionist manner of thought4