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 3 1924 032 293 213 
 
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THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 A SEQUEL TO ' PRAGMATISM ' 
 
 BY 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
 
 LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 1909 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY WILLIAM JAMES 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 J. HE pivotal part of my book named Pragrma- 
 tism is its account of the relation called * truth ' 
 which may obtain between an idea (opinion, 
 belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 
 'Truth,' I there say, 'is a property of certain 
 of our ideas. It means their agreement, as 
 falsity means their disagreement, with reality. 
 Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept 
 this definition as a matter of course. 
 
 'Where our ideas [do] not copy definitely 
 their object, what does agreement with that 
 object mean ? . . . Pragmatism asks its usual 
 question. " Grant an idea or belief to be true," 
 it says, " what concrete difference will its being 
 true make in any one's actual life .'' What ex- 
 periences [may] be different from those which 
 would obtain if the belief were false.'' How 
 will the truth be realized .'' What, in short, is 
 the truth's cash- value in experiential terms.''" 
 The moment pragmatism asks this question, it 
 sees the answer: True ideas are those that we 
 
PREFACE 
 
 can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. 
 False ideas are those that we cannot. That is 
 the practical difference it makes to us to have 
 true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of 
 truth, for it is all that truth is known as. 
 
 ' The truth of an idea is not a stagnant pro- 
 perty inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. 
 It becomes true, is made true by events. Its 
 verity is in fact an event, a process, the process 
 namely of its verifyiog itself, its verification. 
 Its validity is the process of its validation.* 
 
 'To agree in the widest sense with a reality 
 can only mean to be guided either straight up 
 to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into 
 such working touch with it as to handle either 
 it or something connected with it better than if 
 we disagreed. Better either intellectually or 
 practically. . . . Any idea that helps us to 
 
 * But 'verifiability,' I add, 'is as good as verification. For 
 one truth-process completed, there are a million in our lives 
 that function in [the] state of nascency. They lead us towards 
 direct verification ; lead us into the surroundings of the object 
 they envisage; and then, if everything runs on harmoniously, 
 we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, 
 and are usually justified by all that happens.' 
 
 vi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 deal, whether practically or intellectually, with 
 either the reality or its belongings, that does n't 
 entangle our progress in frustrations, that -fits, 
 in fact, and adapts our life to the reality's 
 whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the 
 requirement. It will be true of that reality. 
 
 ' The true, to put it very briefly, is only the 
 expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 
 the right is only the expedient in the way of our 
 behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion, 
 and expedient in the long run and on the whole, 
 of course; for what meets expediently all the 
 experience in sight won't necessarily meet all 
 farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Ex- 
 perience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, 
 and making us correct our present formulas.' 
 
 This account of truth, following upon the 
 similar ones given by Messrs. Dewey and 
 Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest discussion. 
 Few critics have defended it, most of them have 
 scouted it. It seems evident that the subject is 
 a hard one to understand, under its apparent 
 simplicity ; and evident also, I think, that the 
 definitive settlement of it will mark a turning- 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 point in the history of epistemology, and conse- 
 quently in that of general philosophy. In order 
 to make my own thought more accessible to 
 those who hereafter may have to study the 
 question, I have collected in the volume that 
 follows all the work of my pen that bears 
 directly on the truth-question. My first state- 
 ment was in 1884, in the article that begins the 
 present volume. The other papers follow in the 
 order of their publication. Two or three ap- 
 pear now for the first time. 
 
 One of the accusations which I oftenest have 
 had to meet is that of making the truth of our re- 
 ligious beliefs consist in their 'feeling good' to 
 us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given 
 some excuse for this charge, by the unguarded 
 language in which, in the book Pragmatism, I 
 spoke of the truth of the belief of certain philo- 
 sophers in the absolute. Explaining why I do 
 not believe in the absolute myself (p. 78), yet 
 finding that it may secure 'moral holidays' to 
 those who need them, and is true in so far forth 
 (if to gain moral holidays be a good),' I offered 
 
 ' Op. cU., p. 7S. 
 viii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my ene- 
 mies. But they, as is only too common with 
 such offerings, trampled the gift under foot and 
 turned and rent the giver. I had counted too 
 much on their good will — oh for the rarity of 
 christian charity under the sun ! Oh for the 
 rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also! I 
 had supposed it to be matter of common obser- 
 vation that, of two competing views of the uni- 
 verse which in all other respects are equal, but 
 of which the first denies some vital human need 
 while the second satisfies it, the second will be 
 favored by sane men for the simple reason that 
 it makes the world seem more rational. To 
 choose the first view under such circumstances 
 would be an ascetic act, an act of philosophic 
 self-denial of which no normal human being 
 would be guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the 
 meaning of concepts, I had shown the concept 
 of the absolute to mean nothing but the holiday 
 giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. One's ob- 
 jective deliverance, when one says 'the abso- 
 lute exists,' amounted, on my showing, just to 
 this, that * some justification of a feeling of se- 
 
 ix 
 
PREFACE 
 
 curity in presence of the universe,' exists, and 
 that systematically to refuse to cultivate a feel- 
 ing of security would be to do violence to a 
 tendency in one's emotional life which might 
 well be respected as prophetic. 
 
 Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see 
 the workings of their own minds in any such 
 picture, so all that I can do is to apologize, and 
 take my offering back. The absolute is true in 
 no way then, and least of all, by the verdict of 
 the critics, in the way which I assigned ! 
 
 My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'de- 
 sign' was similar. Reducing, by the pragmatic 
 test, the meaning of each of these concepts to 
 its positive experienceable operation, I showed 
 them all to mean the same thing, viz., the pre- 
 sence of 'promise' in the world. 'God or no 
 God.''' means 'promise or no promise?' It 
 seems to me that the alternative is objective 
 enough, being a question as to whether the 
 cosmos has one character or another, even 
 though our own provisional answer be made on 
 subjective grounds. Nevertheless christian and 
 non-christian critics alike accuse me of sum- 
 
PREFACE 
 
 moning people to say 'God exists,' even when 
 he does n't exist, because forsooth in my philo- 
 sophy the 'truth' of the saying does n't really 
 mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but 
 only that to say so feels good. 
 
 Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist 
 warfare is over what the word 'truth' shall be 
 held to signify, and not over any of the facts 
 embodied in truth-situations ; for both prag- 
 matists and anti-pragmatists believe in existent 
 objects, just as they believe in our ideas of them. 
 The difference is that when the pragmatists 
 speak of truth, they mean exclusively some- 
 thing about the ideas, namely their workable- 
 ness ; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of 
 truth they seem most often to mean something 
 about the objects. Since the pragmatist, if he 
 agrees that an idea is 'really' true, also agrees 
 to whatever it says about its object ; and since 
 most anti-pragmatists have already come 
 round to agreeing that, if the object exists, 
 the idea that it does so is workable; there 
 would seem so little left to fight about that 
 I might well be asked why instead of reprint- 
 
 xi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ng my share in so much verbal wrangling, 
 '. do not show my sense of 'values' by burning 
 t all up. 
 
 I understand the question and I will give my 
 mswer. I am interested in another doctrine in 
 )hilosophy to which I give the name of radical 
 mpiricism, and it seems to me that the estab- 
 ishment of the pragmatist theory of truth is a 
 tep of first-rate importance in making radical 
 mpiricism prevail. Radical empiricism con- 
 ists first of a postulate, next of a statement of 
 act, and finally of a generalized conclusion. 
 
 The postulate is that the only things that 
 hall be debatable among philosophers shall 
 e things definable in terms drawn from expe- 
 ience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature 
 lay exist ad libitum, but they f orna no part of 
 he material for philosophic debate.] 
 
 The statement of fact is that the relations 
 letween things, conjunctive as well as disjunc- 
 ive, are just as much matters of direct particu- 
 ar experience, neither more so nor less so, than 
 he things themselves. 
 
 The generalized conclusion is that therefore 
 xii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 the parts of experience hold together from next 
 to next by relations that are themselves parts of 
 experience. The directly apprehended universe 
 needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical 
 connective support, But possesses in its own 
 right a concatenated or continuous structure. 
 
 The great obstacle to radical empiricism in 
 the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist 
 belief that experience as immediately given is 
 all disjunction and no conjunction, and that 
 to make one world out of this separateness, 
 a higher unifying agency must be there. In 
 the prevalent idealism this agency is repre- 
 sented as the absolute all-witness which 're- 
 lates' things together by throwing ' categories ' 
 over them like a net. The most peculiar and 
 unique, perhaps, of all these categories is sup- 
 posed to be the truth-relation, which connects 
 parts of reality in pairs, making of one of them 
 a knower, and of the other a thing known, 
 yet which is itself contentless experientially, 
 neither describable, explicable, nor reduceable 
 to lower terms, and denotable only by uttering 
 the name 'truth.' 
 
 xiii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the 
 truth-relation is that it has a definite content, 
 and that everything in it is experienceable. 
 Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. 
 The ' workableness ' which ideas must have, in 
 order to be true, means particular workings, 
 physical or intellectual, actual or possible, 
 which they may set up from next to next in- 
 side of concrete experience. Were this prag- 
 matic contention admitted, one great point in 
 the victory of radical empiricism would also 
 be scored, for the relation between an object 
 and the idea that truly knows it, is held by 
 rationalists to be nothing of this describable 
 sort, but to stand outside of all possible tem- 
 poral experience; and on the relation, so 
 interpreted, rationalism is Wonted to make its 
 last most obdurate rally. 
 
 Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I 
 try to meet in this volume can be so easily used 
 by rationalists as weapons of resistance, not 
 only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism 
 also (for if the truth-relation were transcendent, 
 others might be so too), that I feel strongly 
 
 XIV 
 
PREFACE 
 
 the strategical importance of having them 
 definitely met and got out of the way. What 
 our critics most persistently keep saying is that 
 though workings go with truth, yet they do not 
 constitute it. It is numerically additional to 
 them, prior to them, explanatory of them, and 
 in no wise to be explained hy them, we are 
 incessantly told. The first point for our ene- 
 mies to establish, therefore, is that something 
 numerically additional and prior to the work- 
 ings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since 
 the object is additional, and usually prior, most 
 rationalists plead it, and boldly accuse us of 
 denying it. This leaves on the bystanders the 
 impression — since we cannot reasonably deny 
 the existence of the object — that our account 
 of truth breaks down, and that our critics have 
 driven us from the field. Altho in various places 
 in this volume I try to refute the slanderous 
 charge that we deny real existence, I will say 
 here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the 
 existence of the object, whenever the idea as- 
 serts it ' truly,' is the only reason, in innumer- 
 able cases, why the idea does work successfully, 
 
 XV 
 
PREFACE 
 
 if it work at all ; and that it seems an abuse of 
 language, to say the least, to transfer the word 
 'truth' from the idea to the object's existence, 
 when the falsehood of ideas that won't work 
 is explained by that existence as well as the 
 truth of those that will. 
 
 I find this abuse prevailing among my most 
 accomplished adversaries. But once establish 
 the proper verbal custom, let the word ' truth ' 
 represent a property of the idea, cease to make 
 it something mysteriously connected with the 
 object known, and the path opens fair and 
 wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radi- 
 cal empiricism on its merits. The truth of an 
 idea will then mean only its workings, or that 
 in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets 
 up those workings; it will mean neither the 
 idea's object, nor anything 'saltatory' inside 
 the idea, that terms drawn from experience 
 cannot describe. 
 
 One word more, ere I end this preface. A 
 distinction is sometimes made between Dewey, 
 Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing the 
 object''s existence, made a concession to popu- 
 
 XVI 
 
PREFACE 
 
 lar prejudice which they, as more radical prag- 
 matists, refuse to ruake. As I myself under- 
 stand these authors, we all three absolutely agree 
 in admitting the transcendency of the object 
 (provided it be an experienceable object) to the 
 subject, in the truth-relation. Dewey in par- 
 ticular has insisted almost ad nauseam that the 
 whole meaning of our cognitive states and pro- 
 cesses lies in the way they intervene in the con- 
 trol and revaluation of independent existences 
 or facts. His account of knowledge is not only 
 absurd, but meaningless, unless independent 
 existences be there of which our ideas take 
 account, and for the transformation of which 
 they work. But because he and Schiller refuse 
 to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent' 
 in the sense of being altogether trans-experi- 
 ential, their critics pounce on sentences in their 
 writings to that eflFect to show that they deny 
 the existence within the realm of experience 
 of objects external to the ideas that declare 
 their presence there.' It seems incredible 
 
 ' It gives me pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read 
 into the pragmatistic church, so far as his epistemology 
 
 xvii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 that educated and apparently sincere critics 
 should so fail to catch their adversary's point 
 of view. 
 
 What misleads so many of them is possibly 
 also the fact that the universes of discourse of 
 Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas of 
 different extent, and that what the one postu- 
 lates explicitly the other provisionally leaves 
 only in a state of implication, while the reader 
 thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's 
 universe is the smallest, being essentially a 
 psychological one. He starts with but one sort 
 of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to 
 the independent objective facts which they 
 
 goes. See his vigorous book. The Metaphysics of Nature, 
 2d Edition, Appendix A. (London, Black, 1908.) The work 
 What is Reality ? by Francis Howe Johnson (Boston, 1891), 
 of which I make the acquaintance only while correcting these 
 proofs, contains some striking anticipations of the later prag- 
 matist view. The Psychology of Thinking, by Irving E. 
 Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just ap- 
 peared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist documents 
 yet published, tho it does not use the word ' pragmatism ' 
 at all. While I am making references, I cannot refrain from 
 inserting one to the extraordinarily acute article by H. V. 
 Knox, in the Quarterly Review for April, 1909. 
 
 xviii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 assert, inasmuch as the most successfully vali- 
 dated of all claims is that such facts are there. 
 My universe is more essentially epistemologi- 
 cal. I start with two things, the objective facts 
 and the claims, and indicate which claims, the 
 facts being there, will work successfully as the 
 latter' s substitutes and which will not. I call 
 the former claims true. Dewey's panorama, if 
 I understand this colleague, is the widest of the 
 three, but I refrain from giving my own account 
 of its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as 
 firmly as I do to objects independent of our 
 judgments. If I am wrong in saying this, he 
 must correct me. I decline in this matter to be 
 corrected at second hand. 
 
 I have not pretended in the following pages 
 to consider all the critics of my account of 
 truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy, Gardi- 
 ner, Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, 
 Salter, Carus, Lalande, Mentre, McTaggart, 
 G. E. Moore, Ladd and others, especially 
 not Professor Schinz, who has published under 
 the title of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing 
 sociological romance. Some of these critics 
 
 xix 
 
PREFACE 
 
 seem to me to labor under an inability almost 
 pathetic, to understand the thesis which they 
 seek to refute. I imagine that most of their 
 difficulties have been answered by anticipa- 
 tion elsewhere in this volume, and I am sure 
 that my readers will thank me for not adding 
 more repetition to the fearful amount that is 
 already there. 
 
 95 Irving St., Cambridge (Mass.), 
 August, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 I 
 
 The Fxjnction of Cognition 1 
 
 II 
 
 The Tigers in India 43 
 
 in 
 
 Humanism and Truth 51 
 
 IV 
 
 The Relation between Knower and Known . . 102 
 
 V 
 
 The Essence of Humanism 121 
 
 VI 
 
 A Word More about Truth 136 
 
 VII 
 
 Professor Pratt on Truth 162 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Pragmatist Account of Truth and its Mis- 
 understanders 180 
 
 IX 
 
 The Meaning of the Word Truth 217 
 
 xxi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 X 
 
 The Existence or Jtjlitjs C^esak 221 
 
 XI 
 
 The Absolute and the Strenuous Life . . . 226 
 
 XII 
 
 Professor Hebert on Pragmatism . .... 230 
 
 XIII 
 
 Abstractionism and ' Relativismus ' 246 
 
 XIV 
 
 Two English Critics 272 
 
 XV 
 A Dialogue 287 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION' 
 
 jLhe following inquiry is (to use a distinction 
 familiar to readers of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson) 
 not an inquiry into the 'how it comes,' but into 
 the 'what it is' of cognition. What we call acts 
 of cognition are evidently realized through 
 what we call brains and their events, whether 
 there be 'souls' dynamically connected with 
 the brains or not. But with neither brains nor 
 souls has this essay any business to transact. 
 In it we shall simply assume that cognition is 
 produced, somehow, and limit ourselves to ask- 
 ing what elements it contains, what factors it 
 implies. 
 
 Cognition is a function of consciousness. 
 The first factor it implies is therefore a state of 
 consciousness wherein the cognition shall take 
 place. Having elsewhere used the word 'feel- 
 
 ' Read before the Aristotelian Society, December 1, 1884, 
 and first published in Mind, vol. x (1885). — This, and the 
 following articles have received a very slight verbal revision, 
 consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy. 
 
 1 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 ing' to designate generically all states of con- 
 sciousness considered subjectively, or without 
 respect to their possible function, I shall then 
 say that, whatever elements an act of cognition 
 may imply besides, it at least implies the exist- 
 ence of a feeling. [If the reader share the cur- 
 rent antipathy to the word ' feeling, ' he may sub- 
 stitute for it, wherever I use it, the word ' idea,' 
 taken in the old broad Lockian sense, or he 
 may use the clumsy phrase ' state of conscious- 
 ness,' or finally he may say 'thought' instead.] 
 Now it is to be observed that the common 
 consent of mankind has agreed that some feel- 
 ings are cognitive and some are simple facts 
 having a subjective, or, what one might almost 
 call a physical, existence, but no such self- 
 transcendent function as would be implied in 
 their being pieces of knowledge. Our task is 
 again limited here. We are not to ask, ' How 
 is self -transcendence possible?' We are only 
 to ask, 'How comes it that common sense has 
 assigned a number of cases in which it is as- 
 sumed not only to be possible but actual ? And 
 what are the marks used by common sense to 
 
 2 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 distinguish those cases from the rest ? ' In short, 
 our inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psy- 
 chology, — hardly anything more. 
 
 Condillac embarked on a quest similar to 
 this by his famous hypothesis of a statue to 
 which variotis feelings were successively im- 
 parted. Its first feeling was supposed to be one 
 of fragrance. But to avoid all possible com- 
 plication with the question of genesis, let us not 
 attribute even to a statue the possession of our 
 imaginary feeling. Let us rather suppose it 
 attached to no matter, nor localized at any 
 point in space, but left swinging in vacuo, as it 
 were, by the direct creative fiat of a god. And 
 let us also, to escape entanglement with diffi- 
 culties about the physical or psychical nature 
 of its 'object,' not call it a feeling of fragrance 
 or of any other determinate sort, but limit our- 
 selves to assuming that it is a feeling of q. What 
 is true of it under this abstract name will be no 
 less true of it in any more particular shape 
 (such as fragrance, pain, hardness) which the 
 reader may suppose. 
 
 Now, if this feeling of q be the only creation 
 3 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 of the god, it will of course form the entire uni- 
 verse. And if, to escape the cavils of that large 
 class of persons who believe that semper idem 
 sentire ac non sentire are the same,' we allow the 
 feeling to be of as short a duration as they like, 
 that universe will only need to last an infini- 
 tesimal part of a second. The feeling in ques- 
 tion will thus be reduced to its fighting weight, 
 and all that befalls it in the way of a cognitive 
 function must be held to befall in the brief in- 
 stant of its quickly snuffed-out life, — a life, it 
 will also be noticed, that has no other moment 
 
 ' ' The Relativity of Knowledge,' held in this sense, is, it may 
 be observed in passing, one of the oddest of philosophic su- 
 perstitions. Whatever facts may be cited in its favor are due 
 to the properties of nerve-tissue, which may be exhausted by 
 too prolonged an excitement. Patients with neuralgias that 
 last iinremittingly for days can, however, assure us that the 
 limits of this nerve-law are pretty widely drawn. But if we 
 physically could get a feeling that should last eternally un- 
 changed, what atom of logical or psychological argument is 
 there to prove that it would not be felt as long as it lasted, 
 and felt for just what it is, all that time ? The reason for the 
 opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think that so 
 stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be, should 
 be allowed to fill eternity with its presence. An interminable 
 acquaintance, leading to no knowledge-ofcoid, — such would 
 be its condition. 
 
 4 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 of consciousness either preceding or follow- 
 ing it. 
 
 Well now, can our little feeling, thus left 
 alone in the universe, — for the god and we 
 psychological critics may be supposed left out 
 of the account, — can the feeling, I say, be said 
 to have any sort of a cognitive function ? For it 
 to know, there must be something to be known. 
 What is there, on the present supposition .'' One 
 may reply, 'the feeling's content q.' But does 
 it not seem more proper to call this the feeling's 
 quality than its content.'* Does not the word 
 'content' suggest that the feeling has already 
 dirempted itself as an act from its content as an 
 object .'' And would it be quite safe to assume 
 so promptly that the quality qoia, feeling is one 
 and the same thing with a feeling of the qual- 
 ity q ? The quality q, so far, is an entirely sub- 
 jective fact which the feeling carries so to 
 speak endogenously, or in its pocket. If any 
 one pleases to dignify so simple a fact as this 
 by the name of knowledge, of course nothing 
 can prevent him. But let us keep closer to the 
 path of common usage, and reserve the name 
 
 5 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 knowledge for the cognition of 'realities,' 
 meaning by realities things that exist inde- 
 pendently of the feeling through which their 
 cognition occurs. If the content of the feeling 
 occur nowhere in the universe outside of the 
 feeling itself, and perish with the feeling, com- 
 mon ' usage refuses to call it a reality, and 
 brands it as a subjective feature of the feeling's 
 constitution, or at the most as the feeling's 
 dream. 
 
 For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific 
 sense, then, it must be self- transcendent ; and 
 we must prevail upon the god to create a reality 
 outside of it to correspond to its intrinsic qual- 
 ity q. Thus only can it be redeemed from the 
 condition of being a solipsism. If now the new- 
 created reality resemble the feeling's quality q, 
 I say that the feeling may be held by us to be 
 cognizant of that reality. 
 
 This first instalment of my thesis is sure to be 
 attacked. But one word before defending it. 
 ' Reality' has become our warrant for calling a 
 feeling cognitive ; but what becomes our war- 
 rant for calling anything reality? The only 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 Vreply is — the faith of the present critic or in- 
 quirer. At every moment of his life he finds 
 himself subject to a belief in some realities, even 
 though his realities of this year should prove to 
 be his illusions of the next. Whenever he finds 
 that the feeling he is studying contemplates 
 what he himself regards as a reality, he must 
 of course admit the feeling itself to be truly 
 cognitive. We are ourselves the critics here; 
 and we shall find our burden much lightened 
 by being allowed to take reality in this relative 
 and provisional way. Every science must make 
 some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are 
 but fallible mortals. When they study the 
 function of cognition, they do it by means of 
 the same function in themselves. And knowing 
 that the fountain cannot go higher than its 
 source, we should promptly confess that our 
 results in this field are affected by our own lia- 
 bility to err. The most we can claim is, that 
 what we say about cognition may be counted as 
 true as what we say about anything else. If our 
 hearers agree with us about what are to be held 
 'realities,' they will perhaps also agree to the 
 
 7 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 reality of our doctrine of the way in which 
 they are known. We cannot ask for more. 
 
 Our terminology shall follow the spirit of 
 these remarks. We will deny the function of 
 knowledge to any feeling whose quality or con- 
 tent we do not ourselves believe to exist outside 
 of that feeling as well as in it. We may call 
 such a feeling a dream if we like ; we shall have 
 to see later whether we can call it a fiction or 
 an error. 
 
 To revert now to our thesis. Some persons 
 will immediately cry out, 'How can a reality 
 resemble a feeling?' Here we find how wise 
 we were to name the quality of the feeling by 
 an algebraic letter q. We flank the whole diflS- 
 culty of resemblance between an inner state and 
 an outward reality, by leaving it free to any 
 one to postulate as the reality whatever sort of 
 thing he thinks can resemble a feeling, — if not 
 an outward thing, then another feeling like the 
 first one, — the mere feeling q in the critic's 
 mind for example. Evading thus this objec- 
 tion, we turn to another which is sure to be 
 urged. 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 It will come from those philosophers to 
 whom 'thought,' in the sense of a knowledge of 
 relations, is the all in all of mental life ; and who 
 hold a merely feeling consciousness to be no 
 better — one would sometimes say from their 
 utterances, a good deal worse — than no con- 
 sciousness at all. Such phrases as these, for 
 example, are common to-day in the mouths of 
 those who claim to walk in the footprints of 
 Kant and Hegel rather than in the ancestral 
 English paths : 'A perception detached from all 
 others, " left out of the heap we call a mind," 
 being out of all relation, has no qualities — is 
 simply nothing. We can no more consider it 
 than we can see vacancy.' ' It is simply in itself 
 fleeting, momentary, unnameable (because 
 while we name it it has become another), and 
 for the very same reason unknowable, the very 
 negation of knowability.' 'Exclude from what 
 we have considered real all qualities consti- 
 tuted by relation, we find that none are left.' 
 
 Altho such citations as these from the writ- 
 ings of Professor Green might be multiplied al- 
 most indefinitely, they would hardly repay the 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 pains of collection, so egregiously false is the 
 doctrine they teach. Our little supposed feel- 
 ing, whatever it may be, from the cognitive 
 point of view, whether a bit of knowledge or a 
 dream, is certainly no psychical zero. It is a 
 most positively and definitely qualified inner 
 fact, with a complexion all its own. Of course 
 there are many mental facts which it is not. It 
 knows q, if 9 be a reality, with a very minimum 
 of knowledge. It neither dates nor locates it. 
 It neither classes nor names it. And it neither 
 knows itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself 
 with other feelings, nor estimates its own dura- 
 tion or intensity. It is, in short, if there is no 
 more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless 
 and useless kind of thing. 
 
 But if we must describe it by so many nega- 
 tions, and if it can say nothing about itself or 
 about anything else, by what right do we deny 
 that it is a psychical zero.? And may not the 
 'relationists' be right after all? 
 
 In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the 
 solution of this riddle; and a simple enough 
 solution it is when frankly looked at. A quo- 
 
 10 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 tation from a too seldom quoted book, the 
 Exploratio Philosophica of John Grote (Lon- 
 don, 1865), p. 60, will form the best introduc- 
 tion to it. 
 
 ' Our knowledge,' writes Grote, ' may be con- 
 templated in either of two ways, or, to use other 
 words, we may speak in a double manner of the 
 " object" of knowledge. That is, we may either 
 use language thus : we know a thing, a man, 
 etc. ; or we may use it thus : we know such and 
 such things about the thing, the man, etc. Lan- 
 guage in general, following its true logical 
 instinct, distinguishes between these two ap- 
 plications of the notion of knowledge, the one 
 being yvSivaL, noscere, kennen, connaitre, the 
 other being ei^ivai, scire, wissen, savoir. In 
 the origin, the former may be considered more 
 what I have called phenomenal — it is the 
 notion of knowledge as acquaintance or famil- 
 iarity with what is known; which notion is 
 perhaps more akin to the phenomenal bodily 
 communication, and is less purely intellectual 
 than the other; it is the kind of knowledge 
 which we have of a thing by the presentation 
 
 11 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 to the senses or the representation of it in 
 picture or type, a Vorstellung. The other, 
 which is what we express in judgments or pro- 
 positions, what is embodied in Begriffe or 
 concepts without any necessary imaginative 
 representation, is in its origin the more intel- 
 lectual notion of knowledge. There is no 
 reason, however, why we should not express 
 our knowledge, whatever its kind, in either 
 manner, provided only we do not confusedly 
 express it, in the same proposition or piece of 
 reasoning, in both.' 
 
 Now obviously if our supposed feeling of q 
 is (if knowledge at all) only knowledge of the 
 mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he- 
 goat, as the ancients would have said, to try to 
 extract from it any deliverance about anything 
 under the sun, even about itself. And it is as 
 unjust, after our failure, to turn upon it and 
 call it a psychical nothing, as it would be, after 
 our fruitless attack upon the billy-goat, to pro- 
 claim the non-lactiferous character of the 
 whole goat-tribe. But the entire industry of the 
 Hegelian school in trying to shove simple sen- 
 
 12 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 sation out of the pale of philosophic recogni- 
 tion is founded on this false issue. It is always 
 the 'speechlessness' of sensation, it-s inability 
 to make any 'statement,'* that is held to make 
 the very notion of it meaningless, and to justify] 
 the student of knowledge in scouting it out o| 
 existence. ' Significance,' in the sense of stand- 
 ing as the sign of other mental states, is taken 
 to be the sole function of what mental states 
 we have; and from the perception that our 
 little primitive sensation has as yet no signifi- 
 cance in this literal sense, it is an easy step to 
 call it first meaningless, next senseless, then 
 vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and 
 inadmissible. But in this universal liquida- 
 tion, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct 
 acquaintance into hnowledge-about, until at 
 last nothing is left about which the knowledge 
 can be supposed to obtain, does not all 'sig- 
 nificance' depart from the situation.'' And 
 when our knowledge about things has reached 
 its never so complicated perfection, must there 
 
 ^ See, for example, Green's Introduction to Hume's Treor- 
 tise of Human Nature, p. 36. 
 
 13 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 not needs abide alongside of it and inextri- 
 cably mixed in with it some acquaintance with 
 what things all this knowledge is about ? 
 
 Now, our supposed little feeling gives a 
 what; and if other feelings should succeed 
 which remember- the first, its what may stand 
 as subject or predicate of some piece of know- 
 ledge-about, of some judgment, perceiving re- 
 lations between it and other whats which the 
 other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb 
 q will then receive a name and be no longer 
 speechless. But every name, as students of 
 logic know, has its 'denotation' ; and the deno- 
 tation always means some reality or content, 
 relationless ah extra or with its internal rela- 
 tions unanalyzed, like the q which our primi- 
 tive sensation is supposed to know. No rela- 
 tion-expressing proposition is possible except 
 on the basis of a preliminary acquaintance 
 with such 'facts,' with such contents, as this. 
 Let the q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or 
 let it be a more complex kind of feeling, like 
 that of the full-moon swimming in her blue 
 abyss, it must first come in that simple shape, 
 
 14 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 and be held fast in that first intention, before 
 any knowledge about it can be attained. The 
 knowledge about it is it with a context added. 
 Undo it, and what is added cannot be con- 
 text' 
 
 Let us say no more then about this objec- 
 tion, but enlarge our thesis, thus : If there be 
 in the universe a q other than the q in the feel- 
 ing, the latter may have acquaintance with an 
 entity ejective to itself ; an acquaintance more- 
 over, which, as mere acquaintance, it would 
 be hard to imagine susceptible either of im- 
 provement or increase, being in its way com- 
 plete; and which would oblige us (so long as 
 we refuse not to call acquaintance knowledge) 
 to say not only that the feeling is cognitive, but 
 that all qualities of feeling, so long as there is 
 
 ' If A enters and B exclaims, 'Did n't you see my brother 
 on the stairs ?' we all hold that A may answer, 'I saw him, but 
 did n't know he was your brother' ; ignorance of brotherhood 
 not abolishing power to see. But those who, on account of the 
 unrelatedness of the first facts with which we become ac- 
 quainted, deny them to be 'known' to us, ought in consistency 
 to maintain that if A did not perceive the relationship of the 
 man on the stairs to B, it was impossible he should have 
 noticed him at all. 
 
 15 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 anything outside of them which they resemble, 
 are feelings of qualities of existence, and per- 
 ceptions of outward fact. 
 
 The point of this vindication of the cogni- 
 tive function of the first feeling lies, it will be 
 noticed, in the discovery that q does exist else- 
 where than in it. In case this discovery were 
 not made, we could not be sure the feeling was 
 cognitive ; and in case there were nothing out- 
 side to be discovered, we should have to call 
 the feeling a dream. But the feeling itself 
 cannot make the discovery. Its own q is the 
 only q it grasps; and its own nature is not a 
 particle altered by having the self-transcend- 
 ent function of cognition either added to it 
 or taken away. The function is accidental; 
 synthetic, not analytic; and falls outside and 
 not inside its being.' 
 
 * It seems odd to call so important a function accidental, 
 but I do not see how we can mend the matter. Just as, if we 
 start with the reality and ask how it may come to be known, 
 we can only reply by invoking a feeling which shall reconstruct 
 it in its own more private fashion ; so, if we start with the feel- 
 ing and ask how it may come to know, we can only reply by 
 invoking a reality which shall reconstruct it in its own more 
 public fashion. In either case, however, the datum we start 
 
 16 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be 
 nothing to be felt or hit, they discharge them- 
 selves ins blaue hinein. If, however, some- 
 thing starts up opposite them, they no longer 
 simply shoot or feel, they hit and know. 
 
 But with this arises a worse objection than 
 any yet made. We the critics look on and see 
 a real q and a feeling of q ; and because the two 
 resemble each other, we say the one knows the 
 other. But what right have we to say this until 
 we know that the feeling of q means to stand 
 for or represent just that same other q ? Sup- 
 pose, instead of one q, a number of real q's in 
 the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can 
 easily see which one of them it hits. But how 
 can we distinguish which one the feeling 
 
 with remains just what it was. One may easily get lost in ver- 
 bal mysteries about the difference between quality of feeling 
 and feeling of quality, between receiving and reconstructing 
 the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must confess 
 that the notion of real cognition involves an unmediated dual- 
 ism of the knower and the known. See Bowne's Metaphysics, 
 New York, 1882, pp. 403-412, and various passages in Lotze, 
 e. g.. Logic, § 308. [' Unmediated ' b a bad word to have 
 used. —1909.] 
 
 17 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 knows ? It knows the one it stands for. But 
 which one does it stand for? It declares no in- 
 tention in this respect. It merely resembles; 
 it resembles all indifferently ; and resembling, 
 per se, is not necessarily representing or stand- 
 ing-for at all. Eggs resemble each other, but 
 do not on that account represent, stand for, 
 or know each other. And if you say this is 
 because neither of them is a feeling, then imag- 
 ine the world to consist of nothing but tooth- 
 aches, which are feelings, feelings resembling 
 each other exactly, — would they know each 
 other the better for all that ? 
 
 The case of q being a bare quality like that 
 of toothache-pain is quite different from that 
 of its being a concrete individual thing. There 
 is practically no test for deciding whether the 
 feeling of a bare quality means to represent it 
 or not. It can do nothing to the quality beyond 
 resembling it, simply because an abstract qual- 
 ity is a thing to which nothing can be done. 
 Being without context or environment or prin- 
 cipium individuationis, a quiddity with no 
 hsecceity, a platonic idea, even duplicate edi- 
 
 18 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 tions of such a quality (were they possible), 
 would be indiscernible, and no sign could be 
 given, no result altered, whether the feeling 
 meant to stand for this edition or for that, or 
 whether it simply resembled the quality with- 
 out meaning to stand for it at all. 
 
 If now we grant a genuine pluralism of edi- 
 tions to the quality q, by assigning to each a 
 context which shall distinguish it from its mates, 
 we may proceed to explain which edition of it 
 the feeling knows, by extending our principle 
 of resemblance to the context too, and saying 
 the feeling knows the particular q whose con- 
 text it most exactly duplicates. But here again 
 the theoretic doubt recurs: duplication and 
 coincidence, are they knowledge.'' The gun 
 shows which q it points to and hits, by break- 
 ing it. Until the feeling can show us which q 
 it points to and knows, by some equally fla- 
 grant token, why are we not free to deny that 
 it either points to or knows any one of the real 
 q's at all, and to affirm that the word 'resem- 
 blance' exhaustively describes its relation to 
 
 the reality ? 
 
 19 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling 
 does show us, quite as flagrantly as the gun, 
 which q it points to ; and practically in concrete 
 cases the matter is decided by an element we 
 have hitherto left out. Let us pass from ab- 
 stractions to possible instances, and ask our 
 obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a 
 richer world. Let him send me, for example, 
 a dream of the death of a certain man, and let 
 him simultaneously cause the man to die. How 
 would our practical instinct spontaneously de- 
 cide whether this were a case of cognition of 
 the reality, or only a sort of marvellous coin- 
 cidence of a resembling reality with my dream ? 
 Just such puzzling cases as this are what the 
 'society for psychical research' is busily col- 
 lecting and trying to interpret in the most rea- 
 sonable way. 
 
 If my dream were the only one of the kind I 
 ever had in my life, if the context of the death 
 in the dream differed in many particulars from 
 the real death's context, and if my dream led 
 me to no action about the death, unquestion- 
 ably we should all call it a strange coincidence, 
 
 20 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 and naught besides. But if the death in the 
 dream had a long context, agreeing point for 
 point with every feature that attended the real 
 death ; if I were constantly having such dreams, 
 all equally perfect, and if on awaking I had a 
 habit of acting immediately as if they were 
 true and so getting 'the start' of my more 
 tardily instructed neighbors, — we should in 
 all probability have to admit that I had some 
 mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that my 
 dreams in an inscrutable way meant just those 
 realities they figured, and that the word ' coin- 
 cidence ' failed to touch the root of the matter. 
 And whatever doubts any one preserved would 
 completely vanish, if it should appear that from 
 the midst of my dream I had the power of in- 
 terfering with the course of the reality, and 
 making the events in it turn this way or that, ac- 
 cording as I dreamed they should. Then at least 
 it would be certain that my waking critics and 
 my dreaming self were dealing with the same. 
 And thus do men invariably decide such a 
 question. The falling of the dream's practical 
 consequences into the real world, and the extent 
 
 21 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 of the resemblance between the two worlds 
 are the criteria they instinctively use.' All 
 feeling is for the sake of action, all feeling re- 
 sults in action, — to-day no argument is needed 
 
 ' The thoroughgoing objector might, it is true, still return 
 to the charge, and, granting a dream vhich should completely 
 mirror the real universe, and all the actions dreamed in which 
 should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in this uni- 
 verse, still insist that this is nothing more than harmony, and 
 that it is as far as ever from being made clear whether the 
 dream-world refers to that other world, all of whose details 
 it so closely copies. This objection leads deep into metaphysics. 
 I do not impugn its importance, and justice obliges me to say 
 that but for the teachings of my colleague. Dr. Josiah Royce, 
 I should neither have grasped its full force nor made my own 
 practical and psychological point of view as clear to myself 
 as it is. On this occasion I prefer to stick steadfastly to that 
 point of view ; but I hope that Dr. Royce's more fundamental 
 criticism of the function of cognition may ere long see the light. 
 [I referred in this note to Royce's Religious aspect of phUoso- 
 phy, then about to be published. This powerful book main- 
 tained that the notion of referring involved that of an inclusive 
 mind that shall own both the real q and the mental q, and use 
 the latter expressly as a representative symbol of the former. 
 At the time I could not refute this transcendentalist opinion. 
 Later, largely through the influence of Professor D. S. Miller 
 (see his essay ' The meaning of truth and error,' in the Philo- 
 sophical Review for 1893, vol. 2 p. 403) I came to see that 
 any definitely experienceable workings would serve as inter- 
 mediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's intentions 
 would.] 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 to prove these truths. But by a most singular 
 disposition of nature which we may conceive 
 to have been different, my feelings act upon 
 the realities within my critic's world. Unless, 
 then, my critic can prove that my feeling does 
 not 'point to' those realities which it acts upon, 
 how can he continue to doubt that he and I 
 are alike cognizant of one and the same real 
 world ? If the action is performed in ohe world, 
 that must be the world the feeling intends ; if 
 in another world, that is the world the feeling 
 has in mind. If your feeling bear no fruits in 
 my world, I call it utterly detached from my 
 world ; I call it a solipsism, and call its world 
 a dream-world. If your toothache do not 
 prompt you to arf as if I had a toothache, nor 
 even as if I had a separate existence; if you 
 neither say to me, 'I know now how you must 
 suffer!' nor tell me of a remedy, I deny that 
 your feeling, however it may resemble mine, is 
 really cognizant of mine. It gives no sign of 
 being cognizant, and such a sign is absolutely 
 necessary to my admission that it is. 
 
 Before I can think you to mean my world, 
 23 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 you must aflFect my world ; before I can think 
 you to mean much of it, you must aflFect much 
 of it ; and before I can be sure you mean it as 
 I do, you must affect it just as I should if I were 
 in your place. Then I, your critic, will gladly 
 believe that we are thinking, not only of the 
 same reality, but that we are thinking it alike, 
 and thinking of much of its extent. 
 
 Without the practical effects of our neigh- 
 bor's feelings on our own world, we should 
 never suspect the existence of our neighbor's 
 feelings at all, and of course should never find 
 ourselves playing the critic as we do in this 
 article. The constitution of nature is very pe- 
 culiar. In the world of each of us are certain 
 objects called human bodies, which move 
 about and act on all the other objects there, 
 and the occasions of their action are in the 
 main what the occasions of our action would 
 be, were they our bodies. They use words and 
 gestures, which, if we used them, would have 
 thoughts behind them, — no mere thoughts 
 uberhaupt, however, but strictly determinate 
 thoughts. I think you have the notion of fire 
 
 24 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 in general, because I see you act towards this 
 fire in my room just as I act towards it, — 
 poke it and present your person towards it, 
 and so forth. But that binds me to believe that 
 if you feel 'fire' at all, this is the fire you feel. 
 As a matter of fact, whenever we constitute 
 ourselves into psychological critics, it is not 
 by dint of discovering which reality a feeling 
 'resembles' that we find out which reality it 
 means. We become first aware of which one 
 it means, and then we suppose that to be the 
 one it resembles. We see each other looking at 
 the same objects, pointing to them and turning 
 them over in various ways, and thereupon we 
 hope and trust that all of our several feelings 
 resemble the reality and each other. But this 
 is a thing of which we are never theoretically 
 sure. Still, it would practically be a case of 
 gruhelsucht, if a ruffian were assaulting and 
 drubbing my body, to spend much time in 
 subtle speculation either as to whether his 
 vision of my body resembled mine, or as to 
 whether the body he really meant to insult were 
 not some body in his mind's eye, altogether 
 
 25 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 other from my own. The practical point of 
 view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs 
 away. If what he have in mind be not my 
 body, why call we it a body at all ? His mind 
 is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence 
 we trace the things that happen. The inference 
 is quite void if the term, once inferred, be sepa- 
 rated from its connection with the body that 
 made me infer it, and connected with another 
 that is not mine at all. No matter for the meta- 
 physical puzzle of how our two minds, the ruf- 
 fian's and mine, can mean the same body. Men 
 who see each other's bodies sharing the same 
 space, treading the same earth, splashing the 
 same water, making the same air resonant, and 
 pursuing the same game and eating out of the 
 same dish, will never practically believe in a 
 pluralism of solipsistic worlds. 
 
 Where, however, the actions of one mind 
 seem to take no effect in the world of the other, 
 the case is different. This is what happens in 
 poetry and fiction. Every one knows Ivanhoe, 
 for example; but so long as we stick to the 
 story pure and simple without regard to the 
 
 26 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 facts of its production, few would hesitate to 
 admit that there are as many different Ivan- 
 hoes as there are different minds cognizant of 
 the story/ The fact that all these Ivanhoes 
 
 * That is, there ia no real 'Ivanhoe,' not even the one in Sir 
 Walter Scott's mind as he was writing the story. That one is 
 only the first one of the Ivanhoe-solipsisms. It is quite true 
 we can make it the real Ivanhoe if we like, and then say that 
 the other Ivanhoes know it or do not know it, according aa 
 they refer to and resemble it or no. This is done by bringing 
 in Sir Walter Scott himself as the author of the real Ivanhoe, 
 and so making a complex object of both. This object, how- 
 ever, is not a story pure and simple. It has dynamic relations 
 with the world common to the experience of all the readers. Sir 
 Walter Scott's Ivanhoe got itself printed in volumes which we 
 all can handle, and to any one of which we can refer to see 
 which of our versions be the true one, i. e., the original one of 
 Scott himself. We can see the manuscript ; in short we can get 
 back to the Ivanhoe in Scott's mind by many an avenue and 
 channel of this real world of our experience, — a thing we can 
 by no means do with either the Ivanhoe or the Rebecca, either 
 the Templar or the Isaac of York, of the story taken simply 
 as such, and detached from the conditions of its production. 
 Everywhere, then, we have the same test: can we pass con- 
 tinuously from two objects in two minds to a third object 
 which seems to be in both tninds, because each mind feels every 
 modification imprinted on it by the other ? If so, the first two 
 objects named are derivatives, to say the least, from the same 
 third object, and may be held, if they resemble each other, to 
 refer to one and the same reality. 
 
 27 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 resemble each other does not prove the contrary. 
 But if an alteration invented by one man in 
 his version were to reverberate immediately 
 through all the other versions, and produce 
 changes therein, we should then easily agree 
 that all these thinkers were thinking the same 
 Ivanhoe, and that, fiction or no fiction, it formed 
 a little world common to them all. 
 
 Having reached this point, we may take up 
 our thesis and improve it again. Still calling 
 the reality by the name of q and letting the 
 critic's feeling vouch for it, we can say that any 
 other feeling will be held cognizant of q, pro- 
 vided it both resemble q, and refer to q, as 
 shown by its either modifying q directly, or 
 modifying some other reality, p or r, which the 
 critic knows to be continuous with q. Or more 
 shortly, thus : The feeling of q knows whatever 
 reality it resembles, and either directly or indi- 
 rectly operates on. If it resemble without oper- 
 ating, it is a dream; if it operate without re- 
 sembling, it is an error.' 
 
 • Among such errors are those cases in which our feeling 
 operates on a reality which it does partially resemble, and yet 
 
 28 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 It is to be feared that the reader may con- 
 sider this formula rather insignificant and ob- 
 vious, and hardly worth the labor of so many 
 
 does not intend: as for instance, when I take up your um- 
 brella, meaning to take my own. I cannot be said here either 
 to know your umbrella, or my own, which latter my feeling 
 more completely resembles. I am mistaking them both, mis- 
 representing their context, etc. 
 
 We have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily 
 one mind, and the feeling criticised another. But the criticised 
 feeling and its critic may be eariier and later feeUngs of the 
 same mind, and here it might seem that we could dispense with 
 the notion of operating, to prove that critic and criticised are 
 referring to and meaning to represent the same. We think we 
 see our past feelings directly, and know what they refer to 
 without appeal. At the worst, we can always fix the intention 
 of our present feeling and make it refer to the same reality to 
 which any one of our past feelings may have referred. So we 
 need no 'operating' here, to make sure that the feeling and 
 its critic mean the same real q. Well, all the better if this is so ! 
 We have covered the more complex and difficult case in our 
 text, and we may let this easier one go. The main thing at 
 present is to stick to practical psychology, and ignore meta- 
 physical difficulties. 
 
 One more remark. Our formula contains, it will be ob- 
 served, nothing to correspond to the great principle of cogni- 
 tion laid down by Professor Ferrier in his Institutes of Meta- 
 physic and apparently adopted by all the followers of Fichte, 
 the principle, namely, that for knowledge to be constituted 
 there must be knowledge of the knowing mind along with 
 whatever else is known: not q, as we have supposed, but q 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 pages, especially when he considers that the 
 only cases to which it applies are percepts, and 
 that the whole field of symbolic or conceptual 
 thinking seems to elude its grasp. Where the 
 reality is either a material thing or act, or a 
 state of the critic's consciousness, I may both 
 mirror it in my mind and operate upon it — in 
 the latter case indirectly, of course — as soon 
 as I perceive it. But there are many cognitions, 
 universally allowed to be such, which neither 
 mirror nor operate on their realities. 
 
 In the whole field of symbolic thought we 
 are universally held both to intend, to speak of, 
 and to reach conclusions about — to know 
 in short — particular realities, without having 
 in our subjective consciousness any mind-stuff 
 that resembles them even in a remote degree. 
 
 plus myself, must be the least I can know. It is certain that 
 the common sense of mankind never dreams of using any such 
 principle when it tries to discriminate between conscious states 
 that are knowledge and conscious states that are not. So that 
 Ferrier's principle, if it have any relevancy at all, must have 
 relevancy to the metaphysical possibility of consciousness at 
 large, and not to the practically recognized constitution of 
 cognitive consciousness. We may therefore pass it by without 
 further notice here. 
 
 30 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 We are instructed about them by language 
 which awakens no consciousness beyond its 
 sound; and we know which realities they are 
 by the faintest and most fragmentary glimpse 
 of some remote context they may have and by 
 no direct imagination of themselves. As minds 
 may differ here, let me speak in the first per- 
 son. I am sure that my own current thinking 
 has words for its almost exclusive subjective 
 material, words which are made intelligible by 
 being referred to some reality that lies beyond 
 the horizon of direct consciousness, and of 
 which I am only aware as of a terminal more 
 existing in a certain direction, to which the 
 words might lead but do not lead yet. The 
 
 • 
 
 subject, or topic, of the words is usually some- 
 thing towards which I mentally seem to pitch 
 them in a backward way, almost as I might 
 jerk my thumb over my shoulder to point at 
 something, without looking round, if I were 
 only entirely sure that it was there. The up- 
 shot, or conclusion, of the words is something 
 towards which I seem to incline my head for- 
 wards, as if giving assent to its existence, 
 
 31 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 tho all my mind's eye catches sight of may 
 be some tatter of an image connected with it, 
 which tatter, however, if only endued with the 
 feeling of familiarity and reality, makes me 
 feel that the whole to which it belongs is ra- 
 tional and real, and fit to be let pass. 
 
 Here then is cognitive consciousness on a 
 large scale, and yet what it knows, it hardly 
 resembles in the least degree. The formula 
 last laid down for our thesis must therefore be 
 made more complete. We may now express it 
 thus : A percept knows whatever reality it di- 
 rectly or indirectly operates on and resembles; 
 a conceptual feeling, or thought knows ' a reality, 
 whenever it actually or potentially terminates 
 in a percept that operates on, or resembles that 
 reality, or is otherwise connected with it or with 
 its context. The latter percept may be either 
 sensation or sensorial idea; and when I say 
 the thought must terminate in such a percept, 
 I mean that it must ultimately be capable of 
 leading up thereto, — by the way of practical 
 
 ^ Is an incomplete 'thought about' that reality, that reality 
 is its 'topic,' etc. 
 
 32 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 experience, if the terminal feeling be a sensa- 
 tion ; by the way of logical or habitual sugges- 
 tion, if it be only an image in the mind. 
 
 Let an illustration make this plainer. I open 
 the first book I take up, and read the first sen- 
 tence that meets my eye: 'Newton saw the 
 handiwork of God in the heavens as plainly 
 as Paley in the animal kingdom.' I immedi- 
 ately look back and try to analyze the subject- 
 ive state in which I rapidly apprehended this 
 sentence as I read it. In the first place there 
 was an obvious feeling that the sentence was 
 intelligible and rational and related to the 
 world of realities. There was also a sense of 
 agreement or harmony between 'Newton,' 
 'Paley,' and * God.' There was no apparent 
 image connected with the words 'heavens,' or 
 'handiwork,' or 'God'; they were words 
 merely. With 'animal kingdom' I think there 
 was the faintest consciousness (it may possi- 
 bly have been an image of the steps) of the 
 Museum of Zoology in the town of Cambridge 
 where I write. With 'Paley' there was an 
 equally faint consciousness of a small dark 
 
 33 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 leather book; and with 'Newton' a pretty dis- 
 tinct vision of the right-hand lower corner of 
 a curling periwig. • This is all the mind-stuflF I 
 can discover in my first consciousness of the 
 meaning of this sentence, and I am afraid that 
 even not all of this would have been present 
 had I come upon the sentence in a genuine 
 reading of the book, and not picked it out for 
 an experiment. And yet my consciousness was 
 truly cognitive. The sentence is 'about reali- 
 ties ' which my psychological critic — for we 
 must not forget him — acknowledges to be 
 such, even as he acknowledges my distinct 
 feeling that they are realities, and my acqui- 
 escence in the general rightness of what I read 
 of them, to be true knowledge on my part. 
 
 Now what justifies my critic in being as 
 lenient as this.? This singularly inadequate 
 consciousness of mine, made up of symbols that 
 neither resemble nor aflfect the realities they 
 stand for, — how can he be sure it is cognizant 
 of the very realities he has himself in mind ? 
 
 He is sure because in countless like cases 
 he has seen such inadequate and symbolic 
 
 34 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 thoughts, by developing themselves, terminate 
 in percepts that practically modified and pre- 
 sumably resembled his own. By 'developing' 
 themselves is meant obeying their tendencies, 
 following up the suggestions nascently present 
 in them, working in the direction in which they 
 seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, mak- 
 ing distinct the halo, unravelling the fringe, 
 which is part of their composition, and in the 
 midst of which their more substantive kernel 
 of subjective content seems consciously to lie. 
 Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley 
 direction by procuring the brown leather vol- 
 ume and bringing the passages about the ani- 
 mal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I may 
 satisfy him that the words mean for me just 
 what they mean for him, by showing him in 
 concreto the very animals and their arrange- 
 ments, of which the pages treat. I may get 
 Newton's works and portraits; or if I follow 
 the line of suggestion of the wig, I may smother 
 my critic in seventeenth-century matters per- 
 taining to Newton's environment, to show 
 that the word 'Newton' has the same locus 
 
 35 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 and relations in both our minds. Finally I 
 may, by act and word, persuade him that what 
 I mean by God and the heavens and the 
 analogy of the handiworks, is just what he 
 means also. 
 
 My demonstration in the last resort is to 
 his senses. My thought makes me act on his 
 senses much as he might himself act on them, 
 were he pursuing the consequences of a per- 
 ception of his own. P ractically then my thought 
 termin ates in his realities. He willingly sup- 
 poses it, therefore, to be of them, and inwardly 
 to resemble what his own thought would be, 
 were it of the same symbolic sort as mine. And 
 the pivot and fulcrum and support of his men- 
 tal persuasion, is the sensible operation which 
 my thought leads me, or may lead, to effect — 
 the bringing of Paley's book, of Newton's por- 
 trait, etc., before his very eyes. 
 
 In the last analysis, then, we believe that we 
 all know and think about and talk about the 
 same world, because we believe our percepts 
 are possessed by us in common. And we believe 
 this because the percepts of each one of us seem 
 
 36 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 to be changed in consequence of changes in the 
 percepts of some one else. What I am for you 
 is in the first instance a percept of your own. 
 Unexpectedly, however, I open and show you 
 a book, uttering certain sounds the while. 
 These acts are also your percepts, but they so 
 resemble acts of yours with feelings prompting 
 them, that you cannot doubt I have the feel- 
 ings too, or that the book is one book felt in 
 both our worlds. That it is felt in the same 
 way, that my feelings of it resemble yours, is 
 something of which we never can be sure, but 
 which we assume as the simplest hypothesis 
 that meets the case. As a matter of fact, we 
 never are sure of it, and, as erkenntnisstheore- 
 tiker, we can only say that of feelings that 
 should not resemble each other, both could not 
 know the same thing at the same time in the 
 same way.' If each holds to its own percept as 
 the reality, it is bound to say of the other per- 
 cept, that, though it may intend that reality, 
 and prove this by working change upon it, 
 
 ' Though both might terminate in the same thing and be 
 incomplete thoughts 'about' it. 
 
 37 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 yet, if it do not resemble it, it is all false and 
 wrong.' 
 
 If this be so of percepts, how much more so 
 of higher modes of thought! Even in the 
 sphere of sensation individuals are probably 
 different enough. Comparative study of the 
 simplest conceptual elements seems to show 
 a wider divergence still. And when it comes 
 to general theories and emotional attitudes 
 towards life, it is indeed time to say with Thack- 
 eray, ' My friend, two different universes walk 
 about under your hat and under mine.' 
 
 What can save us at all and prevent us from 
 flying asunder into a chaos of mutually repel- 
 lent solipsisms.'* Through what can our sev- 
 eral minds commune.'' Through nothing but 
 the mutual resemblance of those of our per- 
 ceptual feelings which have this power of 
 
 ' The difference between Idealism and Bealism is immsr 
 terial here. What is said in the text is consistent with either 
 theory. A law by which my percept shall change yours di- 
 rectly is no more mysterious than a law by which it shall first 
 change a physical reality, and then the reality change yours. 
 In either case you and I seem knit into a continuous world, 
 and not to form a pair of solipsisms. 
 
 38 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 modifying one another, which are mere dumb 
 knowledges-of -acquaintance, and which must 
 also resemble their realities or not know them 
 aright at all. In such pieces of knowledge-of- 
 acquaintance all our knowledge-about must 
 end, and carry a sense of this possible termina- 
 tion as part of its content. These percepts, 
 these termini, these sensible things, these mere 
 matters-of-acquaintance, are the only realities 
 we ever directly know, and the whole history of 
 our thought is the history of our substitution 
 of one of them for another, and the reduction 
 of the substitute to the status of a conceptual 
 sign. Contemned though they be by some 
 thinkers, these sensations are the mother- 
 earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first 
 and last limits, the terminus a quo and the 
 terminus ad quern of the mind. To find such 
 sensational termini should be our aim with 
 all our higher thought. They end discussion; 
 they destroy the false conceit of knowledge; 
 and without them we are all at sea with each 
 other's meaning. If two men act alike on a 
 percept, they believe themselves to feel alike 
 
 39 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 about it; if not, they may suspect they know it 
 in differing ways. We can never be sure we 
 understand each other till we are able to bring 
 the matter to this test.* This is why meta- 
 physical discussions are so much like fighting 
 with the air; they have no practical issue of a 
 sensational kind. 'Scientific' theories, on the 
 other hand, always terminate in definite per- 
 cepts. You can deduce a possible sensation 
 from your theory and, taking me into your 
 laboratory, prove that your theory is true of 
 my world by giving me the sensation then and 
 there. Beautiful is the flight of conceptual 
 reason through the upper air of truth. No 
 wonder philosophers are dazzled by it still, 
 and no wonder they look with some disdain at 
 the low earth of feeling from which the god- 
 
 ^ 'There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist 
 in anything but a possible diflFerence of practice. ... It ap- 
 pears, then, that the rule for attaining the [highest] grade of 
 clearness of apprehension is as follows : Consider what efiEects, 
 which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive 
 the object of oiu- conception to have. Then, our conception 
 of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.' 
 Charles S. Peirce: 'How to make our Ideas clear,' in Popular 
 Scierwe Monthly, New York, January, 1878, p. 293. 
 
 40 
 
THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION 
 
 dess launched herself aloft. But woe to her 
 if she return not home to its acquaintance; 
 Nirgends hapen dann die unsicheren Sohlen — 
 every crazy wind will take her, and, like a 
 fire-balloon at night, she will go out among the 
 stars. 
 
 Note. — The reader will easily see how much of the account 
 of the truth-function developed later in Pragmatism was 
 already explicit in this earlier article, and how much came 
 to be defined later. In this earlier article we find distinctly 
 asserted : — 
 
 1. The reality, external to the true idea; 
 
 2. The critic, reader, or epistemologist, with his own belief, 
 as warrant for this reality's existence ; 
 
 3. The experienceable environment, as the vehicle or me- 
 dium connecting knower with known, and yielding the cogni- 
 tive relation; 
 
 4. The notion of pointing, through this medium, to the 
 reality, as one condition of our being said to know it; 
 
 5. That of resembling it, and eventually affecting it, as de- 
 termining the pointing to it and not to something else. 
 
 6. The elimination of the 'epistemological gulf,' so that the 
 whole truth-relation falls inside of the continuities of concrete 
 experience, and is constituted of particular processes, varying 
 with every object and subject, and susceptible of being de- 
 scribed in detail. 
 
 The defects in this earlier account are : — 
 
 1. The possibly undue prominence given to resembling, 
 
 which altho a fundamental function in knowing truly, is so 
 
 often dispensed with; 
 
 41 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 2. The undue emphasis laid upon operating on the object 
 itself, which in many cases is indeed decisive of that being 
 what we refer to, but which is often lacking, or replaced by 
 operations on other things related to the object. 
 
 3. The imperfect development of the generalized notion of 
 the workability of the feeling or idea as equivalent to that 
 satisfactory adaptation to the particular reality, which-consti- 
 tutes the truth of the idea. It is this more generalized notion, 
 as covering all such specifications as pointing, fitting, operating 
 or resembling, that distinguishes the developed view of 
 Dewey, Schiller, and myself. 
 
 4. The treatment, on page 39, of percepts as the only 
 realm of reality. I now treat concepts as a co-ordinate 
 realm. 
 
 The next paper represents a somewhat broader grasp of the 
 topic on the writer's part. 
 
II 
 
 THE TIGERS IN INDIA' 
 
 There are two ways of knowing things, 
 knowing them immediately or intuitively, and 
 knowing them conceptually or representatively. 
 Altho such things as the white paper before 
 our eyes can be known intuitively, most of 
 the things we know, the tigers now in India, 
 for example, or the scholastic system of phi- 
 losophy, are known only representatively or 
 symbolically. 
 
 Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first 
 a case of conceptual knowledge; and let it be 
 our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit 
 here. Exactly what do we mean by saying 
 that we here know the tigers ? What is the 
 precise fact that the cognition so confidently 
 claimed is known-as, to use Shadworth Hodg- 
 son's inelegant but valuable form of words .'' 
 
 Most men would answer that what we mean 
 
 ' Extracts from a presidential address before the American 
 Psychological Association, published in the Psychological 
 Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895). 
 
 43 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 by knowing the tigers is having them, how- 
 ever absent in body, become in some way 
 present to our thought ; or that our knowledge 
 of them is known as presence of our thought to 
 them. A great mystery is usually made of this 
 peculiar presence in absence; and the scho- 
 lastic philosophy, which is only common sense 
 grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar 
 kind of existence, called intentional inexist- 
 ence, of the tigers in our mind. At the very 
 least, people would say that what we mean 
 by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing 
 towards them as we sit here. 
 
 But now what do we mean by pointing, in 
 such a case as this .'' What is the pointing 
 known-as, here.'' 
 
 To this question I shall have to give a verj' 
 prosaic answer — one that traverses the pre- 
 possessions not only of common sense and 
 scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the 
 epistemological writers whom I have ever 
 read. The answer, made brief, is this: The 
 pointing of our thought to the tigers is known 
 simply and solely as a procession of mental 
 
 44 
 
THE TIGERS IN INDIA 
 
 associates and motor consequences that follow 
 on the thought, and that would lead harmoni- 
 ously, if followed out, into some ideal or real 
 context, or even into the immediate presence, 
 of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a 
 jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger ; 
 as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. 
 It is known as our ability to utter all sorts 
 of propositions which don't contradict other 
 propositions that are true of the real tigers. It 
 is even known, if we take the tigers very seri- 
 ously, as actions of ours which may terminate 
 in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we 
 took a voyage to India for the purpose of 
 tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins 
 of the striped rascals which we had laid low. 
 In all this there is no self-transcendency in our 
 mental images taken by themselves. They are 
 one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; 
 and their pointing to the tigers is a per- 
 fectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, 
 if you once grant a connecting world to be 
 there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in 
 themselves as loose and separate, to use 
 
 45 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Hume's language, as any two things can be; 
 and pointing means here an operation as ex- 
 ternal and adventitious as any that nature 
 yields/ 
 
 I hope you may agree with me now that in 
 representative knowledge there is no special 
 inner mystery, but only an outer chain of 
 physical or mental intermediaries connecting 
 thought and thing. To know an object is here 
 to lead to it through a context which the world 
 supplies. All this was most instructively set 
 forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at our 
 meeting in New York last Christmas, and for 
 re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion, 
 I owe him this acknowledgment.^ 
 
 Let us next pass on to the case of immediate 
 
 ' A stone in one field may 'fit,' we say, a hole in another 
 field. But the relation of 'fitting,' so long as no one carries 
 the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the 
 fact that such an act may happen. Similarly with the know- 
 ing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory name 
 for a further associative and terminative process that may 
 
 occur. 
 
 2 
 
 See Dr. Miller's articles on Truth and Error, and on 
 Content and Function, in the Philosophical Review, July, 
 1893, and Nov., 1895. 
 
 46 
 
THE TIGERS IN INDIA 
 
 or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and 
 let the object be the white paper before our 
 eyes. The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff 
 are here indistinguishably the same in nature, 
 as we saw a moment since, and there is no 
 context of intermediaries or associates to stand 
 between and separate the thought and thing. 
 There is no ' presence in absence ' here, and no 
 'pointing,' but rather an allround embracing 
 of the paper by the thought; and it is clear 
 that the knowing cannot now be explained 
 exactly as it was when the tigers were its object. 
 Dotted all through our experience are states of 
 immediate acquaintance just like this. Some- 
 where our belief always does rest on ultimate 
 data like the whiteness, smoothness, or square- 
 ness of this paper. Whether such qualities be 
 
 j 
 
 truly ultimate aspects of being, or only provi- 
 sional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get 
 better informed, is quite immaterial for our 
 present inquiry. So long as it is believed in, 
 we see our object face to face. What now do 
 we mean by ' knowing ' such a sort of object as 
 this ? For this is also the way- in which we 
 
 47 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 should know the tiger if our conceptual idea 
 of him were to terminate by having led us to 
 his lair? 
 
 This address must not become too long, so I 
 must give my answer in the fewest words. And 
 let me first say this : So far as the white paper 
 or other ultimate datum of our experience is 
 considered to enter also into some one else's 
 experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to 
 know it there as well as here ; so far, again, as 
 it is considered to be a mere mask for hidden 
 molecules that other now impossible experi- 
 ences of our own might some day lay bare to 
 view ; so far it is a case of tigers in India again 
 — the things known being absent experiences, 
 the knowing can only consist in passing 
 smoothly towards them through the inter- 
 mediary context that the world supplies. But 
 if our own private vision of the paper be con- 
 sidered in abstraction from every other event, 
 as if it constituted by itself the universe (and 
 it might perfectly well do so, for aught we can 
 understand to the contrary), then the paper 
 seen arid the seeing of it are only two names for 
 
 48 
 
THE TIGERS IN INDIA 
 
 one indivisible fact which, properly named, 
 is the datum, the -phenomenon, or the experi- 
 ence . The paper is in the mind and the mind 
 is around the paper, because paper and mind 
 are only two names that are given later to the 
 one experience, when, taken in a larger world 
 of which it forms a part, its connections 
 are traced in different directions.* To know 
 
 ' What is meant by this is that 'the experience' can be re- 
 ferred to either of two great associative systems, that of the 
 experiencer'a mental history, or that of the experienced facts 
 of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part, and may 
 be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection. One 
 might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the 
 
 -6 
 
 -0- 
 
 6- 
 
 same object, O, appears also in the mental history of different 
 persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases 
 to be the private property of one experience, and becomes, so 
 to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its outer his- 
 tory in this way, and represent it by the horizontal line. [It 
 is also known representatively at other points of the vertical 
 lines, or intuitively there again, so that the line of its outer his- 
 tory would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it 
 
 49 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental 
 content and object to be identical. This is a very 
 difiFerent definition from that which we gave 
 of representative knowledge; but neither de- 
 finition involves those mysterious notions of 
 self-transcendency and presence in absence 
 which are such essential parts of the ideas 
 of knowledge, both of philosophers and of 
 common men.' 
 
 straight for simplicity's sake.] In any case, however, it is the 
 same stuff &a,t figures in all the sets of lines. 
 
 ' [The reader will observe that the text is written from the 
 point of view of naif realism or common sense, and avoids 
 raising the idealistic controversy.] 
 
Ill 
 
 HUMANISM AND TRUTH' 
 
 Receiving from the Editor of Mind an 
 advance proof of Mr. Bradley's article on 
 'Truth and Practice,' I understand this as 
 a hint to me to join in the controversy over 
 'Pragmatism' which seems to have seriously 
 begun. As my name has been coupled with 
 the movement, I deem it wise to take the hint, 
 the more so as in some quarters greater credit 
 has been given me than I deserve, and prob- 
 ably undeserved discredit in other quarters 
 falls also to my lot. 
 
 First, as to the word 'pragmatism.' I my- 
 self have only used the term to indicate a 
 method of carrying on abstract discussion. 
 The serious meaning of a concept, says Mr. 
 Peirce, lies in the concrete difference to some 
 one which its being true will make. Strive 
 
 ' Reprinted, with slight verbal revision, from Mind, vol. 
 xiii, N. S., p. 457 (October, 1904). A couple of interpolations 
 from another article in Mind, 'Humanism and truth once 
 more,' in vol. sdv, have been made. 
 
 51 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 to bring all debated conceptions to that ' prag- 
 matic' test, and you will escape vain wrangling : 
 if it can make no practical difference which of 
 two statements be true, then they are really one 
 statement in two verbal forms ; if it can make 
 no practical difference whether a given state- 
 ment be true or false, then the statement has 
 no real meaning. In neither case is there 
 anything fit to quarrel about: we may save 
 our breath, and pass to more important 
 things. 
 
 I All that the pragmatic method implies, 
 then, is that truths should have practical • 
 (consequences. In England the word has been 
 used more broadly still, to cover the notion 
 that the truth of any statement consists in the 
 consequences, and particularly in their being 
 good consequences. Here we get beyond 
 affairs of method altogether; and since my 
 pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so 
 different, and both are important enough to 
 
 I ' ['Practical' in the sense of particvlar, of course, not in 
 i the sense that the consequences may not be mental as well 
 I as physical.] 
 
 52 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 have different names, I think that Mr. Schil- 
 ler's proposal to call the wider pragmatism 
 by the name of 'humanism' is excellent and 
 ought to be adopted. The narrower prag- 
 matism may still be spoken of as the 'prag- 
 matic method.' 
 
 I have read in the past six months many 
 hostile reviews of Schiller's and Dewey's pub- 
 lications ; but with the exception of Mr. Brad- 
 ley's elaborate indictment, they are out of 
 reach where I write, and I have largely forgot- 
 ten them. I think that a free discussion of the 
 subject on my part would in any case be more 
 useful than a polemic attempt at rebutting 
 these criticisms in detail. Mr. Bradley in par- 
 ticular can be taken care of by Mr. Schiller. 
 He repeatedly confesses himself unable to com- 
 prehend Schiller's views, he evidently has not 
 sought to do so sympathetically, and I deeply 
 regret to say that his laborious article throws, 
 for my mind, absolutely no useful light upon 
 the subject. It seems to me on the whole an 
 ignoratio elenchi, and I feel free to disregard it 
 
 altogether. 
 
 53 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 The subject is unquestionably difficult. 
 Messrs. Dewey's and Schiller's thought is emi- 
 nently an induction, a generalization working 
 itself free from all sorts of entangling particu- 
 lars. If true, it involves much restatement of 
 traditional notions. This is a kind of intel- 
 lectual product that never attains a classic 
 form of expression when first promulgated. 
 The critic ought therefore not to be too sharp 
 and logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but 
 should weigh it as a whole, and especially weigh 
 it against its possible alternatives. One should 
 also try to apply it first to one instance, and 
 then to another to see how it will work. It 
 seems to me that it is emphatically not a case 
 for instant execution, by conviction of intrinsic 
 absurdity or of self-contradiction, or by cari- 
 cature of what it would look like if reduced to 
 skeleton shape. Humanism is in fact much 
 more like one of those secular changes that 
 come upon public opinion overnight, as it were, 
 borne upon tides 'too deep for sound or foam,' 
 that survive all the crudities and extravagances 
 of their advocates, that you can pin to no one 
 
 54 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any 
 one decisive stab. 
 
 Such have been the changes from aristocracy 
 to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, 
 from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static 
 to evolutionary ways of understanding life — 
 changes of which we all have been spectators. 
 Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the 
 method of confutation by single decisive rea- 
 sons, showing that the new view involves self- 
 contradiction, or traverses some fundamental 
 principle. This is like stopping a river by plant- 
 ing a stick in the middle of its bed. Round 
 your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there 
 all the same.' In reading some of our oppo- 
 nents, I am not a little reminded of those catho- 
 lic writers who refute darwinism by telling us 
 that higher species cannot come from lower 
 because minus nequit gignere plus, or that the 
 notion of transformation is absurd, for it im- 
 plies that species tend to their own destruction, 
 and that would violate the principle that every 
 reality tends to persevere in its own shape. 
 The point of view is too myopic, too tight and 
 
 55 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 close to take in the inductive argument. Wide 
 generalizations in science always meet with 
 these summary refutations in their early days ; 
 but they outlive them, and the refutations then 
 sound oddly antiquated and scholastic. I can- 
 not help suspecting that the humanistic theory 
 is going through this kind of would-be refuta- 
 tion at present. 
 
 The one condition of understanding human- 
 ism is to become inductive-minded oneself, to 
 drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of 
 least resistance 'on the whole.' 'In other 
 words,' an opponent might say, 'resolve your 
 intellect into a kind of slush.' 'Even so,' I 
 make reply, — ' if you will consent to use no 
 politer word.' For humanism, conceiving the 
 more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's 
 term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear ar- 
 guments and ancient ideals of rigor and final- 
 ity. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so 
 different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, 
 that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. 
 Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a mul- 
 titude of standards, of which some, for aught 
 
 56 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 we know, may fail in any given case ; and what 
 is more satisfactory than any alternative in 
 sight, may to the end be a sum of pluses and 
 minuses, concerning which we can only trust 
 that by ulterior corrections and improvements 
 a maximum of the one and a minimum of the 
 other may some day be approached. It means 
 a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic 
 hopes, when one takes up this inductive view 
 of the conditions of belief. 
 
 As I understand the pragmatist way of see- 
 ing things, it owes its being to the break-down 
 which the last fifty years have brought about 
 in the older notions of scientific truth. 'God 
 geometrizes,' it used to be said; and it was 
 believed that Euclid's elements literally repro- 
 duced his geometrizing. There is an eternal 
 and unchangeable ' reason ' ; and its voice was 
 supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Cela- 
 rent. So also of the 'laws of nature,' physical 
 and chemical, so of natural history classifica- 
 tions — all were supposed to be exact and 
 exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes 
 buried in the structure of things, to which the 
 
 57 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables 
 us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world is 
 logical, and its logic is that of a university 
 professor, it was thought. Up to about 1850 
 almost every one believed that sciences ex- 
 pressed truths that were exact copies of a defi- 
 nite code of non-human realities. But the 
 enormously rapid multiplication of theories 
 in these latter days has well-nigh upset the no- 
 tion of any one of them being a more literally 
 objective kind of thing than another. There 
 are so many geometries, so many logics, so 
 many physical and chemical hypotheses, so 
 many classifications, each one of them good for 
 so much and yet not good for everything, that 
 the notion that even the truest formula may 
 be a human device and not a literal transcript 
 has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws 
 now treated as so much 'conceptual short- 
 hand,' true so far as they are useful but no 
 farther. Our mind has become tolerant of sym- 
 bol instead of reproduction, of approxima- 
 tion instead of exactness, of plasticity instead 
 of rigor. ' Energetics,' measuring the bare face 
 
 58 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 of sensible phenomena so as to describe ,in 
 a single formula all their changes of 'level,' 
 is the last word of this scientific humanism, 
 which indeed leaves queries enough outstand- 
 ing as to the reason for so curious a congru- 
 ence between the world and the mind, but 
 which at any rate makes our whole notion of 
 scientific truth more flexible and genial than it 
 used to be. 
 
 It is to be doubted whether any theorizer 
 to-day, either in mathematics, logic, physics 
 or biology, conceives himself to be literally 
 re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of 
 God. The main forms of our thinking, the 
 separation of subjects from predicates, the 
 negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judg- 
 ments, are purely human habits. The ether, 
 as Lord Salisbury said, is only a noun for the 
 verb to undulate; and many of our theological 
 ideas are admitted, even by those who call 
 them 'true,' to be humanistic in like degree. 
 
 I fancy that these changes in the current 
 notions of truth are what originally gave the 
 impulse to Messrs. Dewey's and Schiller's 
 
 59 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 views. The suspicion is in the air nowadays 
 that the superiority of one of our formulas to 
 another may not consist so much in its literal 
 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its 
 usefulness, its 'elegance' or its congruity with 
 our residual beliefs. Yielding to these suspi- 
 jcions, and generalizing, we fall into something 
 like the humanistic state of mind. Truth we 
 conceive to mean everywhere, not duplication, 
 but addition; not the constructing of inner 
 copies of already complete realities, but rather 
 the collaborating with realities so as to 
 bring about a clearer result. Obviously this 
 state of mind is at first full of vagueness and 
 ambiguity. 'Collaborating' is a vague term; it 
 must at any rate cover conceptions and logical 
 arrangements. 'Clearer' is vaguer still. Truth 
 must bring clear thoughts, as well as clear the 
 way to action. 'Reality' is the vaguest term 
 of all. The only way to test such a programme 
 at all is to apply it to the various types of truth, 
 m the hope of reaching an account that shall 
 be more precise. Any hypothesis that forces 
 such a review upon one has one great merit, 
 
 60 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 even if in the end it prove invalid : it gets us 
 better acquainted with the total subject. To 
 give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it 
 hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to 
 choke it off at the outset by abstract accusa- 
 tions of self-contradiction. I think therefore 
 that a decided effort at sympathetic mental 
 play with humanism is the provisional atti- 
 tude to be recommended to the reader. 
 
 When I find myself playing sympathetically 
 with humanism, something like what follows 
 is what I end by conceiving it to mean. 
 
 Experience is a process that continually 
 gives us new material to digest. We handle 
 this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of 
 which we find ourselves already possessed, as- 
 similating, rejecting, or rearranging in differ- 
 ent degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas 
 are recent acquisitions of our own, but most 
 of them are common-sense traditions of the 
 race. There is probably not a common-sense 
 tradition, of all those which we now live by, 
 that was not in the first instance a genuine 
 
 61 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 discovery, an inductive generalization like 
 those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia, of 
 energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive. 
 The notions of one Time and of one Space as 
 single continuous receptacles; the distinction 
 between thoughts and things, matter and mind ; 
 between permanent subjects and changing at- 
 tributes; the conception of classes with sub- 
 classes within them; the separation of fortui- 
 tous from regularly caused connections ; surely 
 all these were once definite conquests made at 
 historic dates by our ancestors in their attempts 
 to get the chaos of their crude individual ex- 
 periences into a more shareable and manage- 
 able shape. They proved of such sovereign 
 use as denkmittel that they are now a part of 
 the very structure of our mind. We cannot 
 play fast and loose with them. No experience 
 can upset them. On the contrary, they ap- 
 perceive every experience and assign it to its 
 place. 
 
 To what effect.? That we may the better 
 foresee the course of our experiences, commu- 
 nicate with one another, and steer our lives 
 
 62 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 by rule. Also that we may have a cleaner, 
 clearer, more inclusive mental view. 
 
 The greatest common-sense achievement, 
 after the discovery of one Time and one Space, 
 is probably the concept of permanently exist- 
 ing things. When a rattle first drops out of the 
 hand of a baby, he does not look to see where 
 it has gone. Non-perception he accepts as an- 
 nihilation until he finds a better belief. That 
 our perceptions mean beings, rattles that are 
 there whether we hold them in our hands or 
 not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of 
 what happens to us that, once employed, it 
 never gets forgotten. It applies with equal 
 felicity to things and persons, to the objective 
 and to the ejective realm. However a Berke- 
 ley, a Mill, or a Cornelius may criticise it, it 
 works; and in practical life we never think of 
 'going back' upon it, or reading our incoming 
 experiences in any other terms. We may, in- 
 deed, speculatively imagine a state of 'pure' 
 experience before the hypothesis of permanent 
 objects behind its flux had been framed; and 
 we can play with the idea that some primeval 
 
 63 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 genius might have struck into a different hy- 
 pothesis. But we cannot positively imagine to- 
 day what the different hypothesis could have 
 been, for the category of trans-perceptual real- 
 ity is now one of the foundations of our life. 
 Our thoughts must still employ it if they are 
 to possess reasonableness and truth. 
 
 This notion of a first in the shape of a most 
 chaotic pure experience which sets us ques- 
 tions, of a second in the way of fundamental 
 categories, long ago wrought into the structure 
 of our consciousness and practically irrevers- 
 ible, which define the general frame within 
 which answers must fall, and of a third which 
 gives the detail of the answers in the shapes 
 most congruous with all our present needs, is, 
 as I take it, the essence of the humanistic con- 
 ception. It represents experience in its pristine 
 purity to be now so enveloped in predicates 
 historically worked out that we can think of 
 it as little more than an Other, of a That, which 
 the mind, in Mr. Bradley's phrase, 'encoun- 
 ters,' and to whose stimulating presence we 
 respond by ways of thinking which we call 
 
 64 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 'true' in proportion as they facilitate our men- 
 tal or physical activities and bring us outer 
 power and inner peace. But whether the 
 Other, the universal That, has itself any defi- 
 nite inner structure, or whether, if it have any, 
 the structure resembles any of our predicated 
 whats, this is a question which humanism 
 leaves untouched. For us, at any rate, it in- 
 sists, reality is an accumulation of our own 
 intellectual inventions, and the struggle for 
 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is 
 always a struggle to work in new nouns and 
 adjectives while altering as little as possible 
 the old. 
 
 It is hard to see why either Mr. Bradley's 
 own logic or his metaphysics should oblige 
 him to quarrel with this conception. He might 
 consistently adopt it verbatim et literatim, if he 
 would, and simply throw his peculiar absolute 
 round it, following in this the good example 
 of Professor Royce. Bergson in France, and 
 his disciples, Wilbois the physicist and Leroy, 
 are thoroughgoing humanists in the sense 
 defined. Professor Milhaud also appears to 
 
 65 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 be one; and the great Poincare misses it by 
 only the breadth of a hair. In Germany the 
 name of Simmel offers itself as that of a hu- 
 manist of the most radical sort. Mach and 
 his school, and Hertz and Ostwald must be 
 classed as humanists. The view is in the at- 
 mosphere and must be patiently discussed. 
 
 The best way to discuss it would be to see 
 what the alternative might be. What is it in- 
 deed.^ Its critics make no explicit statement, 
 Professor Royce being the only one so far who 
 has formulated anything definite. The first 
 service of humanism to philosophy accordingly 
 seems to be that it will probably oblige those 
 who dislike it to search their own hearts and 
 heads. It will force analysis to the front and 
 make it the order of the day. At present the 
 lazy tradition that truth is adcequatio inteUec- 
 tus et rei seems all there is to contradict it with. 
 Mr. Bradley's only suggestion is that true 
 thought 'must correspond to a determinate 
 being which it cannot be said to make,' and 
 obviously that sheds no new light. What is the 
 
 66 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 meaning of the word to 'correspond' ? Where 
 is the 'being' ? What sort of things are ' deter- 
 minations,' and what is meant in this particular 
 case by ' not to make ' ? 
 
 Humanism proceeds immediately to refine 
 upon the looseness of these epithets. We cor- 
 respond in some way with anything with which 
 we enter into any relations at all. If it be a 
 thing, we may produce an exact copy of it, or 
 we may simply feel it as an existent in a cer- 
 tain place. If it be a demand, we may obey it 
 without knowing anything more about it than 
 its push. If it be a proposition, we may agree 
 by not contradicting it, by letting it pass. If 
 it be a relation between things, we may act on 
 the first thing so as to bring ourselves out 
 where the second will be. If it be something 
 inaccessible, we may substitute a hypothetical 
 object for it, which, having the same conse- 
 quences, will cipher out for us real results. In 
 a general way we may simply add our thought 
 to it; and if it supers the addition, and the whole 
 situation harmoniously prolongs and enriches 
 itself, the thought will pass for true. 
 
 67 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 As for the whereabouts of the beings thus 
 corresponded to, although they may be out- 
 side of the present thought as well as in it, hu- 
 manism sees no ground for saying they are 
 outside of finite experience itself. Pragmati- 
 cally, their reality means that we submit to 
 them, take account of them, whether we like 
 to or not, but this we must perpetually do with 
 experiences other than our own. The whole 
 system of what the present experience must 
 correspond to 'adequately' may be continuous 
 with the present experience itself. Reality, 
 so taken as experience other than the pre- 
 sent, might be either the legacy of past expe- 
 rience or the content of experience to come. 
 Its determinations for us are in any case the 
 adjectives which our acts of judging fit to it, 
 and those are essentially humanistic things. 
 
 To say that our thought does not 'make' 
 this reality means pragmatically that if our 
 own particular thought were annihilated the 
 reality would still be there in some shape, 
 though possibly it might be a shape that would 
 lack something that our thought supplies. 
 
 68 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 That reality is 'independent' means that there 
 is something in every experience that escapes 
 our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experi- 
 ence it coerces our attention ; if a sequence, we 
 cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we 
 can come to only one result. There is a push, 
 an urgency, within our very experience, against 
 which we are on the whole powerless, and 
 which drives us in a direction that is the des- 
 tiny of our belief. That this drift of experience 
 itself is in the last resort due to something 
 independent of all possible experience may or 
 may not be true. There may or may not be 
 an extra-experiential 'ding an sich' that keeps 
 the ball rolling, or an ' absolute ' that lies eter- 
 nally behind all the successive determinations 
 which human thought has made. But within 
 our experience itself, at any rate, humanism 
 says, some determinations show themselves as 
 being independent of others ; some questions, 
 if we ever ask them, can only be answered in 
 one way; some beings, if we ever suppose 
 them, must be supposed to have existed pre- 
 viously to the supposing; some relations, if 
 
 69 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 they exist ever, must exist as long as their 
 terms exist. 
 
 Truth thus means, according to humanism, 
 the relation of less fixed parts of experience 
 (predicates) to other relatively more fixed parts 
 (subjects); and we are not required to seek 
 it in a relation of experience as such to any- 
 thing beyond itself. We can stay at home, for 
 our behavior as experients is hemmed in on 
 every side. The forces both of advance and 
 of resistance are exerted by our own objects, 
 and the notion of truth as something opposed 
 to waywardness or license inevitably grows up 
 solipsistically inside of every human life. 
 
 So obvious is all this that a common charge 
 against the humanistic authors 'tnakes me 
 tired.' ' How can a deweyite discriminate sin- 
 cerity from bluff.?' was a question asked at a 
 philosophic meeting where I reported on 
 Dewey's Studies. ' How can the mere '■ prag- 
 
 I know of no 'mere' pragmatist, if mereness here means, 
 as it seems to, the denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist's 
 thought. 
 
 70 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 matist feel any duty to think truly ? ' is the ob- 
 jection urged by Professor Royce. Mr. Brad- 
 ley in turn says that if a humanist understands 
 his own doctrine, 'he must hold any idea, 
 however mad, to be the truth, if any one will 
 have it so.' And Professor Taylor describes 
 pragmatism as believing anything one pleases 
 and calling it truth. 
 
 Such a shallow sense of the conditions 
 under which men's thinking actually goes on 
 seems to me most surprising. These critics 
 appear to suppose that, if left to itself, the rud- 
 derless raft of our experience must be ready 
 to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even tho 
 there were compasses on board, they seem to 
 say, there would be no pole for them to point 
 to. There must be absolute sailing-directions, 
 they insist, decreed from outside, and an in- 
 dependent chart of the voyage added to the 
 'mere' voyage itself, if we are ever to make a 
 port. But is it not obvious that even tho 
 there be such absolute sailing-directions in 
 the shape of pre-human standards of truth 
 that we ought to follow, the only guarantee 
 
 71 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 that we shall in fact follow them must lie in 
 our human equipment. The 'ought' would 
 be a hrutum fulmen unless there were a felt 
 grain inside of our experience that conspired. 
 As a matter of fact the devoutest believers in 
 absolute standards must admit that men fail 
 to obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite 
 of the eternal prohibitions, and the existence 
 of any amount of reality ante rem is no warrant 
 against unlimited error in rebus being incurred. 
 The only real guarantee we have against li- 
 centious thinking is the circumpressure of ex- 
 perience itself, which gets us sick of concrete 
 errors, whether there be a trans-empirical 
 reality or not. How does the partisan of ab- 
 solute reality know what this orders him to 
 think ? He cannot get direct sight of the abso- 
 lute ; and he has no means of guessing what it 
 wants of him except by following the human- 
 istic clues. The only truth that he himself will 
 ever practically accept will be that to which 
 his finite experiences lead him of themselves. 
 The state of mind which shudders at the idea 
 of a lot of experiences left to themselves, and 
 
 72 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 that augurs protection from the sheer name 
 of an absolute, as if, however inoperative, that 
 might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, 
 is like the mood of those good people who, 
 whenever they hear of a social tendency that 
 is damnable, begin to redden and to puflf, and 
 say 'Parliament or Congress ought to make a 
 law against it,' as if an impotent decree would 
 give relief. 
 
 All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the 
 very texture of experience. Absolute or no 
 absolute, the concrete truth for us will always 
 be that way of thinking in which our various 
 experiences most profitably combine. 
 
 And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, 
 your humanist will always have a greater lib- 
 erty to play fast and loose with truth than will 
 your believer in an independent realm of real- 
 ity that makes the standard rigid. If by this 
 latter believer he means a man who pretends 
 to know the standard and who fulminates it, 
 the humanist will doubtless prove more flex- 
 ible; but no more flexible than the absolutist 
 himself if the latter follows (as fortunately our 
 
 73 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 present-day absolutists do follow) empirical 
 methods of inquiry in concrete affairs. To con- 
 sider hypotheses is surely always better than 
 to dogmatize ins blaue hinein. 
 
 Nevertheless this probable flexibility of tem- 
 per in him has been used to convict the hu- 
 manist of sin. Believing as he does, that truth 
 lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own 
 line of most propitious reaction, he stands for- 
 ever debarred, as I have heard a learned col- 
 league say, from trying to convert opponents, 
 for does not their view, being their most pro- 
 pitious momentary reaction, already fill the 
 bill .'' Only the believer in the ante-rem brand 
 of truth can on this theory seek to make con- 
 verts without self-stultification. But can there 
 be self -stultification in urging any -account 
 whatever of truth? Can the definition ever 
 contradict the deed ? ' Truth is what I feel like 
 saying' — suppose that to be the definition. 
 'Well, I feel like saying that, and I want you 
 to feel like saying it, and shall continue to say 
 it until I get you to agree.' Where is there any 
 contradiction.? Whatever truth may be said 
 
 74 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 to be, that is the kind of truth which the say- 
 ing can be held to carry. The temper which a 
 saying may comport is an extra-logical matter. 
 It may indeed be hotter in some individual 
 absolutist than in a humanist, but it need not 
 be so in another. And the humanist, for his 
 part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea 
 and land to make one proselyte, if his nature 
 be enthusiastic enough. 
 
 'But how can you be enthusiastic over any 
 view of things which you know to have been 
 partly made by yourself, and which is liable 
 to alter during the next minute ? How is any 
 heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible 
 under such paltry conditions ? ' 
 
 This is just another of those objections by 
 which the anti-humanists show their own com- 
 paratively slack hold on the realities of the 
 situation. If they would only follow the prag- 
 matic method and ask : ' What is truth known- 
 as? What does its existence stand for in the 
 way of concrete goods ? ' — they would see 
 that the name of it is the inbegrijf of almost 
 everything that is valuable in our lives. The 
 
 75 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 true is the opposite of whatever is instable, 
 of whatever is practically disappointing, of 
 whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and 
 unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and un- 
 supported, of whatever is inconsistent and con- 
 tradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccen- 
 tric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being 
 of no practical account. Here are pragmatic 
 reasons with a vengeance why we should turn 
 to truth — truth saves us from a world of that 
 complexion. What wonder that its very name 
 awakens loyal feeling! In particular what 
 wonder that all little provisional fool's para- 
 dises of belief should appear contemptible in 
 comparison with its bare pursuit! When ab- 
 solutists reject humanism because they feel it 
 to be untrue, that means that the whole habit 
 of their mental needs is wedded already to a 
 different view of reality, in comparison with 
 which the humanistic world seems but the 
 whim of a few irresponsible youths. Their own 
 subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks 
 here in the name of the eternal natures and 
 bids them reject our humanism — as they ap- 
 
 76 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 prehend it. Just so with us humanists, when 
 we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, 
 rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. 
 These contradict the dramatic temperament of 
 nature, as our dealings with nature and our 
 habits of thinking have so far brought us to 
 conceive it. They seem oddly personal and 
 artificial, even when not bureaucratic and pro- 
 fessional in an absurd degree. We turn from 
 them to the great unpent and unstayed wilder- 
 ness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, 
 with as good a conscience as rationalists are 
 moved by when they turn from our wilderness 
 into their neater and cleaner intellectual 
 abodes.' 
 
 ' [I cannot forbear quoting as an illustration of the con- 
 trast between humanist and rationalist tempers of mind, in 
 a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks on the Drey- 
 fus 'affaire,' written by one who assuredly had never heard 
 of humanism or pragmatism. 'Autant que la Kevolution, 
 "r Affaire" est desormais une de nos "origines." Si elle n'a 
 pas fait ouvrir le gouffre, c'est elle du moins qui a rendu 
 patent et visible le long travail souterrain qui, silencieuse- 
 ment, avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps 
 d'aujourd'hui, pour ecarter enfin, d'un coup soudain, la 
 France des traditionalistes {poseurs de principes, chercheurs 
 d'unite, constncctews de systlmes h priori) et la France Sprise 
 
 77 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 This is surely enough to show that the hu- 
 manist does not ignore the character of ob- 
 jectivity and independence in truth. Let me 
 turn next to what his opponents mean when 
 they say that- to be true, our thoughts must 
 'correspond.' 
 
 The vulgar notion of correspondence here is 
 that the thoughts must cofy the reality — 
 cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti et cog- 
 noscentis ; and philosophy, without having ever 
 fairly sat down to the question, seems to have 
 instinctively accepted this idea: propositions 
 are held true if they copy the eternal thought ; 
 terms are held true if they copy extra-mental 
 
 du fait fositif et de libre examen ; — la France revolutaonnaire 
 et romantique si Ton veut, celle qui met tres haut I'individu, 
 qui ne veut pas qu'un juste perisse, fut-ce pour sauver la 
 nation, et qui cherche la verite dans toutes ses parties aussi 
 bien que dans une vue d'ensemble. . . . Duclaux ne pouvait 
 pas eoncevoir qu'on preferat quelque chose a la verite. Mais 
 il voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui, mettant en 
 balance la vie d'un homme et la raison d'fitat, lui avouaient 
 de quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence in- 
 dividuelle, pour innocente qu'elle f ut. C'etaient des classiqves, 
 des gens a qui l' ensemble seid importe.' La Vie de Emile 
 Duclaux, par Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247-248.] 
 
 78 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 realities. Implicitly, I think that the copy- 
 theory has animated most of the criticisms that 
 have been made on humanism. 
 
 A priori, however, it is not self-evident that 
 the sole business of our mind with realities 
 should be to copy them. Let my reader sup- 
 pose himself to constitute for a time all the 
 reality there is in the universe, and then to re- 
 ceive the announcement that another being is 
 to be created who shall know him truly. How 
 will he represent the knowing in advance ? 
 What will he hope it to be ? I doubt extremely 
 whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as 
 a mere copying. Of what use to him would 
 an imperfect second edition of himself in the 
 new comer's interior be ? It would seem pure 
 waste of a propitious opportunity. "The de- 
 mand would more probably be for something 
 absolutely new. The reader would conceive 
 the knowing humanistically, 'the new comer,' 
 he would say, ' must take account of my presence 
 by reacting on it in such a way that good would 
 accrue to us both. If copying be requisite to 
 that end, let there be copying ; otherwise not.' 
 
 79 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 The essence in any case would not be the 
 copying, but the enrichment of the previous 
 world. 
 
 I read the other day, in a book of Professor 
 Eucken's, a phrase, 'Die erhohung des vor- 
 gefundenen daseins,' which seems to be perti- 
 nent here. Why may not thought's mission 
 be to increase and elevate, rather than simply 
 to imitate and reduplicate, existence ? No one 
 who has read Lotze can fail to remember his 
 striking comment on the ordinary view of the 
 secondary qualities of matter, which brands 
 them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing 
 in the thing. The notion of a world complete 
 in itself, to which thought comes as a passive 
 mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is 
 irrational. Rather is thought itself a most 
 momentous part of fact, and the whole mission 
 of the pre-existing and insufficient world of 
 matter may simply be to provoke thought to 
 produce its far more precious supplement. 
 
 ' Knowing,' in short, may, for aught we can 
 see beforehand to the contrary, be only one 
 way of getting into fruitful relations with real- 
 
 80 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 ity, whether copying be one of the relations 
 or not. 
 
 It is easy to see from what special type of 
 knowing the copy-theory arose. In our deal- 
 ings with natural phenomena the great point 
 is to be able to foretell. Foretelling, according 
 to such a writer as Spencer, is the whole mean- 
 ing of intelligence. When Spencer's 'law of 
 intelligence' says that inner and outer relations 
 must 'correspond,' it means that the distribu- 
 tion of terms in our inner time-scheme and 
 space-scheme must be an exact copy of the 
 distribution in real time and space of the real 
 terms. In strict theory the mental terms them- 
 selves need not answer to the real terms in the 
 sense of severally copying them, symbolic men- 
 tal terms being enough, if only the real dates 
 and places be copied. But in our ordinary life 
 the mental terms are images and the real ones 
 are sensations, and the images so often copy 
 the sensations, that we easily take copying of 
 terms as well as of relations to be the natural 
 significance of knowing. Meanwhile much, 
 even of this common descriptive truth, is 
 
 81 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 couched in verbal symbols. If our symbols fit 
 the world, in the sense of determining our ex- 
 pectations rightly, they may even be the bet- 
 ter for not copying its terms. 
 
 It seems obvious that the pragmatic account 
 of all this routine of phenomenal knowledge 
 is accurate. Truth here is a relation, not of 
 our ideas to non-human realities, but of con- 
 ceptual parts of our experience to sensational 
 parts. Those thoughts are true which guide 
 us to beneficial interaction with sensible par- 
 ticulars as they occur, whether they copy these 
 in advance or not. 
 
 From the frequency of copying in the know- 
 ledge of phenomenal fact, copying has been 
 supposed to be the essence of truth in matters 
 rational also. Geometry and logic, it has been 
 supposed, must copy archetypal thoughts in the 
 Creator. But in these abstract spheres there 
 is no need of assuming archetypes. The mind 
 is free to carve so many figures out of space, 
 to make so many numerical collections, to 
 frame so many classes and series, and it can 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 analyze and compare so endlessly, that the very 
 superabundance of the resulting ideas makes 
 us doubt the 'objective' pre-existence of their 
 models. It would be plainly wrong to suppose 
 a God whose thought consecrated rectangular 
 but not polar co-ordinates, or Jevons's nota- 
 tion but not Boole's. Yet if, on the other hand, 
 we assume God to have thought in advance of 
 every possible flight of human fancy in these 
 directions, his mind becomes too much like a 
 Hindoo idol with three heads, eight arms and 
 six breasts, too much made up of superfoetation 
 and redundancy for us to wish to copy it, and 
 the whole notion of copying tends to evaporate 
 from these sciences. Their objects can be bet- 
 ter interpreted as being created step by step by 
 men, as fast as they successively conceive them. 
 If now it be asked how, if triangles, squares, 
 square roots, genera, and the like, are but im- 
 provised human 'artefacts,' their properties 
 and relations can be so promptly known to be 
 'eternal,' the humanistic answer is easy. If 
 triangles and genera are of our own produc- 
 tion we can keep them invariant. We can 
 
 83 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 make them 'timeless' by expressly decreeing 
 that on the things we mean time shall exert 
 no altering eflFect, that they are intentionally 
 and it may be fictitiously abstracted from every 
 corrupting real associate and condition. But 
 relations between invariant objects will them- 
 selves be invariant. Such relations cannot be 
 happenings, for by hypothesis nothing shall 
 happen to the objects. I have tried to show 
 in the last chapter of my Principles of Psy- 
 chology^ that they can only be relations of 
 comparison. No one so far seems to have no- 
 ticed my suggestion, and I am too ignorant of 
 the development of mathematics to feel very 
 confident of my own view. But if it were 
 correct it would solve the difficulty perfectly. 
 Relations of comparison are matters of direct 
 inspection. As soon as mental objects are 
 mentally compared, they are perceived to be 
 either like or unlike. But once the same, al- 
 ways the same, once different, always different, 
 under these timeless conditions. Which is as 
 much as to say that truths concerning these 
 ' Vol. ii, pp. 641 ff. 
 84 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 man-made objects are necessary and eternal. 
 We can change our conclusions only by 
 changing our data first. 
 
 The whole fabric of the a priori sciences can 
 thus be treated as a man-made product. As 
 Locke long ago pointed out, these sciences 
 have no immediate connection with fact. Only 
 if a fact can be humanized by being identified 
 with any of these ideal objects, is what was 
 true of the objects now true also of the facts. 
 The truth itself meanwhile was originally a copy 
 of nothing ; it was only a relation directly per- 
 ceived to obtain between two artificial mental 
 things.' 
 
 We may now glance at some special types 
 of knowing, so as to see better whether the 
 humanistic account fits. On the mathematical 
 and logical types we need not enlarge further, 
 nor need we return at much length to the case 
 of our descriptive knowledge of the course of 
 nature. So far as this involves anticipation, 
 
 ' [Mental things which are realities of course within the 
 mental world.] 
 
 85 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 tho that may mean copying, it need, as we 
 saw, mean little more than 'getting ready' in 
 advance. But with many distant and future 
 objects, our practical relations are to the last 
 degree potential and remote. In no sense can 
 we now get ready for the arrest of the earth's 
 revolution by the tidal brake, for instance; 
 and with the past, tho we suppose ourselves 
 to know it truly, we have no practical rela- 
 tions at all. It is obvious that, altho interests 
 strictly practical have been the original start- 
 ing-point of our search for true phenomenal 
 descriptions, yet an intrinsic interest in the 
 bare describing function has grown up. We 
 wish accounts that shall be true, whether they 
 bring collateral profit or not. The primitive 
 function has developed its demand for mere 
 exercise. This theoretic curiosity seems to be 
 the characteristically human differentia, and 
 humanism recognizes its enormous scope. A 
 true idea now means not only one that pre- 
 pares us for an actual perception. It means 
 also one that might prepare us for a merely 
 possible perception, or one that, if spoken, 
 
 86 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 would suggest possible perceptions to others, 
 or suggest actual perceptions which the speaker 
 cannot share. The ensemble of perceptions 
 thus thought of as either actual or possible 
 form a system which it is obviously advanta- 
 geous to us to get into a stable and consistent 
 shape; and here it is that the common-sense 
 notion of permanent beings finds triumphant 
 use. Beings acting outside of the thinker ex- 
 plain, riot only his actual perceptions, past and 
 future, but his possible perceptions and those 
 of every one else. Accordingly they gratify our 
 theoretic need in a supremely beautiful way. 
 We pass from our immediate actual through 
 them into the foreign and the potential, and 
 back again into the future actual, accounting 
 for innumerable particulars by a single cause. 
 As in those circular panoramas, where a real 
 foreground of dirt, grass, bushes, rocks and a 
 broken-down cannon is enveloped by a can- 
 vas picture of sky and earth and of a raging 
 battle, continuing the foreground so cunningly 
 that the spectator can detect no joint; so these 
 conceptual objects, added to our present per- ' 
 
 87 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 ceptual reality, fuse with it into the whole uni- 
 verse of our belief. In spite of all berkeleyan 
 criticism, we do not doubt that they are really 
 there. Tho our discovery of any one of them 
 may only date from now, we unhesitatingly 
 say that it not only is, but was there, if, by 
 so saying, the past appears connected more 
 consistently with what we feel the present to 
 be. This is historic truth. Moses wrote the 
 Pentateuch, we think, because if he did n't, all 
 our religious habits will have to be undone. 
 Julius Caesar was real, or we can never listen 
 to history again. Trilobites were once alive, or 
 all our thought about the strata is at sea. Ra- 
 dium, discovered only yesterday, must always 
 have existed, or its analogy with other natural 
 elements, which are permanent, fails. In all 
 this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting 
 on another so as to yield the most satisfactory 
 total state of mind. That state of mind, we say, 
 sees truth, and the content of its deliverances 
 we believe. 
 
 Of course, if you take the satisfactoriness 
 concretely, as something felt by you now, and 
 
 88 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 if, by truth, you mean truth taken abstractly 
 and verified in the long run, you cannot make 
 them equate, for it is notorious that the tem- 
 porarily satisfactory is often false. Yet at each 
 and every concrete moment, truth for each 
 man is what that man 'troweth' at that mo- 
 ment with the maximum of satisfaction to him- 
 self ; and similarly, abstract truth, truth verified 
 by the long run, and abstract satisfactoriness, 
 long-run satisfactoriness, coincide. If, in short, 
 we compare concrete with concrete and ab- 
 stract with abstract, the true and the satisfac- 
 tory do mean the same thing. I suspect that 
 a certain muddling of matters hereabouts is 
 what makes the general philosophic public so 
 impervious to humanism's claims. 
 
 The fundamental fact about our experience 
 is that it is a process of change. For the 
 'trower' at any moment, truth, like the visible 
 area round a man walking in a fog, or like 
 what George Eliot calls ' the wall of dark seen 
 by small fishes' eyes that pierce a span in 
 the wide Ocean,' is an objective field which 
 the next moment enlarges and of which it is the 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 critic, and which then either suffers alteration 
 or is "continued unchanged. The critic sees 
 both the first trower's truth and his own truth, 
 compares them with each other, and verifies 
 or confutes. His field of view is the reality 
 independent of that earlier trower's thinking 
 with which that thinking ought to correspond. 
 But the critic is himself only a trower; and if 
 the whole process of experience should ter- 
 minate at that instant, there would be no 
 otherwise known independent reality with 
 which his thought might be compared. 
 
 The immediate in experience is always 
 provisionally in this situation. The human- 
 ism, for instance, which I see and try so hard 
 to defend, is the completest truth attained 
 from my point of view up to date. But, owing 
 to the fact that all experience is a process, no 
 point of view can ever be the last one. Every 
 one is insuflficient and off its balance, and re- 
 sponsible to later points of view than itself. 
 You, occupying some of these later points in 
 your own person, and believing in the reality 
 of others, will not agree that my point of view 
 
 90 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 sees truth positive, truth timeless, truth that 
 counts, unless they yerify and confirm what it 
 sees. 
 
 You generalize this by saying that any 
 opinion, however satisfactory, can count posi- 
 tively and absolutely as true only so far as it 
 agrees with a standard beyond itself; and if 
 you then forget that this standard perpetually 
 grows up endogenously inside the web of the 
 experiences, you may carelessly go on to say 
 that what distributively holds of each experi- 
 ence, holds also collectively of all experience, 
 and that experience as such and in its totality 
 owes whatever truth it may be possessed-of 
 to its correspondence with absolute realities 
 outside of its own being. This evidently is the 
 popular and traditional position. From the 
 fact that finite experiences must draw support 
 from one anot"her, philosophers pass to the 
 notion that experience iiberhaupt must need 
 an absolute support. The denial of such a 
 notion by humanism lies probably at the root 
 of most of the dislike which it incurs. 
 
 But is this not the globe, the elephant and 
 91 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 the tortoise over again ? Must not something 
 end by supporting itself ? Humanism is willing 
 to let finite experience be self-supporting. 
 Somewhere being must immediately breast 
 nonentity. Why may not the advancing front 
 of experience, carrying its immanent satis- 
 factions and dissatisfactions, cut against the 
 black inane as the luminous orb of the moon 
 cuts the cserulean abyss ? Why should any- 
 where the world be absolutely fixed and fin- 
 ished.'' And if reality genuinely grows, why 
 may it not grow in these very determinations 
 which here and now are made.'' 
 
 In point of fact it actually seems to grow 
 by our mental determinations, be these never 
 so 'true.' Take the 'great bear' or 'dipper' 
 constellation in the heavens. We call it by 
 that name, we count the stars 'and call them 
 seven, we say they were seven before they were 
 counted, and we say that whether any one had 
 ever noted the fact or not, the dim resemblance 
 to a long-tailed (or long-necked .?) animal was 
 always truly there. But what do we mean 
 
 92 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 by this projection into past eternity of recent 
 human ways of thinking? Did an 'abso- 
 lute' thinker actually do the counting, tell 
 off the stars upon his standing number-tally, 
 and make the bear-comparison, silly as the 
 latter is? Were they explicitly seven, ex- 
 plicitly bear-like, before the human witness 
 came? Surely nothing in the truth of the 
 attributions drives us to think this. They 
 were only implicitly or virtually what we call 
 them, and we human witnesses first explicated 
 them and made them 'real.' A fact virtually 
 pre-exists when every condition of its realiza- 
 tion save one is already there. In this case the 
 condition lacking is the act of the counting 
 and comparing mind. But the stars (once the 
 mind considers them) themselves dictate the 
 result. The counting in no wise modifies their 
 previous nature, and, they being what and 
 where they are, the count cannot fall out 
 differently. It could then always be made. 
 Never could the number seven be questioned, 
 if the question once were raised. 
 
 We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably 
 93 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 something comes by the counting that was 
 not there before. And yet that something 
 was always true. In one sense you create it, 
 and in another sense you -find it. You have 
 to treat your count as being true beforehand, 
 the moment you come to treat the matter 
 at all. 
 
 Our stellar attributes must always be called 
 true, then; yet none the less are they genuine 
 additions made by our intellect to the world 
 of fact. Not additions of consciousness only, 
 but additions of 'content.' They copy nothing 
 that pre-existed, yet they agree with what pre- 
 existed, fit it, amplify it, relate and connect it 
 with a ' wain,' a number-tally, or what not, 
 and build it out. It seems to me that humanism 
 is the only theory that builds this case out in 
 the good direction, and this case stands for 
 innumerable other kinds of case. In all such 
 cases, odd as it may sound, our judgment 
 may actually be said to retroact and to enrich 
 the past. 
 
 Our judgments at any rate change the char- 
 acter of future reality by the acts to which they 
 
 94 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 lead. Where these acts are acts expressive of 
 trust, — trust, e. g., that a man is honest, 
 that our health is good enough, or that we 
 can make a successful effort, — which acts 
 may be a needed antecedent of the trusted 
 things becoming true. Professor Taylor says ' 
 that our trust is at any rate untrue when it is 
 made, i. e., before the action; and I seem to 
 remember that he disposes of anything like a 
 faith in the general excellence of the universe 
 (making the faithful person's part in it at any 
 rate more excellent) as a 'lie in the soul.' But 
 the pathos of this expression should not blind 
 us to the complication of the facts. I doubt 
 whether Professor Taylor would himself be in 
 favor of practically handling trusters of these 
 kinds as liars. Future and present really mix 
 in such emergencies, and one can always es- 
 cape lies in them by using hypothetic forms. 
 But Mr. Taylor's attitude suggests such ab- 
 surd possibilities of practice that it seems to 
 
 ' In an article criticising Pragmatism (as he conceives it) 
 in the McGill University Quarterly published at Montreal, 
 for May, 1904. 
 
 95 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 me to illustrate beautifully how self-stultifying 
 the conception of a truth that shall merely 
 register a standing fixture may become. 
 Theoretic truth, truth of passive copying, 
 sought in the sole interests of copying as such, 
 not because copying is good for something, but 
 because copying ought schlechthin to be, seems, 
 if you look at it coldly, to be an almost pre- 
 posterous ideal. Why should the universe, 
 existing in itself, also exist in copies ? How 
 can it be copied in the solidity of its objective 
 fulness .'' And even if it could, what would the 
 motive be ? ' Even the hairs of your head are 
 numbered.' Doubtless they are, virtually; 
 but why, as an absolute proposition, ought 
 the number to become copied and known.'' 
 Surely knowing is only one way of interacting 
 with reality and adding to its effect. 
 
 The opponent here will ask : ' Has not the 
 knowing of truth any substantive value on its 
 own account, apart from the collateral advan- 
 tages it may bring ? And if you allow theoretic 
 satisfactions to exist at all, do they not crowd 
 the collateral satisfactions out of house and 
 
 96 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 home, and must not pragmatism go into 
 bankruptcy, if she admits them at all ? ' The 
 destructive force of such talk disappears as 
 soon as we use words concretely instead of 
 abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good 
 pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic 
 needs are known as and in what the intellect- 
 ual satisfactions consist. 
 
 Are they not all mere matters of consistency 
 — - and emphatically not of consistency between 
 an absolute reality and the mind's copies of it, 
 but of actually felt consistency among judg- 
 ments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the 
 mind's own experienceable world? And are 
 not both our need of such consistency and 
 our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of 
 the natural fact that we are beings that do 
 develop mental habits — habit itself proving 
 adaptively beneficial in an environment where 
 the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, 
 recur and follow 'law' ? If this were so, what 
 would have come first would have been the 
 collateral profits of habit as such, and the theo- 
 retic life would have grown up in aid of these. 
 
 97 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 In point of fact, this seems to have been the 
 probable case. At life's origin, any present per- 
 ception may have been ' true ' — if such a word 
 could then be applicable. Later, when reactions 
 became organized, the reactions became 'true' 
 whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. 
 Otherwise they were 'false' or 'mistaken' re- 
 actions. But the same class of objects needs the 
 same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react 
 consistently must gradually have been estab- 
 lished, and a disappointment felt whenever the 
 results frustrated expectation. Here is a per- 
 fectly plausible germ for all our higher consist- 
 encies. Nowadays, if an object claims from 
 us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded 
 only to the opposite class of objects, our mental 
 machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situa- 
 tion is intellectually unsatisfactory. 
 
 Theoretic truth thus falls within the mind, 
 being the accord of some of its processes and 
 objects with other processes and objects — 
 'accord' consisting here in well-definable re- 
 lations. So long as the satisfaction of feeling 
 such an accord is denied us, whatever collat- 
 
 98 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 eral profits may seem to inure from what we 
 believe in are but as dust in the balance — 
 provided always that we are highly organized 
 intellectually, which the majority of us are not. 
 The amount of accord which satisfies most men 
 and women is merely the absence of violent 
 clash between their usual thoughts and state- 
 ments and the limited sphere of sense-per- 
 ceptions in which their lives are cast. The 
 theoretic truth that most of us think we ' ought' 
 to attain to is thus the possession of a set of 
 predicates that do not explicitly contradict their 
 subjects. We preserve it as of ten as not by leav- 
 ing other predicates and subjects out. 
 
 In some men theory is a passion, just as 
 music is in others. The form of inner consist- 
 ency is pursued far beyond the line at which 
 collateral profits stop. Such men systematize 
 and classify and schematize and make synop- 
 tical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure 
 love of unifying. Too often the results, glow- 
 ing with 'truth' for the inventors, seem pa- 
 thetically personal and artificial to bystanders. 
 Which is as much as to say that the purely 
 
 99 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 theoretic criterion of truth can leave us in the 
 lurch as easily as any other criterion, and that 
 the absolutists, for all their pretensions, are 
 'in the same boat' concretely with those whom 
 they attack. 
 
 I am well aware that this paper has been 
 rambling in the extreme. But the whole sub- 
 ject is inductive, and sharp logic is hardly yet 
 in order. My great trammel has been the non- 
 existence of any definitely stated alternative 
 on my opponents' part. It may conduce to 
 clearness if I recapitulate, in closing, what I 
 conceive the main points of humanism to be. 
 They are these : — 
 
 1. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, 
 must conform to reality in order to be true. 
 
 2. By 'reality' humanism means nothing 
 more than the other conceptual or perceptual 
 experiences with which a given present expe- 
 rience may find itself in point of fact mixed up.' 
 
 ' This is meant merely to exclude reality of an 'unknow- 
 able' sort, of which no account in either perceptual or con- 
 ceptual terms can be given. It includes of course any amount 
 of empirical reality independent of the knower. Pragmatism 
 is thus 'epistemologically' realistic in its account. 
 
 100 
 
HUMANISM AND TRUTH 
 
 3. By 'conforming,' humanism means tak- 
 ing account-of in such a way as to gain any in- 
 tellectually and practically satisfactory result. 
 
 4. To 'take account-of and to be 'satis- 
 factory' are terms that admit of no definition, 
 so many are the ways in which these require- 
 ments can practically be worked out. 
 
 5. Vaguely and in general, we take account 
 of a reality by preserving it in as unmodified 
 a form as possible. But, to be then satisfac- 
 tory, it must not contradict other realities out- 
 side of it which claim also to be preserved. 
 That we must preserve all the experience we 
 can and minimize contradiction in what we 
 preserve, is about all that can be said in ad- 
 vance. 
 
 6. .The truth which the conforming experi- 
 ence embodies may be a positive addition to 
 the previous reality, and later judgments may 
 have to conform to it. Yet, virtually at least, it 
 may have been true previously. Pragmatically, 
 virtual and actual truth mean the same thing : 
 the possibility of only one answer, when once 
 the question is raised. 
 
IV 
 
 THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER 
 AND KNOWN' 
 
 Throughout the history of philosophy the 
 subject and its object have been treated as ab- 
 solutely discontinuous entities ; and thereupon 
 the presence of the latter to the former, or the 
 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has 
 assumed a paradoxical character which all 
 sorts of theories had to be invented to over- 
 come. Representative theories put a mental 
 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into 
 the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common- 
 sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring 
 our mind able to clear it by a self -transcend- 
 ing leap. Transcendentalist theories left it 
 impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and 
 brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory 
 act. All the while, in the very bosom of the 
 finite experience, every conjimction required 
 
 ' Extract from an article entitled 'A World of Pure Experi- 
 ence,' in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., September 29, 1904. 
 
 102 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 to make the relation intelligible is given in 
 full. Either the knower and the known are : 
 
 (1) the self-same piece of experience taken 
 twice over in different contexts ; or they are 
 
 (2) two pieces of actual experience belong- 
 ing to the same subject, with definite tracts of 
 conjunctive transitional experience between 
 them; or 
 
 (3) the known is a possible experience 
 either of that subject or another, to which the 
 said conjunctive transitions would lead, if 
 sufficiently prolonged. 
 
 To discuss all the ways in which one expe- 
 rience may function as the knower of another, 
 would be incompatible with the limits of this 
 essay. I have treated of type 1, the kind of 
 knowledge called perception, in an article in 
 the Journal of Philosophy, for September 1, 
 1904, called 'Does consciousness exist.''' This 
 is the type of case in which the mind enjoys 
 direct 'acquaintance' with a present object. 
 In the other types the mind has 'knowledge- 
 about' an object not immediately there. Type 
 3 can always formally and hypothetically be 
 
 103 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 reduced to type 2, so that a brief description 
 of that type will now put the present reader 
 sufficiently at my point of view, and make him 
 see what the actual meanings of the mysterious 
 cognitive relation may be. 
 
 Suppose me to be sitting here in my library 
 at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from ' Me- 
 morial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of the 
 latter object. My mind may have before it 
 only the name, or it may have a clear image, 
 or it may have a very dim image of the hall, 
 but such an intrinsic difference in the image 
 makes no difiference in its cognitive function. 
 Certain extrinsic phenomena, special experi- 
 ences of conjunction, are what impart to the 
 image, be it what it may, its knowing office. 
 
 For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean 
 by my image, and I can tell you nothing ; or if 
 I fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard 
 Delta ; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain 
 whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind 
 or not; you would rightly deny that I had 
 'meant' that particular hall at all, even tho 
 my mental image might to some degree have 
 
 104 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 resembled it. The resemblance would count 
 in that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts 
 of things of a kind resemble one another in 
 this world without being held for that reason 
 to take cognizance of one another. 
 
 On the other hand, if I can lead you to the 
 hall, and tell you of its history and present 
 uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, how- 
 ever imperfect it may have been, to have led 
 hither and to be now terminated; if the asso- 
 ciates of the image and of the felt hall run 
 parallel, so that each term of the one context 
 corresponds serially, as I walk, with an answer- 
 ing term of the others; why then my soul was 
 prophetic, and my idea must be, and by com- 
 mon consent would be, called cognizant of 
 reality. That percept was what I meant, for 
 into it my idea has passed by conjunctive ex- 
 periences of sameness and fulfilled intention. 
 Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment 
 continues and corroborates an earlier one. 
 
 In this continuing and corroborating, taken 
 in no transcendental sense, but denoting defi- 
 nitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing 
 
 105 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or 
 signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, 
 the first experience knows the last one. Where 
 they do not, or where even as possibles they 
 can not, intervene, there can be no pretence of 
 knowing. In this latter case the extremes will 
 be connected, if connected at all, by inferior 
 relations — bare likeness or succession, or by 
 ' withness' alone. BjQowledge of sensible reali- 
 ties thus comes to life inside the tissue of ex- 
 perience. It is made; and made by relations 
 that unroll themselves in time. Whenever cer- 
 tain intermediaries are given, such that, as they 
 develop towards their terminus, there is expe- 
 rience from point to point of one direction fol- 
 lowed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the 
 result is that their starting-point thereby becomes 
 a knower and their terminus an object meant or 
 known. That is all that knowing (in the sim- 
 ple case considered) can be known-as, that is 
 the whole of its nature, put into experiential 
 terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our 
 experiences we may freely say that we had the 
 terminal object 'm mind' from the outset, 
 
 106 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 even altho at the outset nothing was there in 
 us but a flat piece of substantive experience 
 like any other, with no self-transcendency 
 about it, and no mystery save the mystery of 
 coming into existence and of being gradually 
 followed by other pieces of substantive expe- 
 rience, with conjunctively transitional experi- 
 ences between. That is what we mean here by 
 the object's being 'in mind.' Of any deeper 
 more real way of its being in mind we have no 
 positive conception, and we have no right to 
 discredit our actual experience by talking of 
 such a way at all. 
 
 I know that many a reader will rebel at this. 
 'Mere intermediaries,' he will say, 'even tho 
 they be feelings of continuously growing ful- 
 filment, only separate the knower from the 
 known, whereas what we have in knowledge 
 is a kind of immediate touch of the one by 
 the other, an "apprehension" in the etymo- 
 logical sense of the word, a leaping of the 
 chasm as by lightning, an act by which two 
 terms are smitten into one over the head of 
 their distinctness. All these dead intermedi- 
 
 107 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 aries of yours are out of each other, and out- 
 side of their termini still.' 
 
 But do not such dialectic difficulties remind 
 us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping 
 at its image in the water ? If we knew any more 
 real kind of union aliunde, we might be en- 
 titled to brand all our empirical unions as a 
 sham. But unions by continuous transition 
 are the only ones we know of, whether in this 
 matter of a knowledge-about that terminate^ 
 in an acquaintance, whether in personal iden- 
 tity, in logical prediction through the copula 
 'is,' or elsewhere. If anywhere there were 
 more absolute unions, they could only, reveal 
 themselves to us by just such conjunctive re- 
 sults. These are what the unions are worth, 
 these are all that we can ever practically mean 
 by union, by continuity. Is it not time to re- 
 peat what Lotze said of substances, that to act 
 like one is to be one ? Should we not say here 
 that to be experienced as continuous is to be 
 really continuous, in a world where experi- 
 ence and reality come to the same thing.'' In 
 a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to 
 
 108 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will 
 hold a painted ship. In a world where both 
 the terms and their distinctions are affairs of 
 experience, conjunctions that are experienced 
 must be at least as real as anything else. They 
 will be 'absolutely' real conjunctions, if we 
 have no transphenomenal absolute ready, to 
 derealize the whole experienced world by, at 
 a stroke. 
 
 So much for the essentials of the cognitive 
 relation where the knowledge is conceptual in 
 type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. 
 It consists in intermediary experiences (pos- 
 sible, if not actual) of continuously developing 
 progress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the 
 sensible percept which is the object is reached. 
 The percept here not only verifies the concept, 
 proves its function of knowing that percept 
 to be true, but the percept's existence as the 
 terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates 
 the function. Whatever terminates that chain 
 was, because it now proves itself to be, what 
 the concept 'had in mind.' 
 
 109 
 
THE MEANING OP TRUTH 
 
 The towering importance for human life 
 of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that 
 an experience that knows another can figure 
 as its representative, not in any quasi-miracu- 
 lous ' epistemological ' sense, but in the definite 
 practical sense of being its substitute in various 
 operations, sometimes physical and some- 
 times mental, which lead us to its associates 
 and results. By experimenting on our ideas 
 of reality, we may save ourselves the trouble 
 of experimenting on the real experiences which 
 they severally mean. The ideas form related 
 systems, corresponding point for point to the 
 systems which the realities form ; and by letting 
 an ideal term call up its associates systemati- 
 cally, we may be led to a terminus which the 
 corresponding real term would have led to in 
 case we had operated on the real world. And 
 this brings us to the general question of sub- 
 stitution. 
 
 What, exactly, in a system of experiences, 
 does the 'substitution' of one of them for 
 another mean? 
 
 110 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 According to my view, experience as a whole 
 is a process in time, whereby innumerable 
 particular terms lapse and are superseded by 
 others that follow upon them by transitions 
 which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in 
 content, are themselves experiences, and must 
 in general be accounted at least as real as the 
 terms which they relate. What the nature of 
 the event called 'superseding' signifies, de- 
 pends altogether on the kind of transition that 
 obtains. Some experiences simply abolish 
 their predecessors without continuing them 
 in any way. Others are felt to increase or to 
 enlarge their meaning, to carry out their pur- 
 pose, or to bring us nearer to their goal. They 
 'represent' them, and may fulfil their function 
 better than they fulfilled it themselves. But to 
 ' fulfil a function ' in a world of pure experience 
 can be conceived and defined in only one pos- 
 sible way. In such a world transitions and 
 arrivals (or terminations) are the only events 
 that happen, tho they happen by so many sorts 
 of path. The only function that one experi- 
 ence can perform is to lead into another expe- 
 
 111 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 rience ; and the only fulfilment we can speak of 
 is the reaching of a certain experienced end. 
 When one experience leads to (or can le_ad to) 
 the same end as another, they agree jix func- 
 tion. But the whole system of experiences as 
 they are immediately given presents itself as a 
 quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of 
 an initial term in many directions and yet end 
 in the same terminus, moving from next to next 
 by a great many possible paths. 
 
 Either one of these paths might be a func- 
 tional substitute for another, and to follow 
 one rather than another might on occasion 
 be an advantageous thing to do. As a matter 
 of fact, and in a general way, the paths that 
 run through conceptual experiences, that is, 
 through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the 
 things in which they terminate, are highly ad- 
 vantageous paths to follow. Not only do they 
 yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, 
 owing to the ' universal ' character ^ which 
 
 ' Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also 
 can be conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transi- 
 tions, or of the possibility of such. 
 
 112 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 they frequently possess, and to their capacity 
 for association with one another in great sys- 
 tems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of 
 the things themselves, and sweep us on towards 
 our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving 
 way than the following of trains of sensible 
 perception ever could. Wonderful are the new 
 cuts and the short-circuits the thought-paths 
 make. Most thought-paths, it is true, are sub- 
 stitutes for nothing actual ; they end outside the 
 real world altogether, in wayward fancies, Uto- 
 pias, fictions or mistakes. But where they do 
 re-enter reality and terminate therein, we sub- 
 stitute them always ; and with these substitutes 
 we pass the greater number of our hours.' 
 
 ' This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, 
 a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum 
 total of experiences than we commonly suppose. The object- ' 
 ive nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is 
 true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a per- 
 • cept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the material en- 
 vironment of that body, changing by gradual transition when 
 the body moves. But the distant parts of the physical world 
 are at all times absent from us, and form conceptual objects 
 merely, into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts 
 itself at points discrete and relatively rare. Round their sev- 
 eral objective nuclei, partly shared and common partly dis- 
 
 113 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Whosoever feels his experience to be some- 
 thing substitutional even while he has it, may 
 be said to have an experience that reaches 
 beyond itself. From inside of its own entity 
 it says 'more,' and postulates reality existing 
 elsewhere. For the transcendentalist, who 
 holds knowing to consist in a salto mortale 
 across an ' epistemological chasm,' such an idea 
 presents no difficulty ; but it seems at first sight 
 as if it might be inconsistent with an empiri- 
 cism like our own. Have we not explained that 
 conceptual knowledge is made such wholly by 
 the existence of things that fall outside of the 
 knowing experience itself — by intermediary 
 experiences and by a terminus that fulfils ? 
 
 Crete, of tke real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing 
 their several lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths 
 that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual 
 points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and 
 around all the nuclei of shared 'reality' floats the vast cloud 
 of experiences that are wholly subjective, that are non-sub- 
 stitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for them- 
 selves in the perceptual world — the mere day-dreams and 
 joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These 
 exist with one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, 
 but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no inter- 
 related system of any kind will ever be made. 
 
 114 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 Can the knowledge be there before these ele- 
 ments that constitute its being have come? 
 And, if knowledge be not there, how can ob- 
 jective reference occur? 
 
 The key to this difficulty lies in the distinc- 
 tion between knowing a s verifie d and com- 
 pleted, and the same kn owing s as in transit and 
 on its way. To recur to the Memorial Hall 
 example lately used, it is only when our idea 
 of the Hall has actually terminated in the 
 percept that we know 'for certain' that from 
 the beginning it was truly cognitive of that. 
 Until established by the end of the process, 
 its quality of knowing that, or indeed of know- 
 ing anything, could still be doubted; and yet 
 the knowing really was there, as the result now 
 shows. We were virtual knowers of the Hall 
 long before we were certified to have been its 
 actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive 
 Validating power. Just so we are ' mortal ' 
 all the time, by reason of the virtuality of 
 the inevitable event which will make us so 
 when it shall have come. 
 
 Now the immensely greater part of all our 
 115 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. 
 It never is completed or nailed down. I speak 
 not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like 
 ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,' or of 'ejects' 
 like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I 
 speak also of ideas which we might verify if we 
 would take the trouble, but which we hold for 
 true altho unterminated perceptually, because 
 nothing says 'no' to us, and there is no con- 
 tradicting truth in sight. To continue thinking 
 unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hun- 
 dred, our practical substitute for knowing in the 
 completed sense. As each experience runs by 
 cognitive transition into the next one, and we 
 nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere 
 count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to 
 the current as if the port were sure. We live, as 
 it were, upon the front edge of an advancing 
 wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate 
 direction in falling forward is all we cover of 
 the future of our path. It is as if a differential 
 quotient should be conscious and treat itself as 
 an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve. 
 Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate 
 
 116 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 and of direction, and lives in these transitions 
 more than in the journey's end. The experi- 
 ences of tendency are sufficient to act upon — 
 what more could we have done at those mo- 
 ments even if the later verification comes com- 
 plete ? 
 
 This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say 
 to the charge that the objective reference which 
 is so flagrant a character of our experiences 
 involves a chasm and a mortal leap. A posi- 
 tively conjunctive transition involves neither 
 chasm nor leap. Being the very original of 
 what we mean by continuity, it makes a con- 
 tinuum wherever it appears. Objective refer- 
 ence is an incident of the fact that so much 
 of our experience comes as an insufficient and 
 consists of process and transition. Our fields 
 of experience have no more definite bounda- 
 ries than have our fields of view. Both are 
 fringed forever by a more that continuously de- 
 velops, and that continuously supersedes them 
 as life proceeds. The relations, generally speak- 
 ing, are as real here as the terms are, and the 
 only complaint of the transcendentalist's with 
 
 117 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 which I could at all sympathize would be his 
 charge that, by first making knowledge to con- 
 sist in external relations as I have done, and 
 by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time 
 these are not actually but only virtually there, 
 I have knocked the solid bottom out of the 
 whole business, and palmed off a substitute 
 of knowledge for the genuine thing. Only the 
 admission, such a critic might say, that our 
 ideas are self- transcendent and ' true ' already ; 
 in advance of the experiences that are to ter- 
 minate them, can bring solidity back to know- 
 ledge in a world like this, in which transitions 
 and terminations are only by exception fulfilled. 
 
 This seems to me an excellent place for 
 applying the pragmatic method. What would 
 the self -transcendency affirmed to exist in ad- 
 vance of all experiential mediation or termi- 
 nation, be known-as? What would it practi- 
 cally result in for us, were it true ? 
 
 It could only result in our orientation, in 
 the turning of our expectations and practical 
 tendencies into the right path; and the right 
 path here, so long as we and the object are 
 
 118 
 
KNOWER AND KNOWN 
 
 not yet face to face (or can never get face to 
 face, as in the case of ejects), would be the 
 path that led us into the object's nearest neigh- 
 borhood. Where direct acquaintance is lack- 
 ing, 'knowledge about' is the next best thing, 
 and an acquaintance with what actually lies 
 about the object, and is most closely related 
 to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. 
 Ether- waves and your anger, for example, 
 are things in which my thoughts will never 
 perceptually terminate, but my concepts of 
 them lead me to their very brink, to the 
 chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words 
 and deeds which are their really next effects. 
 Even if our ideas did in themselves possess 
 the postulated self-transcendency, it would 
 still remain true that their putting us into 
 possession of such effects would be the sole 
 cash-value of the self-transcendency for us. And 
 this cash-value, it is needless to say, is verba- 
 tim et literatim what our empiricist account 
 pays in. On pragmatist principles therefore, 
 a dispute over self-transcendency is a pure 
 logomachy. Call our concepts of ejective things 
 
 119 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no 
 difference, so long as we don't differ about 
 the nature of that exalted virtue's fruits — 
 fruits for us, of course, humanistic fruits. 
 
 The transcendentalist believes his ideas to 
 be self- transcendent only because he finds that 
 in fact they do bear fruits. Why need he 
 quarrel with an account of knowledge that 
 insists on naming this effect .^ Why not treat 
 the working of the idea from next to next as 
 the essence of its self-transcendency .^ Why 
 insist that knowing is a static relation out of 
 time when it practically seems so much a 
 function of our active life ? For a thing to be 
 valid, says Lotze, is the same as to make itself 
 valid. When the whole universe seems only to 
 be making itself valid and to be still incom- 
 plete (else why its ceaseless changing.'') why, 
 of all things, should knowing be exempt ? Why 
 should it not be making itself valid like every- 
 thing else. ? That some parts of it may be 
 already valid or verified beyond dispute, the 
 empirical philosopher, of course, like any one 
 else, may always hope. 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM' 
 
 JiuMANiSM is a ferment that has 'come to 
 stay.' It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, 
 and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather 
 a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, 
 making things appear as from a new centre 
 of interest or point of sight. Some writers 
 are strongly conscious of the shifting, others 
 half unconscious, even though their own 
 vision may have undergone much change. 
 The result is no small confusion in debate, 
 the half -conscious humanists often taking part 
 against the radical ones, as if they wished to 
 count upon the other side.^ 
 
 If humanism really be the name for such 
 
 ' Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and 
 Scientific Methods, vol. ii, No. 5, March 2, 1905. 
 
 ^ Professor Baldwin, for example. His address 'Selective 
 Thinking' (Psychological Review, January, 1898, reprinted 
 in his volume, 'Development and Evolution') seems to me 
 an unusually well written pragmatic manifesto. Nevertheless 
 in 'The Limits of Pragmatism' (ibid., January, 1904), he 
 (much less clearly) joins in the attack. 
 
 121 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that the 
 whole scene of the philosophic stage will 
 change in some degree if humanism prevails. 
 The emphasis of things, their foreground and 
 background distribution, their sizes and values, 
 will not keep just the same.* If such pervasive 
 consequences be involved in humanism, it is 
 clear that no pains which philosophers may 
 take, first in defining it, and then in further- 
 ing, checking, or steering its progress, will be 
 thrown away. 
 
 It suffers badly at present from incomplete 
 definition. Its most systematic advocates, 
 Schiller and Dewey, have published fragment- 
 ary programmes only ; and its bearing on many 
 
 ' The ethical changes, it seems to me, are beautifully made 
 evident in Professor Dewey's series of articles, which will 
 never get the attention they deserve till they are printed in a 
 book. I mean: 'The Significance of Emotions,' Psychological 
 Review, vol. ii, 13; 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,' 
 ibid., iii, 357; 'Psychology and Social Practice,' iMd., vii, 105; 
 ' Interpretation of Savage Mind,' ibid., ix, 21 7 ; ' Green's Theory 
 of the Moral Motive,' Philosophical Review, vol. i, 593; 'Self- 
 reaUzation as the Moral Ideal,' ibid., ii, 652; 'The Psychology 
 of Effort,' ibid., vi, 43; 'The Evolutionary Method as Applied 
 to Morahty,' ibid., xi, 107, 353; 'Evolution and Ethics,' Monist, 
 vol. viii, 321 ; to mention only a few. 
 
 122 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 vital philosophic problems has not been traced 
 except by adversaries who, scenting heresies 
 in advance, have showered blows on doctrines 
 — subjectivism and scepticism, for example — 
 that no good humanist finds it necessary to 
 entertain. By their still greater reticences, the 
 anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed the hu- 
 manists. Much of the controversy has involved 
 the word 'truth.' It is always good in debate 
 to know your adversary's point of view au- 
 thentically. But the critics of humanism never 
 define exactly what the word 'truth' signifies 
 when they use it themselves. The humanists 
 have to guess at their view; and the result 
 has doubtless been much beating of the air. 
 Add to all this, great individual differences in 
 both camps, and it becomes clear that nothing 
 is so urgently needed, at the stage which things 
 have reached at present, as a sharper defini- 
 tion by each side of its central point of view. 
 Whoever will contribute any touch of sharp- 
 ness will help us to make sure of what's what 
 and who is who. Any one can contribute such 
 a definition, and, without it, no one knows 
 
 123 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 exactly where he stands. If I oflfer my own 
 provisional definition of humanism now and 
 here, others may improve it, some adversary 
 may be led to define his own creed more 
 sharply by the contrast, and a certain quick- 
 ening of the crystallization of general opinion 
 may result. 
 
 The essential service of humanism, as I 
 conceive the situation, is to have seen that 
 tho one part of our experience may lean upon 
 another part to make it what it is in any one 
 of several aspects in which it may be consid- 
 ered, experience as a whole is self-containing 
 and leans on nothing. Since this formula also 
 expresses the main contention of transcenden- 
 tal idealism, it needs abundant explication 
 to make it unambiguous. It seems, at first 
 sight, to confine itself to denying theism and 
 pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny 
 either; everything would depend on the exe- 
 gesis; and if the formula ever became canon- 
 ical, it would certainly develop both right- 
 
 124 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 wing and left-wing interpreters. I myself read 
 humanism theistically and pluralistically. If 
 there be a God, he is no absolute all-experi- 
 encer, but simply the experiencer of widest 
 actual conscious span. Read thus, humanism 
 is for me a religion susceptible of reasoned de- 
 fence, tho I am well aware how many minds 
 there are to whom it can appeal religiously 
 only when it has been monistically translated. 
 Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes for 
 me a stronger hold on reality than any other 
 philosophy I know of — it being essentially 
 a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co,' in 
 which conjunctions do the work. But my 
 primary reason for advocating it is its match- 
 less intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only 
 of the standing 'problems' that monism en- 
 genders ('problem of evil,' 'problem of free- 
 dom,' and the like), but of other metaphysical 
 mysteries and paradoxes as well. 
 
 It gets rid, for example, of the whole ag- 
 nostic controversy, by refusing to entertain 
 the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all. 
 It gets rid of any need for an absolute of the 
 
 125 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 bradleyan type (avowedly sterile for inte 
 leetual purposes) by insisting that the coi 
 junctive relations found within experience ai 
 faultlessly real. It gets rid of the need c 
 an absolute of the roycean type (similarl 
 sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the prol 
 lem of knowledge. As the views of knowledgt 
 reality and truth imputed to humanism hav 
 been those so far most fiercely attacked, it i 
 in regard to these ideas that a sharpening c 
 focus seems most urgently required. I pre 
 ceed therefore to bring the views which . 
 impute to humanism in these respects int 
 focus as briefly as I can. 
 
 II 
 
 j If the central humanistic thesis, printe< 
 above in italics, be accepted, it will follow 
 that, if there be any such thing at all as know 
 ing, the knower and the object known mus 
 both be portions of experience. One part o 
 experience must, therefore, either 
 
 (1) Know another part of experience — ii 
 other words, parts must, as Professor Wood 
 
 126 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 bridge says,* represent one another instead 
 of representing realities outside of 'conscious- 
 ness' — this case is that of conceptual know- 
 ledge ; or else 
 
 (2) They must simply exist as so many 
 ultimate thats or facts of being, in the first 
 instance; and then, as a secondary complica- 
 tion, and without doubling up its entitative 
 singleness, any one alid the same that in 
 experience must figure alternately as a thing 
 known and as a knowledge of the thing, by 
 reason of two divergent kinds of context into 
 which, in the general course of experience, it 
 gets woven. ^ 
 
 This second case is that of sense-perception. 
 There is a stage of thought that goes beyond 
 common sense, and of it I shall say more 
 presently; but the common-sense stage is a 
 perfectly definite halting-place of thought, 
 primarily for purposes of action ; and, so long 
 
 ' In Science, November 4, 1904, p. 599. 
 
 ' This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one 
 who has not read my two articles 'Does Consciousness Exist?' 
 and ' A World of Pure Experience ' in the Journal of Philo- 
 sophy, vol. i, 1904. 
 
 127 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 as we remain on the common-sense stage of 
 thought, object and subject fuse in the fact 
 of 'presentation' or sense-perception — the 
 pen and hand which I now see writing, for 
 example, are the physical realities which those 
 words designate. In this case there is no self- 
 transcendency implied in the knowing. Hu- 
 manism, here, is only a more comminuted 
 identit'dtsphilosophie . 
 
 In case (1), on the contrary, the representa- 
 tive experience does transcend itself in knowing 
 the other experience that is its object. No 
 one can talk of the knowledge of the one by 
 the other without seeing them as numerically 
 distinct entities, of which the one lies beyond 
 the other and away from it, along some direc- 
 tion and with some interval, that can be 
 definitely named. But, if the talker be a 
 humanist, he must also see this distance- 
 interval concretely and pragmatically, and 
 confess it to consist of other intervening ex- 
 periences — of possible ones, at all events, 
 if not of actual. To call my present idea of 
 my dog, for example, cognitive of the real dog 
 
 128 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 means that, as the actual tissue of experience 
 is constituted, the idea is capable of leading 
 into a chain of other experiences on my part 
 that go from next to next and terminate at last 
 in vivid sense-perceptions of a jumping, bark- 
 ing, hairy body. Those are the real dog, the 
 dog's full presence, for my common sense. 
 If the supposed talker is a profound phi- 
 losopher, altho they may not he the real dog 
 for him, they mean the real dog, are practical 
 substitutes for the real dog, as the representa- 
 tion was a practical substitute for them, that 
 real dog being a lot of atoms, say, or of mind- 
 stuff, that lie where the sense-perceptions lie 
 in his experience as well as in my own. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The philosopher here stands for the stage 
 of thought that goes beyond the stage of com- 
 mon sense; and the difference is simply that 
 he 'interpolates' and 'extrapolates,' where 
 common sense does not. For common sense, 
 two men see the same identical real dog. Phi- 
 losophy, noting actual differences in their per- 
 
 129 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 ceptions, points out the duality of these latter, 
 and interpolates something between them as 
 a more real terminus — first, organs, viscera, 
 etc.; next, cells; then, ultimate atoms; lastly, 
 mind-stuff perhaps. The original sense- termini 
 of the two men, instead of coalescing with each 
 other and with the real dog-object, as at first 
 supposed, are thus held by philosophers to 
 be separated by invisible realities with which, 
 at most, they are conterminous. 
 
 Abolish, now, one of the percipients, and 
 the interpolation changes into 'extrapolation.' 
 The sense-terminus of the remaining percipient 
 is regarded by the philosopher as not quite 
 reaching reality. He has only carried the pro- 
 cession of experiences, the philosopher thinks, 
 to a definite, because practical, halting-place 
 somewhere on the way towards an absolute 
 truth that lies beyond. 
 
 The humanist sees all the time, however, 
 that there is no absolute transcendency even 
 about the more absolute realities thus con- 
 jectured or believed in. The viscera and cells 
 are only possible percepts following upon that 
 
 130 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 of the outer body. The atoms again, tho we 
 may never attain to human means of per- 
 ceiving them, are still defined perceptually. 
 The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind 
 of experience; and it is possible to frame the 
 hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic 
 be excluded from philosophy) of two knowers 
 of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff 
 itself becoming 'confluent' at the moment at 
 which our imperfect knowing might pass into 
 knowing of a completed type. Even so do 
 you and I habitually conceive our two per- 
 ceptions and the real dog as confluent, tho 
 only provisionally, and for the common-sense 
 stage of thought. If my pen be inwardly made 
 of mind-stuff, there is no confluence now 
 between that mind-stuff and my visual per- 
 ception of the pen. But conceivably there 
 might come to be such confluence ; for, in the 
 case of my hand, the visual sensations and the 
 inward feelings of the hand, its mind-stuff, so 
 to speak, are even now as confluent as any 
 two things can be. 
 
 There is, thus, no breach in humanistic 
 131 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 epistemology. Whether knowledge be taken 
 as ideally perfected, or only as true enough 
 to pass muster for practice, it is hung on 
 one continuous scheme. Reality, howsoever 
 remote, is always defined as a terminus within 
 the general possibilities of experience; and 
 what knows it is defined as an experience that 
 'represents' it, in the sense of being suhstitutahle 
 for it in our thinking because it leads to the 
 same associates, or in the sense of ' pointing to 
 it' through a chain of other experiences that 
 either intervene or may intervene. 
 
 Absolute reality here bears the same rela- 
 tion to sensation as sensation bears to concep- 
 tion or imagination. Both are provisional or 
 final termini, sensation being only the terminus 
 at which the practical man habitually stops, 
 while the philosopher projects a 'beyond,' in 
 the shape of more absolute reality. These ter- 
 mini, for the practical and the philosophical 
 stages of thought respectively, are self-support- 
 ing. They are not ' true ' of anything else, they 
 simply are, are real. They ' lean on nothing,' as 
 my italicized formula said. Rather does the 
 
 132 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 whole fabric of experience lean on them, just as 
 the whole fabric of the solar system, including 
 many relative positions, leans, for its absolute 
 position in space, on any one of its constituent 
 stars. Here, again, one gets a new Identit'dts- 
 philosophie in pluralistic form. 
 
 IV 
 
 If I have succeeded in making this at all 
 clear (tho I fear that brevity and abstract- 
 ness between them may have made me fail), 
 the reader will see that the 'truth' of our 
 mental operations must always be an intra- 
 experiential affair. A conception is reckoned 
 true by common sense when it can be made to 
 lead to a sensation. The sensation, which for 
 common sense is not. so much 'true' as 'real,' 
 is held to be provisionally true by the philo- 
 sopher just in so far as it covers (abuts at, or 
 occupies the place of) a still more absolutely 
 real experience, in 'the possibility of which, 
 to some remoter experient, the philosopher 
 finds reason to believe. 
 
 Meanwhile what actually does count for 
 133 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 true to any individual trower, whether he be 
 philosopher or conlmon man, is always a re- 
 sult of his apperceptions. If a novel experience, 
 conceptual or sensible, contradict too emphat- 
 ically our pre-existent system of beliefs, in 
 ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is treated 
 as false. Only when the older and the newer 
 experiences are congruous enough to mutually 
 apperceive and modify each other, does what 
 we treat as an advance in truth result. In no 
 case, however, need truth consist in a relation 
 between our experiences and something arche- 
 typal or trans-experiential. Should we ever 
 reach absolutely terminal experiences, experi- 
 ences in which we all agreed, which were super- 
 seded by no revised continuations, these would 
 not be true, they would be real, they would 
 simply be, and be indeed the angles, comers, 
 and linchpins of all reality, on which the truth 
 of everything else would be stayed. Only such 
 other things.as led to these* by satisfactory con- 
 junctions would be 'true.' Satisfactory con- 
 nection of some sort with such termini is all that 
 the word 'truth' means .\ On the common- 
 
 134 
 
THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM 
 
 sense stage of thought sense-presentations 
 serve as such termini. Our ideas and concepts 
 and scientific theories pass for true only so far 
 as they harmoniously lead back to the world 
 of sense. 
 
 I hope that many humanists will endorse 
 this attempt of mine to trace the more essential 
 features of that way of viewing things. I feel 
 almost certain that Messrs. Dewey and Schiller 
 will do so. If the attackers will also take some 
 slight account pf it, it may be that discussion 
 will be a little less wide of the mark than it has 
 hitherto been. 
 
VI 
 
 A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH* 
 
 My failure in making converts to my concep- 
 tion of truth seems, if I may judge by what 
 I hear in conversation, almost complete. An 
 ordinary philosopher would feel disheartened, 
 and a common choleric sinner would curse 
 God and die, after such a reception. But in- 
 stead of taking counsel of despair, I make bold 
 to vary my statements, in the faint hope that 
 repeated droppings may wear upon the stone, 
 and that my formulas may seem less obscure 
 if surrounded by something more of a 'mass' 
 whereby to apperceive them. 
 
 For fear of compromising other pragmatists, 
 whoe'er they be, I will speak of the conception 
 which I am trying to make intelligible, as my 
 own conception. I first published it in the year 
 1885, in the first article reprinted in the pre- 
 sent book. Essential theses of this article were 
 independently supported in 1893 and 1895 by 
 
 * Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy, July 18, 1907. 
 136 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 Professor D. S. Miller' and were repeated by 
 me in a presidential address on 'The know- 
 ing of things together' ^ in 1895. Professor 
 Strong, in an article in the Journal of Phi- 
 losophy, etc.,^ entitled 'A naturalistic theory of 
 the reference of thought to reality,' called our 
 account ' the James-Miller theory of cognition,' 
 and, as I understood him, gave it his adhesion. 
 Yet, such is the difficulty of writing clearly in 
 these penetralia of philosophy, that each of these 
 revered colleagues informs me privately that 
 the account of truth I now give — which to me 
 is but that earlier statement more completely 
 set forth — is to him inadequate, and seems to 
 leave the gist of real cognition out. If such 
 near friends disagree, what can I hope from 
 remoter ones, and what from unfriendly critics .-' 
 Yet I feel so sure that the fault must lie in 
 my lame forms of statement and not in my 
 doctrine, that I am fain to try once more to 
 express myself. 
 
 * Philosophical Review, vol. ii, p. 408, and Psychological 
 
 Review, vol. ii, p. 533. 
 
 ' The relevant parts of which are printed above, p. 43. 
 
 ^ Vol. i, p. 253. 
 
 137 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Are there not some general distinctions which 
 it may help us to agree about in advance ? Pro- 
 fessor Strong distinguishes between what he 
 calls 'saltatory' and what he calls 'ambulatory' 
 relations. 'DiflPerence,' for example, is salta- 
 tory, jumping as it were immediately from one 
 term to another, but ' distance' in time or space 
 is made out of intervening parts of experience 
 through which we ambulate in succession. 
 Years ago, when T. H. Green's ideas were most 
 influential, I was much troubled by his criti- 
 cisms of english sensationalism. One of his 
 disciples in particular would always say to me, 
 'Yes! terms may indeed be possibly sensa- 
 tional in origin; but relations, what are they 
 but pure acts of the intellect coming upon the 
 sensations from above, and of a higher na- 
 ture?' I well remember the sudden relief it 
 gave me to perceive one day that space-rela- 
 tions at any rate were homogeneous with the 
 terms between which they mediated. The 
 terms were spaces, and the relations were 
 
 138 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 other intervening spaces.' For the Greenites 
 space-relations had been saltatory, for me they 
 became thenceforward ambulatory. 
 
 Now the most general way of contrasting 
 my view of knowledge with the popular view 
 (which is also the view of most epistemologists) 
 is to call my view ambulatory, and the other 
 view saltatory; and the most general way of 
 characterizing the two views is by saying that 
 my view describes knowing as it exists con- 
 cretely, while the other view only describes 
 its results abstractly taken. 
 
 I fear that most of my recalcitrant readers 
 fail to recognize that what is ambulatory in 
 the concrete may be taken so abstractly as to 
 appear saltatory. Distance, for example, is 
 made abstract by emptying out whatever is 
 particular in the concrete intervals — it is re- 
 duced thus to a sole 'difference,' a difference 
 of 'place,' which is a logical or saltatory dis- 
 tinction, a so-called 'pure relation.' 
 
 The same is true of the relation called ' know- 
 ing,' which may connect an idea with a reality. 
 
 ' See my Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 148-153. 
 139 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 My own account of this relation is ambulatory 
 through and through. I say that we know an 
 object by means of an idea, whenever we am- 
 bulate towards the object under the impulse 
 which the idea communicates. If we believe 
 in so-called 'sensible' realities, the idea may 
 not only send us towards its object, but may 
 put the latter into our very hand, make it our 
 immediate sensation. But, if, as most reflect- 
 ive people opine, sensible realities are not ' real ' 
 realities, but only their appearances, our idea 
 brings us at least so far, puts us in touch with 
 reality's most authentic appearances and substi- 
 tutes. In any case our idea brings us into the 
 object's neighborhood, practical or ideal, gets 
 us into commerce with it, helps us towards its 
 closer acquaintance, enables us to foresee it, 
 class it, compare it, deduce it, — in short, to 
 deal with it as we could not were the idea not 
 in our possession. 
 
 ( The idea is thus, when functionally consid- 
 ered, an instrument for enabling us the better 
 to have to do with the object and to act about 
 it. But it and the object are both of them bits 
 
 140 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 of the general sheet and tissue of reality at 
 large ; and when we say that the idea leads us 
 towards the object, that only means that it car- 
 ries us forward through intervening tracts of 
 that reality into the object's closer neighbor- 
 hood, into the midst of its associates at least, 
 be these its physical neighbors, or be they 
 its logical congeners only. Thus carried into 
 closer quarters, we are in an improved situa- 
 tion as regards acquaintance and conduct ; and 
 we say that through the idea we now know the 
 object better or more truly. 
 
 My thesis is that the knowing here is made 
 by the ambulation through the intervening 
 experiences. If the idea led us nowhere, or 
 from that object instead of towards it, could 
 we talk at all of its having any cognitive qual- 
 ity.'' Surely not, for it is only when taken in 
 conjunction with the intermediate experiences 
 that it gets related to that particular object 
 rather than to any other part of nature. Those 
 intermediaries determine what particular know- 
 ing function it exerts. The terminus they guide 
 
 us to tells us what object it 'means,' the re- 
 
 141 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 suits they enrich us with 'verify' or 'refute' it. 
 Intervening experiences are thus as indispens- 
 able foundations for a concrete relation of 
 cognition as intervening space is for a relation 
 of distance. Cognition, whenever we take it 
 concretely, means determinate 'ambulation,' 
 through intermediaries, from a terminus a quo 
 to, or towards, a terminus ad quern. As the in- 
 termediaries are other than the termini, and 
 connected with them by the usual associative 
 bonds (be these 'external' or be they logical, 
 i. e., classificatory, in character), there would 
 appear to be nothing especially unique about 
 the processes of knowing. They fall wholly 
 within experience; and we need use, in de- 
 scribing them, no other categories than those 
 which we employ in describing other natural 
 processes. 
 
 But there exist no processes which we can- 
 not also consider abstractly, eviscerating them 
 down to their essential skeletons or outlines; 
 and when we have treated the processes of 
 knowing thus, we are easily led to regard them 
 as something altogether unparalleled in na- 
 
 142 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 ture. For we first empty idea, object and in- 
 termediaries of all their particularities, in or- 
 der to retain only a general scheme, and then 
 we consider the latter only in its function of 
 giving a result, and not in its character of be- 
 ing a process. In this treatment the interme- 
 diaries shrivel into the form of a mere space of 
 separation, while the idea and object retain 
 only the logical distinctness of being the end- 
 terms that are separated. In other words, the 
 intermediaries which in their concrete particu- 
 larity form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an 
 empty interval to cross, and then, the relation 
 of the end-terms having become saltatory, the 
 whole hocus-pocus of erkenntnisstheorie be- 
 gins, and goes on unrestrained by further con- 
 crete considerations. The idea, in 'meaning' 
 an object separated by an ' epistemological 
 chasm' from itself, now executes what Pro- 
 fessor Ladd calls a 'salto mortale'; in knowing 
 the object's nature, it now 'transcends' its 
 own. The object in turn becomes 'present' 
 where it is really absent, etc. ; until a scheme 
 remains upon our hands, the sublime para- 
 
 143 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 doxes of which some of us think that nothing 
 short of an 'absolute' can explain. 
 
 The relation between idea and object, thus 
 made abstract and saltatory, is thenceforward 
 opposed, as being more essential and previous, 
 to its own ambulatory self, and the more con- 
 crete description is branded as either false or 
 insufficient. The bridge of intermediaries, act- 
 ual or possible, which in every real case is what 
 carries and defines the knowing, gets treated as 
 an episodic complication which need not even 
 potentially be there. I believe that this vulgar 
 fallacy of opposing abstractions to the con- 
 cretes from which they are abstracted, is the 
 main reason why my account of knowing is 
 deemed so unsatisfactory, and I will therefore 
 say a word more on that general point. 
 
 Any vehicle of conjunction, if all its particu- 
 larities are abstracted from it, will leave us with 
 nothing on our hands but the original dis- 
 junction which it bridged over. But to escape 
 treating the resultant self-contradiction as an 
 achievement of dialectical profundity, all we 
 need is to restore some part, no matter how 
 
 144 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 small, of what we have taken away. In the 
 case of the epistemological chasm the first rea- 
 sonable step is to remember that the chasm 
 was filled with some empirical material, whether 
 ideational or sensational, which performed 
 some bridging function and saved us from the 
 mortal leap. Restoring thus the indispensable 
 modicum of reality to the matter of our dis- 
 cussion, we find our abstract treatment gen- 
 uinely useful. We escape entanglement with 
 special cases without at the same time falling 
 into gratuitous paradoxes. We can now de- 
 scribe the general features of cognition, tell 
 what on the whole it does for us, in a universal 
 way. 
 
 We must remember that this whole inquiry 
 into knowing grows up on a reflective level. 
 In any real moment of knowing, what we are 
 thinking of is our object, not the way in which 
 we ourselves are momentarily knowing it. We 
 at this moment, as it happens, have knowing 
 itself for our object ; but I think that the reader 
 will agree that his present knowing of that ob- 
 ject is included only abstractly, and by antici- 
 
 145 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 pation, in the results he may reach. What he 
 concretely has before his mind, as he reasons, 
 is some supposed objective instance of know- 
 ing, as he conceives it to go on in some other 
 person, or recalls it from his own past. As 
 such, he, the critic, sees it to contain both an 
 idea and an object, and processes by which the 
 knower is guided from the one towards the 
 other. He sees that the idea is remote from 
 the object, and that, whether through interme- 
 diaries or not, it genuinely has to do with it. He 
 sees that it thus works beyond its immediate 
 being, and lays hold of a remote reality; it 
 jumps across, transcends itself. It does all this 
 by extraneous aid, to be sure, but when the aid 
 has come, it has done it and the result is se- 
 cure. Why not talk of results by themselves, 
 then, without considering means ? Why not 
 treat the idea as simply grasping or intuiting 
 the reality, of its having the faculty anyhow, 
 of shooting over nature behind the scenes and 
 knowing things immediately and directly? 
 Why need we always lug in the bridging ? — 
 it only retards our discourse to do so. 
 
 146 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 Such abstract talk about cognition's re- 
 sults is surely convenient; and it is surely as 
 legitimate as it is convenient, so long as we 
 do not forget or positively deny, what it ig- 
 nores. We may on occasion say that our idea 
 meant always that particular object, that it 
 led us there because it was of it intrinsically 
 and essentially. We may insist that its veri- 
 fication follows upon that original cognitive 
 virtue in it — and all the rest — and we shall 
 do no harm so long as we know that these are 
 only short cuts in our thinking. They are 
 positively true accounts of fact as far as they 
 go, only they leave vast tracts of fact out of 
 the account, tracts of fact that have to be 
 reinstated to make the accounts literally true 
 of any real case. But if, not merely passively 
 ignoring the intermediaries, you actively deny 
 them ' to be even potential requisites for the 
 results you are so struck by, your epistemology 
 goes to irremediable smash. You are as far 
 
 * This is the fallacy which I have called 'vicious intellectual- 
 ism' in my book A Pluralistic Universe, Longmans, Green 
 & Co., 1909. 
 
 147 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 off the track as an historian would be, if, lost 
 in admiration of Napoleon's personal power, 
 he were to ignore his marshals and his armies, 
 and were to accuse you of error in describing 
 his conquests as effected by their means. Of 
 such abstractness and one-sidedness I accuse 
 most of the critics of my own account. 
 
 In the second lecture of the book Prag- 
 matism, I used the illustration of a squirrel 
 scrambling round a tree-trunk to keep out 
 of sight of a pursuing man : both go round the 
 tree, but does the man go round the squirrel .'* 
 It all depends, I said, on what you mean by 
 'going round.' In one sense of the word the 
 man 'goes round,' in another sense he does not. 
 I settled the dispute by pragmatically dis- 
 tinguishing the senses. But I told how some 
 disputants had called my distinction a shuf- 
 fling evasion and taken their stand on what 
 they called 'plain honest English going-round.' 
 
 In such a simple case few people would 
 object to letting the term in dispute be trans- 
 lated into its concreter equivalents. But in the 
 case of a complex function like our knowing 
 
 148 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 they act differently. I give full concrete par- 
 ticular value for the ideas of knowing in every 
 case I can think of, yet my critics insist that 
 'plain honest English knowing' is left out of 
 my account. They write as if the minus were 
 on my side and the plus on theirs. 
 
 The essence of the matter for me is that 
 altho knowing can be both abstractly and 
 concretely described, and altho the abstract 
 descriptions are often useful enough, yet 
 they are all sucked up and absorbed without 
 residuum into the concreter ones, and contain 
 nothing of any essentially other or higher na- 
 ture, which the concrete descriptions can be 
 justly accused of leaving behind. Knowing 
 is just a natural process like any other. There 
 is no ambulatory process whatsoever, the 
 results of which we may not describe, if we 
 prefer to, in saltatory terms, or represent in 
 static formulation. Suppose, e. g., that we 
 say a man is ' prudent.' Concretely, that means 
 that he takes out insurance, hedges in betting, 
 looks before he leaps. Do such acts constitute 
 the prudence ? are they the man qua prudent ? 
 
 149 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Or is the prudence something by itself and 
 independent of them? As a constant habit 
 in him, a permanent tone of character, it is 
 convenient to call him prudent in abstraction 
 from any one of his acts, prudent in general 
 and without specification, and to say the acts 
 follow from the pre-existing prudence. There 
 are peculiarities in his psycho-physical system 
 that make him act prudently; and there are 
 tendencies to association in our thoughts that 
 prompt SG ne of them to make for truth and 
 others for error. But would the man be pru- 
 dent in the absence of each and all of the 
 acts .? Or would the thoughts be true if they 
 had no associative or impulsive tendencies ? 
 Surely we have no right to oppose static es- 
 sences in this way to the moving processes in 
 which they live embedded. 
 
 My bedroom is above my library. Does the 
 'aboveness' here mean aught that is different 
 from the concrete spaces which have to be 
 moved-through in getting from the one to the 
 other .!* It means, you may say, a pure topo- 
 graphic relation, a sort of architect's plan 
 
 150 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 among the eternal essences. But that is not 
 the full aboveness, it is only an abbreviated 
 substitute that on occasion may lead my mind 
 towards truer, i. e., fuller, dealings with the 
 real aboveness. It is not an aboveness ante 
 rem, it is a post rem extract from the above- 
 ness in rebus. We may indeed talk, for cer- 
 tain conveniences, as if the abstract scheme 
 preceded, we may say 'I must go up stairs 
 because of the essential aboveness,' just as 
 we may say that the man 'does prudent acts 
 because of his ingrained prudence,' or that 
 our ideas 'lead us truly because of their in- 
 trinsic truth.' But this should not debar us 
 on other occasions from using completer 
 forms of description. A concrete matter of 
 fact always remains identical under any form 
 of description, as when we say of a line, 
 now that it runs from left to right, and now 
 that it runs from right to left. These are but 
 names of one and the same fact, one more 
 expedient to use at one time, one at another. 
 The full facts of cognition, whatever be the 
 way in which we talk about them, even when 
 
 151 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 we talk most abstractly, stand inalterably 
 given in the actualities and possibilities of 
 the experience-continuum.' But my critics 
 treat my own more concrete talk as if it 
 were the kind that sinned by its inadequacy, 
 and as if the full continuum left something 
 out. 
 
 A favorite way of opposing the more ab- 
 stract to the more concrete account is to accuse 
 those who favor the latter of 'confounding 
 psychology with logic' Our critics say that 
 when we are asked what truth means, we reply 
 by telling only how it is arrived-at. But since 
 a meaning is a logical relation, static, inde- 
 pendent of time, how can it possibly be identi- 
 fied, they say, with any concrete man's ex- 
 perience, perishing as this does at the instant 
 of its production ? This, indeed, sounds pro- 
 found, but I challenge the profundity. I defy 
 any one to show any difference between logic 
 
 ' The ultimate object or terminus of a cognitive process 
 may in certain instances lie beyond the direct experience of 
 the particular cognizer, but it, of course, must exist as part 
 of the total universe of experience whose constitution, with 
 cognition in it, the critic is discussing. 
 
 152 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 and psychology here. The logical relation 
 stands to the psychological relation between 
 idea and object only as saltatory abstractness 
 stands to ambulatory concreteness. Both re- 
 lations need a psychological vehicle ; and the 
 'logical' one is simply the 'psychological' one 
 disemboweled of its fulness, and reduced to 
 a bare abstractional scheme. 
 
 A while ago a prisoner, on being released, 
 tried to assassinate the judge who had sen- 
 tenced him. He had apparently succeeded in 
 conceiving the judge timelessly, had reduced 
 him to a bare logical meaning, that of being 
 his 'enemy and persecutor,' by stripping off 
 all the concrete conditions (as jury's verdict, 
 official obligation, absence of personal spite, 
 possibly sympathy) that gave its full psycho- 
 logical character to the sentence as a particu- 
 lar man's act in time. Truly the sentence was 
 inimical to the culprit ; but which idea of it is 
 the truer one, that bare logical definition of it, 
 or its full psychological specification .J* The 
 anti-pragmatists ought in consistency to stand 
 up for the criminal's view of the case, treat 
 
 153 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 the judge as the latter's logical enemy, and 
 bar out the other conditions as so much in- 
 essential psychological stuff. 
 
 II 
 
 A still further obstacle, I suspect, stands in 
 the way of my account's acceptance. Like 
 Dewey and like Schiller, I have had to say that 
 the truth of an idea is determined by its satis- 
 factoriness. But satisfactoriness is a subjective 
 term, just as idea is ; and truth is generally re- 
 garded as ' objective.' Readers who admit that 
 satisfactoriness is our only mark of truth, the 
 only sign that we possess the precious article, 
 will still say that the objective relation between 
 idea and object which the word ' truth ' points 
 to is left out of my account altogether. I fear 
 also that the association of my poor name 
 with the 'will to believe' (which 'will,' it 
 seems to me, ought to play no part in this dis- 
 cussion) works against my credit in some quar- 
 ters. I fornicate with that unclean thing, my 
 adversaries may think, whereas your genuine 
 truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan heroics, 
 
 154 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 and feel as if truth, to be real truth, ought to 
 bring eventual messages of death to all our 
 satisfactions. Such divergences certainly prove 
 the complexity of the area of our discussion; 
 but to my mind they also are based on mis- 
 understandings, which (tho with but little hope 
 of success) I will try to diminish by a further 
 word of explanation. 
 
 First, then, I will ask my objectors to define 
 exactly what sort of thing it is they have in 
 mind when they speak of a truth that shall be 
 absolute, complete and objective; and then I 
 will defy them to show me any conceivable 
 standing-room for such a kind of truth outside 
 the terms of my own description. It will fall, 
 as I contend, entirely within the field of my 
 analysis. 
 
 To begin with, it must obtain between an 
 idea and a reality that is the idea's object; 
 and, as a predicate, it must apply to the idea 
 and not to the object, for objective realities 
 are not true, at least not in the universe of 
 discourse to which we are now confining our- 
 selves, for there they are taken as simply being, 
 
 155 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 while tKe ideas are true of them. But we can 
 suppose a series of ideas to be successively 
 more and more true of the same object, and 
 can ask what is the extreme approach to being 
 absolutely true that the last idea might attain to. 
 The maximal conceivable truth in an idea 
 would seem to be that it should lead to an 
 actual merging of ourselves with the object, to 
 an utter mutual confluence and identification. 
 On the common-sense level of belief this is 
 what is supposed really to take place in sense- 
 perception. My idea of this pen verifies itself 
 through my percept; and my percept is held 
 to he the pen for the time being — percepts 
 and physical realities being treated by com- 
 mon sense as identical. But the physiology 
 of the senses has criticised common sense out 
 of court, and the pen 'in itself is now believed 
 to lie beyond my momentary percept. Yet the 
 notion once suggested, of what a completely 
 consummated acquaintance with a reality 
 might be like, remains over for our specula- 
 tive purposes. Total conflux of the mind with 
 the reality would be the absolute limit of truth, 
 
 156 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 there could be no better or more satisfying 
 knowledge than that. 
 
 Such total conflux, it is needless to say, is 
 already explicitly provided for, as a possibility, 
 in my account of the matter. If an idea should 
 ever lead us not only towards, or up to, or 
 against, a reality, but so close that we and the 
 reality should melt together, it would be made 
 absolutely true, according to me, by that per- 
 formance. 
 
 In point of fact philosophers doubt that 
 this ever occurs. What happens, they think, 
 is only that we get nearer and nearer to reali- 
 ties, we approximate more and more to the 
 all-satisfying limit; and the definition of 
 actually, as distinguished from imaginably, 
 complete and objective truth, can then only 
 be that it belongs to the idea that will lead us 
 as close up against the object as in the nature 
 of our experience is possible, literally next to 
 it, for instance. 
 
 Suppose, now, there were an idea that did 
 this for a certain objective reality. Suppdse 
 that no further approach were possible, that 
 
 157 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 nothing lay between, that the next step would 
 carry us right into the reality; then that 
 result, being the next thing to conflux, would 
 make the idea true in the maximal degree that 
 might be supposed practically attainable in 
 the world which we inhabit. 
 
 Well, I need hardly explain that that degree 
 of truth is also provided for in my account of 
 the matter. And if satisfactions are the marks 
 of truth's presence, we may add that any less 
 true substitute for such a true idea would prove 
 less satisfactory. Following its lead, we should 
 probably find out that we did not quite touch 
 the terminus. We should desiderate a closer 
 approach, and not rest till we had found it. 
 
 I am, of course, postulating here a standing 
 reality independent of the idea that knows it. 
 I am also postulating that satisfactions grow 
 pari passu with our approximation to such 
 reality.* If my critics challenge this latter 
 
 * Say, if you prefer to, that dissatisfactions decrease pari 
 passu with such approximation. The approximation may be 
 of any kind assignable — approximation in time or in space, 
 or approximation in kind, which in common speech means 
 'copying.' 
 
 158 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 assumption, I retort upon them with the for- 
 mer. Our whole notion of a standing reality 
 grows up in the form of an ideal limit to the 
 series of successive termini to which our 
 thoughts have led us and still are leading us. 
 Each terminus proves provisional by leaving 
 us unsatisfied. The truer idea is the one that 
 pushes farther ; so we are ever beckoned on by 
 the ideal notion of an ultimate completely 
 satisfactory terminus. I, for one, obey and 
 accept that notion. I can conceive no other 
 objective content to the notion of ideally per- 
 fect truth than that of penetration into such a 
 terminus, nor can I conceive that the notion 
 would ever have grown up, or that true ideas 
 would ever have been sorted out from false 
 or idle ones, save for the greater sum of satis- 
 factions, intellectual or practical, which the 
 truer ones brought with them. Can we im- 
 agine a man absolutely satisfied with an idea 
 and with all its relations to his other ideas and 
 to his sensible experiences, who should yet 
 not take its content as a true account of 
 reality.'' The matter of the true is thus abso- 
 
 159 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 lutely identical with the matter of the satis- 
 factory. You may put either word first in your 
 ways of talking ; but leave out that whole no- 
 tion of satisfactory working or leading (which 
 is the essence of my pragmatistic account) 
 and call truth a static logical relation, inde- 
 pendent even of possible leadings or satisfac- 
 tions, and it seems to me you cut all ground 
 from under you. 
 
 I fear that I am still very obscure. But I 
 respectfully implore those who reject my doc- 
 trine because they can make nothing of my 
 stumbling language, to tell us in their own 
 name — und zwar very concretely and articu- 
 lately ! — just how the real, genuine and ab- 
 solutely ' objective ' truth which they believe in 
 so profoundly, is constituted and established. 
 They mustn't point to the 'reality' itself, 
 for truth is only our subjective relation to 
 realities. What is the nominal essence of this 
 relation, its logical definition, whether or not 
 it be 'objectively' attainable by mortals? 
 
 Whatever they may say it is, I have the 
 firmest faith that my account will prove to 
 
 160 
 
A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH 
 
 have allowed for it and included it by antici- 
 pation, as one possible case in the total mixture 
 of cases. There is, in short, no room for any 
 grade or sort of truth outside of the frame- 
 work of the pragmatic system, outside of that 
 jungle of empirical workings and leadings, 
 and their nearer or ulterior terminations, of 
 which I seem to have written so unskilfully. 
 
VII 
 PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 Professor J. B. Pratt's paper in the Jour- 
 nal of Philosophy for June 6, 1907, is so bril- 
 liantly written that its misconception of the 
 pragmatist position seems doubly to call for 
 a reply. 
 
 He asserts that, for a pragmatist, truth can- 
 not be a relation between an idea and a reality 
 outside and transcendent of the idea, but must 
 lie 'altogether within experience,' where it will 
 need 'no reference to anything else to justify 
 it' — no reference to the object, apparently. 
 The pragmatist must 'reduce everything to 
 psychology,' aye, and to the psychology of 
 the immediate moment. He is consequently 
 debarred from saying that an idea that event- 
 ually gets psychologically verified was already 
 true before the process of verifying was com- 
 
 ' Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, etc., August 
 15, 1907 (vol. iv, p. 464). 
 
 162 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 plete ; and he is equally debarred f rdm treating 
 an idea as true provisionally so long as he only 
 believes that he can verify it whenever he will. 
 
 Whether such a pragmatist as this exists, 
 I know not, never having myself met with the 
 beast. We can define terms as we like; and if 
 that be my friend Pratt's definition of a prag- 
 matist, I can only concur with his anti-prag- 
 matism. But, in setting up the weird type, 
 he quotes words from me; so, in order to es- 
 cape being classed by some reader along with 
 so asinine a being, I will reassert my own view 
 of truth once more. 
 
 Truth is essentially a relation between two 
 things, an idea, on the one hand, and a reality 
 outside of the idea, on the other. This relation, 
 like all relations, has its fundamentum, namely, 
 the matrix of experiential circumstance, psy- 
 chological as well as physical, in which the 
 correlated terms are found embedded. In the 
 case of the relation between 'heir' and 'legacy' 
 the fundamentum is a world in which there was 
 a testator, and in which there is now a will and 
 an executor; in the case of that between idea 
 
 163 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 and object, it is a world with circumstances 
 of a sort to make a satisfactory verification 
 process, lying around and between the two 
 terms. But just as a man may be called an 
 heir and treated as one before the executor 
 has divided the estate, so an idea may prac- 
 tically be credited with truth before the veri- 
 fication process has been exhaustively carried 
 out — the existence of the mass of verifying 
 circumstance is enough. Where potentiality 
 counts for actuality in so many other cases, 
 one does not see why it may not so count here. 
 We call a man benevolent not only for his kind 
 acts paid in, but for his readiness to perform 
 others; we treat an idea as 'luminous' not 
 only for the light it has shed, but for that we 
 expect it will shed on dark problems. Why 
 should we not equally trust the truth of our 
 ideas .'' We live on credits everywhere ; and we 
 use our ideas far oftener for calling up things 
 connected with their immediate objects, than 
 for calling up those objects themselves . Ninety- 
 nine times out of a hundred the only use we 
 should make of the object itself, if we were led 
 
 164 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 up to it by our idea, would be to pass on to those 
 connected things by its means. So we con- 
 tinually curtail verification-processes, letting 
 our belief that they are possible suffice. 
 
 What constitutes the relation known as truth, 
 I now say, is just the existence in the empirical 
 world of this fundamentum of circumstance 
 surrounding object and idea and ready to 
 be either short-circuited or traversed at full 
 length. So long as it exists, and a satisfactory 
 passage through it between the object and the 
 idea is possible, that idea will both he true, 
 and will have been true of that object, whether 
 fully developed verification has taken place or 
 not. The nature and place and affinities of the 
 object of course play as vital a part in mak- 
 ing the particular passage possible as do the 
 nature and associative tendencies of the idea ; 
 so that the notion that truth could fall alto- 
 gether inside of the thinker's private experience 
 and be something purely psychological, is 
 absurd. It is between the idea and the object 
 that the truth-relation is to be sought and it 
 involves both terms. 
 
 165 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 But the 'intellectualistic' position, if I un- 
 derstand Mr. Pratt rightly, is that, altho 
 we can use this fundamentum, this mass of 
 go-between experience, for testing truth, yet 
 the truth-relation in itself remains as some- 
 thing apart. It means, in Mr. Pratt's words, 
 merely 'this simple thing that the object of 
 which one is thinking is as one. thinks it.' 
 
 It seems to me that the word 'as,' which 
 qualifies the relation here, and bears the whole 
 'epistemological' burden, is anything but sim- 
 ple. What it most immediately suggests is that 
 the idea should be like the object; but most of 
 our ideas, being abstract concepts, bear al- 
 most no resemblance to their objects. The 'as' 
 must therefore, I should say, be usually inter- 
 preted functionally, as meaning that the idea 
 shall lead us into the same quarters of experi- 
 ence as the object would. Experience leads 
 ever on and on, and objects and our ideas of 
 objects may both lead to the same goals. The 
 ideas being in that case shorter cuts, we sub- 
 stitute them more and more for their objects; 
 and we habitually waive direct verification of 
 
 166 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 each one of them, as their train passes through 
 our mind, because if an idea leads as the 
 object would lead, we can say, in Mr. Pratt's 
 words, that in so far forth the object is as we 
 think it, and that the idea, verified thus in so 
 far forth, is true enough. 
 
 Mr. Pratt will undoubtedly accept most of 
 these facts, but he will deny that they spell 
 pragmatism. Of course, definitions are free 
 to every one; but I have myself never meant 
 by the pragmatic view of truth anything dif- 
 ferent from what I now describe; and inas- 
 much as my use of the term came earlier than 
 my friend's, I think it ought to have the right 
 of way. But I suspect that Professor Pratt's 
 contention is not solely as to what one must 
 think in order to be called a pragmatist. I am 
 sure that he believes that the truth-relation 
 has something more in it than the fundamen- 
 tum which I assign can account for. Useful 
 to test truth by, the matrix of circumstance, 
 he thinks, cannot found the truth-relation 
 in se, for that is trans-empirical and 'salta- 
 tory.' 
 
 167 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Well, take an object and an idea, and as- 
 sume that the latter is true of the former — as 
 eternally and absolutely true as you like. Let 
 the object be as much 'as' the idea thinks it, 
 as it is possible for one thing to be ' as ' another. 
 I now formally ask of Professor Pratt to tell 
 what this 'as'-ness in itself consists in — for it 
 seems to me that it ought to consist in some- 
 thing assignable and describable, and not re- 
 main a pure mystery, and I promise that if 
 he can assign any determination of it whatever 
 which I cannot successfully refer to some 
 specification of what in this article I have called 
 the empirical fundamentum, I will confess my 
 stupidity cheerfully, and will agree never to 
 publish a line upon this subject of truth again. 
 
 II 
 
 Professor Pratt has returned to the charge 
 in a whole book,^ which for its clearness and 
 good temper deserves to supersede all the rest 
 
 ' J. B. Pratt: What is Pragmatism. New York, The Mac- 
 millan Company, 1909. — The comments I have printed were 
 written in March, 1909, after some of the articles printed later 
 in the present volume. 
 
 168 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 of the anti-pragmatistic literature. I wish it 
 might do so; for its author admits all my es- 
 sential contentions, simply distinguishing my 
 account of truth as 'modified' pragmatism 
 from Schiller's and Dewey's, which he calls 
 pragmatism of the ' radical ' sort. As I myself 
 understand Dewey and Schiller, our views ab- 
 solutely agree, in spite of our different modes 
 of statement ; but I have enough trouble of my 
 own in life without having to defend my 
 friends, so I abandon them provisionally to 
 the tender mercy of Professor Pratt's interpre- 
 tations, utterly erroneous tho I deem these to 
 be. My reply as regards myself can be very 
 short, for I prefer to consider only essentials, 
 and Dr. Pratt's whole book hardly takes the 
 matter farther than the article to which I re- 
 tort in Part I of the present paper. 
 
 He repeats the 'as '-formula, as if it were 
 something that I, along with other pragma- 
 tists, had denied,^ whereas I have only asked 
 those who insist so on its importance to do 
 something more than merely utter it — to ex- 
 
 • Of. cit, pp. 77-80. 
 169 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 plicate it, for example, and tell us what its so 
 great importance consists in. I myself agree 
 most cordially that for an idea to be true the 
 object must be ' as ' the idea declares it, but I 
 explicate the 'as'-ness as meaning the idea's 
 verifiability. 
 
 Now since Dr. Pratt denies none of these 
 verifying ' workings ' for which I have pleaded, 
 but only insists on their inability to serve as 
 the fundamentum of the truth-relation, it 
 seems that there is really nothing in the line 
 of fact about which we differ, and that the 
 issue between us is solely as to how far the 
 notion of workableness or verifiability is an 
 essential part of the notion of 'trueness' — 
 'trueness' being Dr. Pratt's present name for 
 the character of as-ness in the true idea. I 
 maintain that there is no meaning left in this 
 notion of as-ness or trueness if no reference to 
 the possibility of concrete working on the part 
 of the idea is made. 
 
 Take an example where there can be no 
 possible working. Suppose I have an idea to 
 which I give utterance by the vocable ' skrkl,' 
 
 170 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 claiming at the same time that it is true. 
 Who now can say that it is false, for why 
 may there not be somewhere in the unplumbed 
 depths of the cosmos some object with which 
 'skrkl' can agree and have trueness in Dr. 
 Pratt's sense? On the other hand who can 
 say that it is true, for who can lay his hand on 
 that object and show that it and nothing else 
 is what I mean by my word ? But yet again, 
 who can gainsay any one who shall call my 
 word utterly irrelative to other reality, and 
 treat it as a bare fact in my mind, devoid of 
 any cognitive function whatever. One of these 
 three alternatives must surely be predicated of 
 it. For it not to be irrelevant (or not-cognitive 
 in nature), an object of some kind must be 
 provided which it may refer to. Supposing 
 that object provided, whether 'skrkl' is true 
 or false of it, depends, according to Professor 
 Pratt, on no intermediating condition whatever. 
 The trueness or the falsity is even now imme- 
 diately, absolutely, and positively there. 
 
 I, on the other hand, demand a cosmic en- 
 vironment of some kind to establish which of 
 
 171 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 them is there rather than utter irrelevancy.' 
 I then say, first, that unless some sort of a nat- 
 ural path exists between the 'skrkl' and that 
 object, distinguishable among the innumer- 
 able pathways that run among all the realities 
 of the universe, linking them promiscuously 
 with one another, there is nothing there to con- 
 stitute even the possibility of its referring to 
 that object rather than to any other. 
 
 I say furthermore that unless it have some 
 tendency to follow up that path, there is no- 
 thing to constitute its intention to refer to the 
 object in question. 
 
 ' Dr. Pratt, singularly enough, disposes of this primal 
 postulate of all pragmatic epistemology, by saying that the 
 pragmatist ' imconsciously surrenders his whole case by smug- 
 gling in the idea of a conditioning environment which deter- 
 mines whether or not the experience can work, and which 
 cannot itself be identified with the experience or any part of 
 it ' (pp. 167-168). The 'experience' means here of course the 
 idea, or belief; and the expression 'smuggling in' is to the last 
 degree diverting. If any epistemologist could dispense with 
 a conditioning environment, it would seem to be the anti- 
 pragmatist, with his immediate saltatory trueness, independent 
 of work done. The mediating pathway which the environ- 
 ment supplies is the very essence of the pragmatist's explana- 
 tion. 
 
 172 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 Finally, I say that unless the path be strown 
 with possibilities of frustration or encourage- 
 ment, and offer some sort of terminal satisfac- 
 tion or contradiction, there is nothing to con- 
 stitute its agreement or disagreement with that 
 object, or to constitute the as-ness (or ' not-as- 
 ness') in which the trueness (or falseness) is 
 said to consist. 
 
 I think that Dr. Pratt ought to do something 
 more than repeat the name 'trueness,' in an- 
 swer to my pathetic question whether that 
 there be not some constitution to a relation as 
 important as this. The pathway, the tendency, 
 the corroborating or contradicting progress, 
 need not in every case be experienced in full, 
 but I don't see, if the universe does n't contain 
 them among its possibilities of furniture, what 
 logical material for defining the trueness of my 
 idea is left. But if it do contain them, they and 
 they only are the logical material required. 
 
 I am perplexed by the superior importance 
 which Dr. Pratt attributes to abstract trueness 
 over concrete verifiability in an idea, and I 
 wish that he might be moved to explain. It 
 
 173 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 is prior to verification, to be sure, but so is the 
 verifiability for which I contend prior, just as 
 a man's 'mortality' (which is nothing but the 
 possibiHty of his death) is prior to his death, 
 but it can hardly be that this abstract priority 
 of all possibility to its correlative fact is what 
 so obstinate a quarrel is about. I think it prob- 
 able that Dr. Pratt is vaguely thinking of some- 
 thing concreter than this. The trueness of an 
 idea must mean something definite in it that 
 determines its tendency to work, and indeed 
 towards this object rather than towards that. 
 Undoubtedly there is something of this sort in 
 the idea, just as there is something in man that 
 accounts for his tendency towards death, and 
 in bread that accounts for its tendency to 
 nourish. What that something is in the 
 case of truth psychology tells us : the idea has 
 associates peculiar to itself, motor as well as 
 ideational; it tends by its place and nature 
 to call these into being, one after another ; and 
 the appearance of them in succession is what 
 we mean by the 'workings' of the idea. Ac- 
 cording to what they are, does the trueness or 
 
 174 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 falseness which the idea harbored come to light. 
 These tendencies have still earlier conditions 
 which, in a general way, biology, psychology 
 and biography can trace. This whole chain 
 of natural causal conditions produces a result- 
 ant state of things in which new relations, not 
 simply causal, can now be found, or into 
 which they can now be introduced, — the rela- 
 tions namely which we epistemologists study, 
 relations of adaptation, of substitutability, of 
 instrumentality, of reference and of truth. 
 
 The prior causal conditions, altho there 
 could be no knowing of any kind, true or false, 
 without them, are but preliminary to the ques- 
 tion of what makes the ideas true or false when 
 once their tendencies have been obeyed. The 
 tendencies must exist in some shape anyhow, 
 but their fruits are truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, 
 according. to what they concretely turn out to 
 be. They are not 'saltatory' at any rate, for 
 they evoke their consequences contiguously, 
 from next to next only ; and not until the final 
 result of the whole associative sequence, act- 
 ual or potential, is in our mental sight, can we 
 
 175 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 feel sure what its epistemological significance, 
 if it have any, may be. True knowing is, in 
 fine, not substantially, in itself, or 'as such,' 
 inside of the idea from the first, any more than 
 mortality as such is inside of the man, or nour- 
 ishment as such inside of the bread. Some- 
 thing else is there first, that practically makes 
 for knowing, dying or nourishing, as the case 
 may be. That something is the ' nature ' namely 
 of the first term, be it idea, man, or bread, that 
 operates to start the causal chain of processes 
 which, when completed, is the complex fact 
 to which we give whatever functional name 
 best fits the case. Another nature, another 
 chain of cognitive workings ; and then either 
 another object known or the same object 
 known diflferently, will ensue. 
 
 Dr. Pratt perplexes me again by seeming to 
 charge Dewey and Schiller * (I am not sure that 
 he charges me) with an account of truth which 
 would allow the object believed in not to 
 exist, even if the belief in it were true. ' Since 
 
 ' Page 200. 
 176 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 the truth of an idea,' he writes, ' means merely 
 the fact that the idea works, that fact is all 
 that you mean when you say the idea is true ' 
 (p. 206). 'When you say the idea is true' — 
 does that mean true for you, the critic, or true 
 for the believer whom you are describing? 
 The critic's trouble over this seems to come 
 from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, 
 whereas the pragmatist always means 'true 
 for him who experiences the workings.' 'But 
 is the object really true or not.''' — the critic 
 then seems to ask, — as if the pragmatist were 
 bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of 
 his epistemology and tell us what realities in- 
 dubitably exist. 'One world at a time,' would 
 seem to be the right reply here. 
 
 One other trouble of Dr. Pratt's must be no- 
 ticed. It concerns the 'transcendence' of the 
 object. When our ideas have worked so as to 
 bring us flat up against the object, next to it, 
 ' is our relation to it then ambulatory or sal- 
 tatory ? ' Dr. Pratt asks. If your headache be 
 my object, 'my experiences break oflf where 
 yours begin,' Dr. Pratt writes, and 'this fact 
 
 177 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 is of great importance, for it bars out the sense 
 of transition and fulfilment which forms so 
 important an element in the pragmatist de- 
 scription of knowledge — the sense of fulfil- 
 ment due to a continuous passage from the 
 original idea to the known object. If this comes 
 at all when I know your headache, it comes 
 not with the object, but quite on my side of the 
 " epistemological gulf." The gulf is still there 
 to be transcended " (p. 158). 
 
 Some day of course, or even now some- 
 where in the larger life of the universe, differ- 
 ent men's headaches may become confluent 
 or be 'co-conscious.' Here and now, however, 
 headaches do transcend each other and, when 
 not felt, can be known only conceptually. My 
 idea is that you really have a headache; it 
 works well with what I see of your expression, 
 and with what I hear you say ; but it does n't 
 put me in possession of the headache itself. 
 I am still at one remove, and the headache 
 'transcends' me, even tho it be in nowise 
 transcendent of human experience generally. 
 But the 'gulf here is that which the pragma- 
 
 178 
 
PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH 
 
 tist epistemology itself fixes in the very first 
 words it uses, by saying there must be an ob- 
 ject and an idea. The idea however does n't 
 immediately leap the gulf, it only works from 
 next to next so as to bridge it, fully or approxi- 
 mately. If it bridges it, in the pragmatist's 
 vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be 
 called a ' true ' idea. If it only might bridge it, 
 but does n't, or if it throws a bridge distinctly 
 at it, it still has, in the onlooking pragmatist's 
 eyes, what Professor Pratt calls 'trueness.' 
 But to ask the pragmatist thereupon whether, 
 when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the 
 object, it is really true or has real trueness, — 
 in other words whether the headache he sup- 
 poses, and supposes the thinker he supposes, 
 to believe in, be a real headache or not, — 
 is to step from his hypothetical universe of 
 discourse into the altogether different world 
 of natural fact. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OP 
 TRUTH AND ITS MISUNDER- 
 STANDERSi 
 
 jLhe account of truth given in my volume 
 entitled Pragmatism, continues to meet with 
 such persistent misunderstanding that I am 
 tempted to make a final brief reply. My ideas 
 may well deserve refutation, but they can get 
 none till they are conceived of in their proper 
 shape. The fantastic character of the cur- 
 rent misconceptions shows how unfamiliar 
 is the concrete point of view which pragma- 
 tism assumes. Persons who are familiar with 
 a conception move about so easily in it that 
 they understand each other at a hint, and can 
 converse without anxiously attending to their 
 P's and Q's. I have to admit, in view of the 
 results, that we have assumed too ready an 
 intelligence, and consequently in many places 
 
 * Keprint from the Philosophical Review, January, 1908 
 (vol. xvii, p. 1). 
 
 180 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 used a language too slipshod. We should never 
 have spoken elliptically. The critics have 
 boggled at every word they could boggle at, 
 and refused to take the spirit rather than the 
 letter of our discourse. This seems to show a 
 genuine unfamiliarity in the whole point of 
 view. It also shows, I think, that the second 
 stage of opposition, which has already begun 
 to express itself in the stock phrase that ' what 
 is new is not true, and what is true not new,' 
 in pragmatism, is insincere. If we said no- 
 thing in any degree new, why was our mean- 
 ing so desperately hard to catch .'' The blame 
 cannot be laid wholly upon our obscurity of 
 speech, for in other subjects we have attained 
 to making ourselves understood. But recrimi- 
 nations are tasteless ; and, as far as I personally 
 am concerned, I am sure that some of the mis- 
 conception I complain of is due to my doctrine 
 of truth being surrounded in that volume of 
 popular lectures by a lot of other opinions not 
 necessarily implicated with it, so that a reader 
 may very naturally have grown confused. For 
 this I am to blame, — likewise for omitting 
 
 181 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 certain explicit cautions, which the pages that 
 follow will now in part supply. 
 
 First misunderstanding: Pragmatism is only 
 a re-editing of 'positivism. 
 
 This seems the commonest mistake. Scep- 
 ticism, positivism, and agnosticism agree with 
 ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presuppos- 
 ing that everybody knows what the word 
 'truth' means, without further explanation. 
 But the former doctrines then either suggest or 
 declare that real truth, absolute truth, is inac- 
 cessible to us, and that we must fain put up 
 with relative or phenomenal truth as its next 
 best substitute. By scepticism this is treated 
 as an unsatisfactory state of afiFairs, while posi- 
 tivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it, 
 call real truth sour grapes, and consider phe- 
 nomenal truth quite sufficient for all our 'prac- 
 tical' purposes. 
 
 In point of fact, nothing could be farther 
 from all this than what pragmatism has to 
 say of truth. Its thesis is an altogether pre- 
 vious one. It leaves oflf where these other theo- 
 
 182 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 ries begin, having contented itself with the 
 word truth's definition. 'No matter whether 
 any mind extant in the universe possess truth 
 or not,' it asks, ' what does the notion of truth 
 signify ideally ? ' ' What kind of things would 
 true judgments be in case they existed ? ' The 
 answer which pragmatism offers is intended to 
 cover the most complete truth that can be con- 
 ceived of, ' absolute ' truth if you like, as well as 
 truth of the most relative and imperfect descrip- 
 tion. This question of what truth would be like 
 if it did exist, belongs obviously to a purely 
 speculative field of inquiry. It is not a theory 
 about any sort of reality, or about what kind of 
 knowledge is actually possible; it abstracts 
 from particular terms altogether, and defines 
 the nature of a possible relation between two 
 of them.- 
 
 As Kant's question about synthetic judg- 
 ments had escaped previous philosophers, so 
 the pragmatist question is not only so subtile 
 as to have escaped attention hitherto, but even 
 so subtile, it would seem, that when openly 
 broached now, dogmatists and sceptics alike 
 
 183 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 fail to apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist 
 to be treating of something wholly different. 
 He insists, they say (I quote an actual critic), 
 'that the greater problems are insoluble by 
 human intelligence, that our need of know- 
 ing truly is artificial and illusory, and that our 
 reason, incapable of reaching the foundations 
 of reality, must turn itself exclusively towards 
 action.' There could not be a worse misappre- 
 hension. 
 
 Second misunderstanding: Pragmatism is 
 primarily an appeal to action. 
 
 The name 'pragmatism,' with its suggestions 
 of action, has been an unfortunate choice, I 
 have to admit, and has played into the hands 
 of this mistake. But no word could protect 
 the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature 
 of the inquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks 
 of ideas 'working' well, the only thing they 
 think of is their immediate workings in the 
 physical environment, their enabling us to 
 make money, or gain some similar 'practical' 
 advantage. Ideas do work thus, of course, im- 
 
 184 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 mediately or remotely; but they work indefi- 
 nitely inside of the mental world also. Not 
 crediting us with this rudimentary insight, our 
 critics treat our view as offering itself exclu- 
 sively to engineers, doctors, financiers, and men 
 of action generally, who need some sort of a 
 rough and ready Weltanschauung, but have no 
 time or wit to study genuine philosophy. It is 
 usually described as a characteristically Ameri- 
 can movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of 
 thought, excellently fitted for the man on the 
 street, who naturally hates theory and wants 
 cash returns immediately. 
 
 It is quite true that, when the refined theo- 
 retic question that pragmatism begins with is 
 once answered, secondary corollaries of a prac- 
 tical sort follow. Investigation shows that, in 
 the function called truth, previous realities are 
 not the only independent variables. To a cer- 
 tain extent our ideas, being realities, are also 
 independent variables, and, Just as they follow 
 other reality and fit it, so, in a measure, does 
 other reality follow and fit them. When they 
 add themselves to being, they partly redeter- 
 — 185 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 mine the existent, so that reality as a whole ap- 
 pears incompletely definable unless ideas also 
 are kept account of. This pragmatist doctrine, 
 exhibiting our ideas as complemental factors 
 of reality, throws open (since our ideas are 
 instigators of our action) a wide window upon 
 human action, as well as a wide license to orig- 
 inality in thought. But few things could be 
 sillier than to ignore the prior epistemological 
 edifice in which the window is built, or to talk 
 as if pragmatism began and ended at the win- 
 dow. This, nevertheless, is what our critics do 
 almost without exception. They ignore our 
 primary step and its motive, and make the rela- 
 tion to action, which is our secondary achieve- 
 ment, primary. 
 
 Third misunderstanding: Pragmatists cut 
 themselves off from the right to believe in eject- 
 ive realities. 
 
 They do so, according to the critics, by mak- 
 ing the truth of our beliefs consist in their veri- 
 fiability, and their verifiability in the way in 
 which they do work for us. Professor Stout, 
 
 186 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 in his otherwise admirable and hopeful review 
 of Schiller in Mind for October, 1897, con- 
 siders that this ought to lead Schiller (could 
 he sincerely realize the effects of his own doc- 
 trine) to the absurd consequence of being un- 
 able to believe genuinely in another man's 
 headache, even were the headache there. He 
 can only ' postulate' it for the sake of the work- 
 ing value of the postulate to himself. The pos- 
 tulate guides certain of his acts and leads to 
 advantageous consequences; but the moment 
 he understands fully that the postulate is true 
 only (!) in this sense, it ceases (or should cease) 
 to be true for him that the other man really 
 has a headache. All that makes the postulate 
 most precious then evaporates: his interest 
 in his fellow-man 'becomes a veiled form of 
 self-interest, and his world grows cold, dull, 
 and heartless.' 
 
 Such an objection makes a curious mud- 
 dle of the pragmatist's universe of discourse. 
 Within that universe the pragmatist finds some 
 one with a headache or other feeling, and 
 some one else who postulates that feeling. Ask- 
 
 187 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 ing on what condition the postulate is 'true,' 
 the pragmatist replies that, for the postulator 
 at any rate, it is true just in proportion as to 
 believe in it works in him the fuller sum of sat- 
 isfactions. What is it that is satisfactory here ? 
 Surely to believe in the postulated object, 
 namely, in the really existing feeling of the 
 other man. But how (especially if the postu- 
 lator were himself a thoroughgoing pragma- 
 tist) could it ever be satisfactory to him not to 
 believe in that feeling, so long as, in Professor 
 Stout's words, disbelief ' made the world seem 
 to him cold, dull, and heartless'.? Disbelief 
 would seem, on pragmatist principles, quite 
 out of the question under such conditions, un- 
 less the heartlessness of the world were made 
 probable already on other grounds. And since 
 the belief in the headache, true for the subject 
 assumed in the pragmatist's universe of dis- 
 course, is also true for the pragmatist who for 
 his epitemologizing purposes has assumed that 
 entire universe, why is it not true in that uni- 
 verse absolutely ? The headache believed in is 
 a reality there, and no extant mind disbelieves 
 
 188 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 it, neither the critic's mind nor his subject's! 
 Have our opponents any better brand of truth 
 in this real universe of ours that they can show 
 us?' 
 
 ' I see here a chance to forestall a criticism which some one 
 may make on Lecture III of my Pragmatism, where, on pp. 
 96-100, 1 said that 'God' and 'Matter' might be regarded as 
 synonymous terms, so long as no differing future consequences 
 were deducible from the two conceptions. The passage was 
 transcribed from my address at the California Philosophical 
 Union, reprinted in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. 
 I had no sooner given the address than I perceived a flaw in 
 that part of it ; but I have left the passage unaltered ever since, 
 because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. The flaw 
 was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless uni- 
 verse, I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart,' 
 meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistin- 
 guishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talk- 
 ing, blushing, mu-sing us, and performing all fetninine offices 
 as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any 
 one regard her as a full equivalent ? Certainly not, and why ? 
 Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things 
 inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration. The 
 outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a 
 manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in. 
 Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would 
 not work, and in point of fact no one treats it as a serious 
 hypothesis. The godless universe would be exactly similar. 
 Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the 
 idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief 
 call for a God on modern men's part is for a being who will 
 
 189 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 So much for the third misunderstanding, 
 which is but one specification of the following 
 still wider one. 
 
 Fourth misunderstanding: No pragmatist 
 can be a realist in his epistemology . 
 
 This is supposed to follow from his state- 
 ment that the truth of our beliefs consists in 
 general in their giving satisfaction. Of course 
 satisfaction per se is a subjective condition; 
 so the conclusion is drawn that truth falls 
 wholly inside of the subject, who then may 
 manufacture it at his pleasure. True beliefs 
 become thus wayward affections, severed from 
 all responsibility to other parts of experience. 
 
 It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the 
 pragmatist's opinion, ignoring as it does every 
 element but one of his universe of discourse. 
 The terms of which that universe consists posi- 
 tively forbid any non-realistic interpretation 
 of the function of knowledge defined there. 
 
 inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. 
 Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains 
 for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so 
 for definite pragmatic reasons. 
 
 190 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there 
 a reality and a mind with ideas. What, now, 
 he asks, can make those ideas true of that 
 reaHty ? Ordinary epistemology contents itself 
 with the vague statement that the ideas must 
 ' correspond ' or ' agree ' ; the pragmatist insists 
 on being more concrete, and asks what such 
 'agreement' may mean in detail. He finds first 
 that the ideas must point to or lead towards 
 that reality and no other, and then that the 
 pointings and leadings must yield satisfac- 
 tion as their result. So far the pragmatist is 
 hardly less abstract than the ordinary slouchy 
 epistemologist; but as he defines himself far- 
 ther, he grows more concrete. The entire quar- 
 rel of the intellectualist with him is over his 
 concreteness, intellectualism contending that 
 the vaguer and more abstract account is here 
 the more profound. The concrete pointing and 
 leading are conceived by the pragmatist to be 
 the work of other portions of the same universe 
 to which the reality and the mind belong, in- 
 termediary verifying bits of experience with 
 which the mind at one end, and the reality at 
 
 191 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 the other, are joined. The 'satisfaction,' in 
 turn, is no abstract satisfaction uberhaupt, felt 
 by an unspecified being, but is assumed to con- 
 sist of such satisfactions (in the plural) as con- 
 cretely existing men actually do find in their 
 beliefs. As we humans are constituted in point 
 of fact, we find that to believe in other men's 
 minds, in independent physical realities, in past 
 events, in eternal logical relations, is satisfac- 
 tory. We find hope satisfactory. We often 
 find it satisfactory to cease to doubt. Above 
 all we find consistency satisfactory, consistency 
 between the present idea and the entire rest of 
 our mental equipment, including the whole 
 order of our sensations, and that of our intui- 
 tions of likeness and difference, and our whole 
 stock of previously acquired truths. 
 
 The pragmatist, being himself a man, and 
 imagining in general no contrary lines of truer 
 belief than ours about the 'reality' which he 
 has laid at the base of his epistemological dis- 
 cussion, is willing to treat our satisfactions as 
 possibly really true guides to it, not as guides 
 true solely for us. It would seem here to be the 
 
 192 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 duty of his critics to show with some explicit- 
 ness why, being our subjective feelings, these 
 satisfactions can not yield 'objective' truth. 
 The beliefs which they accompany 'posit' the 
 assumed reality, 'correspond' and 'agree' 
 with it, and 'fit' it in perfectly definite and 
 assignable ways, through the sequent trains of 
 thought and action which form their verifica- 
 tion, so merely to insist on using these words 
 abstractly instead of concretely is no way of 
 driving the pragmatist from the field, — his 
 more concrete account virtually includes his 
 critic's. If our critics have any definite idea 
 of a truth more objectively grounded than 
 the kind we propose, why do they not show 
 it more articulately .? As they stand, they 
 remind one of Hegel's man who wanted 'fruit,' 
 but rejected cherries, pears, and grapes, be- 
 cause they were not fruit in the abstract. We 
 offer them the full quart-pot, and they cry for 
 the empty quart-capacity. 
 
 But here I think I hear some critic retort as 
 follows : ' If satisfactions are all that is needed 
 to make truth, how about the notorious fact 
 
 193 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 that errors are so often satisfactory ? And how 
 about the equally notorious fact that certain 
 true beliefs may cause the bitterest dissatisfac- 
 tion ? Is n't it clear that not the satisfaction 
 which it gives, but the relation of the belief 
 to the reality is all that makes it true ? Suppose 
 there were no such reality, and that the sat- 
 isfactions yet remained : would they not then 
 effectively work falsehood? Can they conse- 
 quently be treated distinctively as the truth- 
 builders ? It is the inherent relation to reality 
 of a belief that gives us that specific truth- 
 satisfaction, compared with which all other sat- 
 isfactions are the hollowest humbug. The sat- 
 isfaction of knowing truly is thus the only one 
 which the pragmatist ought to have considered. 
 As a psychological sentiment, the anti-prag- 
 matist gladly concedes it to him, but then only 
 as a concomitant of truth, not as a constituent. 
 What constitutes truth is not the sentiment, 
 but the purely logical or objective function of 
 rightly cognizing the reality, and the pragma- 
 tist's failure to reduce this function to lower 
 values is patent.' 
 
 194 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 Such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me 
 a tissue of confusion. To begin with, when the 
 pragmatist says 'indispensable,' it confounds 
 this with ' suflScient.' The pragmatist calls sat- 
 isfactions indispensable for truth-building, but 
 I have everywhere called them insufficient 
 unless reality be also incidentally led to. If the 
 reality assumed were cancelled from the prag- 
 matist's universe of discourse, he would straight- 
 way give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs 
 remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. 
 For him, as for his critic, there can be no truth 
 if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are 
 so much flat psychological surface unless some 
 mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. 
 This is why as a pragmatist I have so care- 
 fully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why, 
 throughout my whole discussion, I remain an 
 epistemological realist.* 
 
 The anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further 
 
 * I need hardly remind the reader that both sense-percepts 
 and percepts of ideal relation (comparisons, etc.) should be 
 classed among the realities. The bulk of our mental 'stock* 
 consists of truths concerning theSe terms. 
 
 195 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 confusion of imagining that, in undertaking 
 to give him an account of what truth formally 
 means, we are assuming at the same time to 
 provide a warrant for it, trying to define the 
 occasions when he can be sure of materially 
 possessing it. Our making it hinge on a reality 
 so 'independent' that when it comes, truth 
 comes, and when it goes, truth goes with it, 
 disappoints this naive expectation, so he deems 
 our description unsatisfactory. I suspect that 
 under this confusion lies the still deeper one of 
 not discriminating sufficiently between the two 
 notions, truth and reality. Realities are not 
 true, they are; and beliefs are true of them. But 
 I suspect that in the anti-pragmatist mind the 
 two notions sometimes swap their attributes. 
 The reality itself, I fear, is treated as if 'true,' 
 and conversely. Whoso tells us of the one, it 
 is then supposed, must also be telling us of the 
 other ; and a true idea must in a manner he, or 
 at least yield without extraneous aid, the reality 
 it cognitively is possessed of. 
 
 To this absolute-idealistic demand pragma- 
 tism simply opposes its non possumus. If there 
 
 196 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 is to be truth, it says, both realities and beliefs 
 about them must conspire to make it; but 
 whether there ever is such a thing, or how 
 anyone can be sure that his own beliefs possess 
 it, it never pretends to determine. That truth- 
 satisfaction par excellence which may tinge a 
 belief unsatisfactory in other ways, it easily 
 explains as the feeling of consistency with the 
 stock of previous truths, or supposed truths, 
 of which one's whole past experience may have 
 left one in possession. 
 
 But are not all pragmatists sure that their 
 own belief is right.'' their enemies will ask at 
 this point; and this leads me to the 
 
 Fiph misunderstanding: What 'pragmatists 
 say is inconsistent with their saying so. 
 
 A correspondent puts this objection as fol- 
 lows : 'When you say to your audience, "prag- 
 matism is the truth concerning truth," the first 
 truth is different from the second. About the 
 first you and they are not to be at odds ; you 
 are not giving them liberty to take or leave it 
 according as it works satisfactorily or not for 
 
 197 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 their private uses. Yet the second truth, which 
 ought to describe and include the first, affirms 
 this liberty. Thus the intent of your utterance 
 seems to contradict the content of it.' 
 
 General scepticism has always received this 
 same classic refutation. ' You have to dogma- 
 tize,' the rationalists say to the sceptics, ' when- 
 ever you express the sceptical position; so 
 your lives keep contradicting your thesis.' 
 One would suppose that the impotence of so 
 hoary an argument to abate in the slightest 
 degree the amount of general scepticism in the 
 world might have led some rationalists them- 
 selves to doubt whether these instantaneous 
 logical refutations are such fatal ways, after 
 all, of killing off live mental attitudes. Gen- 
 eral scepticism is the live mental attitude of 
 refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor 
 of the will, renewing itself in detail towards 
 each successive thesis that offers, and you can 
 no more kill it off by logic than you can kill 
 off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why 
 it is so irritating. Your consistent sceptic 
 never puts his scepticism into a formal pro- 
 
 198 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 position, — he simply chooses it as a habit. 
 He provokingly hangs back when he might 
 so easily join us in saying yes, but he is not 
 illogical or stupid, — on the contrary, he often 
 impresses us by his intellectual superiority. 
 This is the real scepticism that rationalists 
 have to meet, and their logic does not even 
 touch it. 
 
 No more can logic kill the pragmatist's be- 
 havior : his act of utterance, so far from con- 
 tradicting, accurately exemplifies the matter 
 which he utters. What is the matter which 
 he utters ? In part, it is this, that truth, con- 
 cretely considered, is an attribute of our be- 
 liefs, and that these are attitudes that follow 
 satisfactions. The ideas around which the 
 satisfactions cluster are primarily only hypo- 
 theses that challenge or summon a belief to 
 come and take its stand upon them. The prag- 
 matist's idea of truth is just such a challenge. 
 He finds it ultra-satisfactory to accept it, and 
 takes his own stand accordingly. But, being 
 gregarious as they are, men seek to spread 
 their beliefs, to awaken imitation, to infect 
 
 199 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 others. Why should not you also find the same 
 belief satisfactory ? thinks the pragmatist, and 
 forthwith endeavors to convert you. You and 
 he will then believe similarly ; you will hold up 
 your subject-end of a truth, which will be a 
 truth objective and irreversible if the reality 
 holds up the object-end by being itself present 
 simultaneously. What there is of self-contra- 
 diction in all this I confess I cannot discover. 
 The pragmatist's conduct in his own case seems 
 to me on the contrary admirably to illustrate 
 his universal formula; and of all epistemolo- 
 gists, he is perhaps the only one who is irre- 
 proachably self-consistent. 
 
 Sixth misunderstanding: Pragmatism ex- 
 plains not what truth is, but only how it is 
 arrived at. 
 
 In point of fact it tells us both, tells us what 
 it is incidentally to telling us how it is arrived 
 at, — for what is arrived at except just what 
 the truth is.? If I tell you how to get to the 
 railroad station, don't I implicitly introduce 
 you to the what, to the being and nature of 
 
 200 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 that edifice ? It is quite true that the abstract 
 word 'how' has n't the same meaning as the 
 abstract word 'what,' but in this universe of 
 concrete facts you cannot keep hows and whats 
 asunder. The reasons why I find it satisfac- 
 tory to believe that any idea is true, the how 
 of my arriving at that belief, may be among 
 the very reasons why the idea is true in real- 
 ity. If not, I summon the anti-pragmatist to 
 explain the impossibility articulately. 
 
 His trouble seems to me mainly to arise 
 from his fixed inability to understand how a 
 concrete statement can possibly mean as much, 
 or be as valuable, as an abstract one. I said 
 above that the main quarrel between us and 
 our critics was that of concreteness versus 
 abstractness. This is the place to develop that 
 point farther. 
 
 In the present question, the links of expe- 
 rience sequent upon an idea, which mediate 
 between it and a reality, form and for the 
 pragmatist indeed are, the concrete relation of 
 truth that may obtain between the idea and 
 that reality. They, he says, are all that we 
 
 201 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 mean when we speak of the idea 'pointing' to 
 the reality, 'j&tting' it, 'corresponding' with it, 
 or 'agreeing' with it, — they or other similar 
 mediating trains of verification. Such medi- 
 ating events make the idea 'true.' The idea 
 itself, if it exists at all, is also a concrete event : 
 so pragmatism insists that truth in the singu- 
 lar is only a collective name for truths in the 
 plural, these consisting always of series of 
 definite events; and that what intellectualism 
 calls the truth, the inherent truth, of any one 
 such series is only the abstract name for its 
 truthfulness in act, for the fact that the ideas 
 there do lead to the supposed reality in a way 
 that we consider satisfactory. 
 
 The pragmatist himself has no objection to 
 abstractions. Elliptically, and 'for short,' he 
 relies on them as much as any one, finding 
 upon innumerable occasions that their com- 
 parative emptiness makes of them useful sub- 
 stitutes for the overfulness of the facts he meets 
 with. But he never ascribes to them a higher 
 grade of reality. The full reality of a truth for 
 him is always some process of verification, in 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 which the abstract property of connecting 
 ideas with objects truly is workingly embodied. 
 Meanwhile it is endlessly serviceable to be able 
 to talk of properties abstractly and apart from 
 their working, to find them the same in in- 
 numerable cases, to take them 'out of time,' 
 and to treat of their relations to other similar 
 abstractions. We thus form whole universes 
 of platonic ideas ante rem, universes in posse, 
 tho none of them exists effectively except in 
 rebus. Countless relations obtain there which 
 nobody experiences as obtaining, — as, in 
 the eternal universe of musical relations, for 
 example, the notes of Aennchen von Tharau 
 were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever 
 heard them. Even so the music of the future 
 sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter. Or, if 
 we take the world of geometrical relations, 
 the thousandth decimal of it sleeps there, tho 
 no one may ever try to compute it. Or, if we 
 take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 
 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on 
 which they are not practically fitted; countless 
 stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 seeks to fit them actually. In the same way 
 countless opinions 'fit' realities, and count- 
 less truths are valid, tho no thinker ever 
 thinks them. 
 
 For the anti-pragmatist these prior timeless 
 relations are the presupposition of the con- 
 crete ones, and possess the profounder dig- 
 nity and value. The actual workings of our 
 ideas in verification-processes are as naught 
 in comparison with the 'obtainings' of this 
 discarnate truth within them. 
 
 For the pragmatist, on the contrary, all dis- 
 carnate truth is static, impotent, and relatively 
 spectral, full truth being the truth that ener- 
 gizes and does battle. Can any one suppose 
 that the sleeping quality of truth would ever 
 have been abstracted or have received a name, 
 if truths had remained forever in that storage- 
 vault of essential timeless 'agreements' and 
 had never been embodied in any panting strug- 
 gle of men's live ideas for verification ? Surely 
 no more than the abstract property of 'fitting' 
 would have received a name, if in our world 
 there had been no backs or feet or gaps in 
 
 204 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 walls to be actually fitted. Existential truth 
 is incidental to the actual competition of opin- 
 ions. Essential truth, the truth of the intellect- 
 ualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is 
 like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried 
 it on, like the music that no ear has listened 
 to. It is less real, not more real, than the veri- 
 fied article ; and to attribute a superior degree 
 of glory to it seems little more than a piece of 
 perverse abstraction-worship. As well might 
 a pencil insist that the outline is the essen- 
 tial thing in all pictorial representation, and 
 chide the paint-brush and the camera for omit- 
 ting it, forgetting that their pictures not only 
 contain the whole outline, but a hundred other 
 things in addition. Pragmatist truth contains 
 the whole of intellectualist truth and a hundred 
 other things in addition. Intellectualist truth 
 is then only pragmatist truth in posse. That 
 on innumerable occasions men do substitute 
 truth in posse or verifiability, for verification 
 or truth in act, is a fact to which no one at- 
 tributes more importance than the pragmatist : 
 he emphasizes the practical utility of such a 
 
 205 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 habit. But he does not on that account consider 
 truth in posse, — truth not alive enough ever 
 to have been asserted or questioned or contra- 
 dicted, — to be the metaphysically prior thing, 
 to which truths in act are tributary and sub- 
 sidiary. When intellectualists do this, prag- 
 matism charges them with inverting the real 
 relation. Truth in posse means only truths 
 in act; and he insists that these latter take 
 precedence in the order of logic as well as in 
 that of being. 
 
 Seventh misunderstanding: Pragmatism ig- 
 nores the theoretic interest. 
 
 This would seem to be an absolutely wanton 
 slander, were not a certain excuse to be found 
 in the linguistic affinities of the word 'prag- 
 matism,' and in certain oflFhand habits of 
 speech of ours which assumed too great a gen- 
 erosity on our reader's part. When we spoke 
 of the meaning of ideas consisting in their 
 'practical' consequences, or of the 'practical' 
 differences which our beliefs make to us ; when 
 we said that the truth of a belief consists in its 
 
 206 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 'working' value, etc.; our language evidently 
 was too careless, for by 'practical' we were 
 almost unanimously held to mean opposed to 
 theoretical or genuinely cognitive, and the con- 
 sequence was punctually drawn that a truth 
 in our eyes could have no relation to any in- 
 dependent reality, or to any other truth, or 
 to anything whatever but the acts which we 
 might ground on it or the satisfactions they 
 might bring. The mere existence of the idea, 
 all by itself, if only its results were satisfactory, 
 would give full truth to it, it was charged, in 
 our absurd pragmatist epistemology. The sol- 
 emn attribution of this rubbish to us was also 
 encouraged by two other circumstances. First, 
 ideas are practically useful in the narrow sense, 
 false ideas sometimes, but most often ideas 
 whiph we can verify by the sum total of all 
 their leadings, and the reality of whose ob- 
 jects may thus be considered established be- 
 yond doubt. That these ideas should be true 
 in advance of and apart from their utility, that, 
 in other words, their objects should be really 
 there, is the very condition of their having that 
 
 207 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 kind of utility, — the objects they connect us 
 with are so important that the ideas which serve 
 as the objects' substitutes grow important also. 
 This manner of their practical working was the 
 first thing that made truths good in the eyes of 
 primitive men ; and buried among all the other 
 good workings by which true beliefs are char- 
 acterized, this kind of subsequential utility 
 remains. 
 
 The second misleading circumstance was 
 the emphasis laid by Schiller and Dewey on 
 the fact that, unless a truth be relevant to the 
 mind's momentary predicament, unless it be 
 germane to the ' practical ' situation, — mean- 
 ing by this the quite particular perplexity, — 
 it is no good to urge it. It does n't meet our 
 interests any better than a falsehood would 
 under the same circumstances. But why our 
 predicaments and perplexities might not be 
 theoretical here as well as narrowly practical, 
 I wish that our critics would explain. They 
 simply assume that no pragmatist can admit 
 a genuinely theoretic interest. Having used 
 the phrase 'cash- value' of an idea, I am im- 
 
 208 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 plored by one correspondent to alter it, 'for 
 every one thinks you mean only pecuniary 
 profit and loss.' Having said that the true is 
 'the expedient in our thinking,' I am rebuked 
 in this wise by another learned correspondent : 
 'The word expedient has no other meaning 
 than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this 
 has ended by landing a number of officers of 
 national banks in penitentiaries. A philoso- 
 phy that leads to such results must be un- 
 sound.' 
 
 But the word 'practical' is so habitually 
 loosely used that more indulgence might have 
 been expected. When one says that a sick man 
 has now practically recovered, or that an enter- 
 prise has practically failed, one usually means 
 just the opposite of practically in the literal 
 sense. One means that, altho untrue in strict 
 practice, what one says is true in theory, 
 true virtually, certain to be true. Again, by the 
 practical one often means the distinctively con- 
 crete, the individual, particular, and effective, 
 as opposed to the abstract, general, and inert. 
 To speak for myself, whenever I have empha- 
 
 209 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 sized the practical nature of truth, this is mainly 
 what has been in my mind. 'Pragmata' are 
 things in their plurality ; and in that early Cali- 
 fornia address, when I described pragmatism 
 as holding that 'the meaning of any proposi- 
 tion can always be brought down to some par- 
 ticular consequence in our future practical ex- 
 perience, whether passive or active,' I expressly 
 added these qualifying words : ' the point lying 
 rather in the fact that the experience must be 
 particular than in the fact that it must be 
 active,' — by 'active' meaning here 'practical' 
 in the narrow literal sense.' But particular 
 consequences can perfectly well be of a theo- 
 
 ' The ambiguity of the word 'practical' comes out well in 
 these words of a recent would-be reporter of our views : 'Prag- 
 matism is an Anglo-Saxon reaction against the intellectualism 
 and rationalism of the Latin mind. . . . Man, each indi- 
 vidual man is the measure of things. He is able to conceive 
 none but relative truths, that is to say, illusions. What these 
 illusions are worth is revealed to him, not by general theory, 
 but by individual practice. Pragmatism, which consists in 
 experiencing these illusions of the mind and obeying them by 
 acting them out, is a philosophy withovt words, a philosophy 
 of gestures and of acts, which abandons what is general and 
 holds only to what is particvla/r.' (Bourdeau, in Journal des 
 Debats, October 29, 1907.) 
 
 210 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 re tic nature. Every remote fact which we infer 
 from an idea is a particular theoretic conse- 
 quence which our mind practically works to- 
 wards. The loss of every old opinion of ours 
 which we see that we shall have to give up if 
 a new opinion be true, is a particular theoretic 
 as well as a particular practical consequence. 
 After man's interest in breathing freely, the 
 greatest of all his interests (because it never 
 fluctuates or remits, as most of his physical 
 interests' do), is his interest in consistency,, in 
 feeling that what he now thinks goes with what 
 he thinks on other occasions. We tirelessly 
 compare truth with truth for this sole purpose. 
 Is the present candidate for belief perhaps con- 
 tradicted by principle number one ? Is it com- 
 patible with fact number two.? and so forth. 
 The particular operations here are the purely 
 logical ones of analysis, deduction, compari- 
 son, etc. ; and altho general terms may be used 
 ad libitum, the satisfactory practical working of 
 the candidate-idea consists in the conscious- 
 ness yielded by each successive theoretic con- 
 sequence in particular. It is therefore simply 
 
 211 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 idiotic to repeat that pragmatism takes no 
 account of purely theoretic interests. All it 
 insists on is that verity in act means verifica- 
 tions, and that these are always particulars. 
 Even in exclusively theoretic matters, it in- 
 sists that vagueness and generality serve to 
 verify nothing. 
 
 Eighth misunderstanding: Pragmatism is 
 shut up to solipsism. 
 
 I have already said something about this 
 misconception under the third and fourth 
 heads, above, but a little more may be helpful. 
 The objection is apt to clothe itself in words 
 like these : ' You make truth to consist in every 
 value except the cognitive value proper; you 
 always leave your knower at many removes 
 (or, at the uttermost, at one remove) from his 
 real object ; the best you do is to let his ideas 
 carry him towards it; it remains forever out- 
 side of him,' etc. 
 
 I think that the leaven working here is the 
 rooted intellectualist persuasion that, to know 
 a reality, an idea must in some inscrutable 
 
 212 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 fashion possess or be it.* For pragmatism this 
 kind of coalescence is inessential. As a rule 
 our cognitions are only processes of mind off 
 their balance and in motion towards real ter- 
 mini; and the reality of the termini, believed 
 in by the states of mind in question, can be 
 guaranteed only by some wider knower.^ But 
 
 ' Sensations may, indeed, possess their objects or coalesce 
 with them, as common sense supposes that they do; and in- 
 tuited differences between concepts may coalesce with the 
 'eternal' objective differences; but to simplify our discussion 
 here we can afford to abstract from these very special cases 
 of knowing. 
 
 ^ The transcendental idealist thinks that, in some inex- 
 pUcable way, the finite states of mind are identical with the 
 transfinite all-knower which he finds himself obliged to postu- 
 late in order to supply a fundamerdum for the relation of know- 
 ing, as he apprehends it. Pragmatists can 'leave the question 
 of identity open ; but they cannot do without the wider knower 
 any more than they can do without the reality, if they want to 
 prove a case of knowing. They themselves play the part of the 
 absolute knower for the universe of discourse which serves 
 them as material for epistemologizing. They warrant the real- 
 ity there, and the subject's true knowledge, there, of it. But 
 whether what they themselves say about that whole universe 
 is objectively true, i. e., whether the pragmatic theory of truth 
 is true really, they cannot warrant, — they can only believe 
 it. To their hearers they can only propose it, as I propose it 
 to my readers, as something to be verified ambidando, or by 
 the way in which its consequences may confirm it. 
 
 213 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 if there is no reason extant in the universe why 
 they should be doubted, the beliefs are true 
 in the only sense in which anything can be true 
 anyhow: they are practically and concretely 
 true, namely. True in the mystical mongrel 
 sense of an Identitatsphilosophie they need not 
 be ; nor is there any intelligible reason why they 
 ever need be true otherwise than verifiably 
 and practically. It is reality's part to possess 
 its own existence; it is thought's part to get 
 into 'touch' with it by innumerable paths of 
 verification. 
 
 I fear that the 'humanistic' developments of 
 pragmatism may cause a certain difficulty here. 
 We get at one truth only through the rest of 
 truth ; and the reality, everlastingly postulated 
 as that which all our truth must keep in touch 
 with, may never be given to us save in the form 
 of truth other than that which we are now test- 
 ing. But since Dr. Schiller has shown that 
 all our truths, even the most elemental, are 
 affected by race- inheritance with a human co- 
 efficient, reality per se thus may appear only 
 as a sort of limit; it may be held to shrivel 
 
 214 
 
PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH 
 
 to the mere flace for an object, and what is 
 known may be held to be only matter of our 
 psyche that we fill the place with. 
 
 It must be confessed that pragmatism, 
 worked in this humanistic way, is compatible 
 with solipsism. It joins friendly hands with 
 the agnostic part of kantism, with contempo- 
 rary agnosticism, and with idealism generally. 
 But worked thus, it is a metaphysical theory 
 about the matter of reality, and flies far beyond 
 pragmatism's own modest analysis of the na- 
 ture of the knowing function, which analysis 
 may just as harmoniously be combined with 
 less humanistic accounts of reality. One of 
 pragmatism's merits is that it is so purely epis- 
 temological. It must assume realities; but it 
 prejudges nothing as to their constitution, and 
 the most diverse metaphysics can use it as their 
 foundation. It certainly has no special affinity 
 with solipsism. 
 
 As I look back over what I have written, 
 much of it gives me a queer impression, as if 
 the obvious were set forth so condescendingly 
 
 215 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 that readers might well laugh at my pompo- 
 sity. It may be, however, that concreteness as 
 radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole 
 originality of pragmatism, the whole point in 
 it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It 
 begins with concreteness, and returns and ends 
 with it. Dr. Schiller, with his two 'practical' 
 aspects of truth, (1) relevancy to situation, and 
 (2) subsequential utility, is only filling the cup 
 of concreteness to the brim for us. Once seize 
 that cup, and you cannot misunderstand prag- 
 matism. It seems as if the power of imagining 
 the world concretely might have been common 
 enough to let our readers apprehend us better, 
 as if they might have read between our lines, 
 and, in spite of all our infelicities of expres- 
 sion, guessed a little more correctly what our 
 thought was. But alas ! this was not on fate's 
 programme, so we can only think, with the 
 German ditty: — 
 
 "Es war' zu schon gewesen, 
 Es hat nicht soUen sein." 
 
IX 
 
 THE MEANING OF THE WORD 
 TRUTHS 
 
 M.Y account of truth is realistic, and follows 
 the epistemological dualism of common sense. 
 Suppose I say to you ' The thing exists ' — is 
 that true or not ? How can you tell ? Not till 
 my statement has developed its meaning far- 
 ther is it determined as being true, false, or 
 irrelevant to reality altogether. But if now you 
 ask 'what thing ?' and I reply 'a desk' ; if you 
 ask ' where .'' ' and I point to a place ; if you ask 
 'does it exist materially, or only in imagina- 
 tion .'' ' and I say ' materially ' ; if moreover I 
 say 'I mean that desk,' and then grasp and 
 shake a desk which you see just as I have de- 
 scribed it, you are willing to call my statement 
 true. But you and I are commutable here ; we 
 can exchange places ; and, as you go bail for 
 my desk, so I can go bail for yours. 
 
 This notion of a reality independent of 
 
 ' Remarks at the meeting of the American Philosophical 
 Association, Cornell University, December, 1907. 
 
 217 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 either of us, taken from ordinary social expe- 
 rience, lies at the base of the pragmatist defi- 
 nition of truth. With some such reality any 
 statement, in order to be counted true, must 
 agree. Pragmatism defines 'agreeing' to mean 
 certain ways of 'working,' be they actual or 
 potential. Thus, for my statement 'the desk 
 exists ' to be true of a desk recognized as real 
 by you, it must be able to lead me to shake 
 your desk, to explain myself by words that 
 suggest that desk to your mind, to make a 
 drawing that is like the desk you see, etc. Only 
 in such ways as this is there sense in saying it 
 agrees with that reality, only thus does it gain 
 for me the satisfaction of hearing you corrob- 
 orate me. Reference then to something deter- 
 minate, and some sort of adaptation to it 
 worthy of the name of agreement, are thus 
 constituent elements in the definition of any 
 statement of mine as 'true.' 
 
 You cannot get at either the reference or 
 the adaptation without using the notion of the 
 workings. That the thing is, what it is, and 
 which it is (of all the possible things with that 
 
 218 
 
MEANING OF THE WORD TRUTH 
 
 what) are points determinable only by the 
 pragmatic method. The ' which ' means a pos- 
 sibility of pointing, or of otherwise singling out 
 the special object ; the ' what ' means choice on 
 our part of an essential aspect to conceive it by 
 (and this is always relative to what Dewey calls 
 our own 'situation') ; and the 'that' means our 
 assumption of the attitude of belief, the reality- 
 recognizing attitude. Surely for understand- 
 ing what the word ' true ' means as applied 
 to a statement, the mention of such workings 
 is indispensable. Surely if we leave them out 
 the subject and the object of the cognitive re- 
 lation float — in the same universe, 'tis true 
 — but vaguely and ignorantly and without 
 mutual contact or mediation. 
 
 Our critics nevertheless call the workings 
 inessential. No functional possibilities 'make' 
 our beliefs true, they say; they are true in- 
 herently, true positively, bom 'true' as the 
 Count of Chambord was born 'Henri-Cinq.' 
 Pragmatism insists, on the contrary, that state- 
 ments and beliefs are thus inertly and statically 
 
 true only by courtesy : they practically pass for 
 
 219 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 true ; but you cannot define what you mean by 
 calling them true without referring to their 
 functional possibilities. These give its whole 
 logical content to that relation to reality on a 
 belief's part to which the name 'truth' is ap- 
 plied, a relation which otherwise remains one 
 of mere coexistence or bare withness. 
 
 The foregoing statements reproduce the es- 
 sential content of the lecture on Truth in my 
 book Pragmatism. Schiller's doctrine of 'hu- 
 manism,' Dewey's 'Studies in logical theory,' 
 and my own ' radical empiricism,' all involve 
 this general notion of truth as 'working,' either 
 actual or conceivable. But they envelop it as 
 only one detail in the midst of much wider 
 theories that aim eventually at determining 
 the notion of what 'reality' at large is in its 
 ultimate nature and constitution. 
 
X 
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS C^SAR' 
 
 JMt account of truth is purely logical and 
 relates to its definition only. I contend that 
 you cannot tell what the word 'true' means, as 
 applied to a statement, without invoking the 
 concept of the statement's workings. 
 
 Assume, to fix our ideas, a universe com- 
 posed of two things only : imperial Caesar dead 
 and turned to clay, and me, saying 'Csesar 
 really existed.' Most persons would naively 
 deem truth to be thereby uttered, and say that 
 by a sort of actio in distans my statement had 
 taken direct hold of the other fact. 
 
 But have my words so certainly denoted that ■ 
 Caesar ? — or so certainly connoted his indi- 
 vidual attributes ? To fill out the complete 
 measure of what the epithet 'true' may ideally 
 mean, my thought ought to bear a fully deter- 
 minate and unambiguous ' one-to-one-rela- 
 
 ' Originally printed under the title of 'Truth versus Truth- 
 fulness,' in the Journal of Philosophy. 
 
 221 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 tion' to its own particular object. In the ultra- 
 simple universe imagined the reference is un- 
 certified. Were there two Csesars we should n't 
 know which was meant. The conditions of 
 truth thus seem incomplete in this universe 
 of discourse so that it must be enlarged. 
 
 Transcendentalists enlarge it by invoking 
 an absolute mind which, as it owns all the facts, 
 can sovereignly correlate them. If it intends 
 that my statement shall refer to that identical 
 Caesar, and that the attributes I have in mind 
 shall mean his attributes, that intention suf- 
 fices to make the statement true. 
 
 I, in turn, enlarge the universe by admitting 
 finite intermediaries between the two original 
 facts. Csesar had, and my statement has, ef- 
 fects; and if these effects in any way run to- 
 gether, a concrete medium and bottom is pro- 
 vided for the determinate cognitive relation, 
 which, as a pure actio in distans, seemed to 
 float too vaguely and unintelligibly. 
 
 The real Csesar, for example, wrote a man- 
 uscript of which I see a real reprint, and say 
 'the Caesar I mean is the author of that.' The 
 
 222 
 
THE EXISTENCE OF C^SAR 
 
 workings of my thought thus determine both 
 its denotative and its connotative significance 
 more fully. It now defines itself as neither 
 irrelevant to the real Caesar, nor false in what 
 it suggests of him. The absolute mind, seeing 
 me thus working towards Caesar through the 
 cosmic intermediaries, might well say : ' Such 
 workings only specify in detail what I meant 
 myself by the statement being true. I decree 
 the cognitive relation between the two original 
 facts to mean that just that kind of concrete 
 chain of intermediaries exists or can exist.' 
 
 But the chain involves facts prior to the 
 statement the logical conditions of whose truth 
 we are defining, and facts subsequent to it; 
 and this circumstance, coupled with the vul- 
 gar employment of the terms truth and fact as 
 synonyms, has laid my account open to misap- 
 prehension. ' How,' it is confusedly asked, * can 
 Caesar's existence, a truth already 2000 years 
 old, depend for its truth on anything about to 
 happen now.'* How can my acknowledgment 
 of it be made true by the acknowledgment's 
 own effects ? The effects may indeed confirm 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 my belief, but the belief was made true already 
 by the fact that Csesar really did exist.' 
 
 Well, be it so, for if there were no Caesar, 
 there could, of course, be no positive truth 
 about him — but then distinguish between 
 'true' as being positively and completely so 
 estabhshed, and 'true' as being so only 'prac- 
 tically,' elliptically, and by courtesy, in the 
 sense of not being positively irrelevant or un- 
 true. Remember also that Caesar's having ex- 
 isted in fact may make a present statement 
 false or irrelevant as well as it may make it 
 true, and that in neither case does it itself 
 have to alter. It being given, whether truth, 
 untruth, or irrelevancy shall be also given de- 
 pends on something coming from the state- 
 ment itself. What pragmatism contends for is 
 that you cannot adequately define the some- 
 thing if you leave the notion of the statement's 
 functional workings out of your account. 
 Truth meaning agreement with reality, the 
 mode of the agreeing is a practical problem 
 which the subjective term of the relation 
 alone can solve. 
 
THE EXISTENCE OP CAESAR 
 
 Note. This paper was originally followed by a couple of para- 
 graphs meant to conciliate the intellectualist opposition. Since 
 you love the word 'true' so, and since you despise so the con- 
 crete working of our ideas, I said, keep the word 'truth' for 
 the saltatory and incomprehensible relation you care so much 
 for, and I will say of thoughts that know their objects in an 
 inteUigible sense that they are 'truthful.' 
 
 Like most offerings, this one has been spurned, so I revoke 
 it, repenting of my generosity. Professor Pratt, in his recent 
 book, calls any objective state of jacts "a truth,' and uses the 
 word 'trueness' in the sense of 'truth' as proposed by me. Mr. 
 Hawtrey (see below, page 281) uses 'correctness' in the same 
 sense. Apart from the general evil of ambiguous vocabularies, 
 we may really forsake all hope, if the term 'truth' is oflScially 
 to lose its status as a property of our beliefs and opinions, and 
 become recognized as a technical synonym for 'fact.' 
 
XI 
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND THE 
 STRENUOUS LIFE' 
 
 Professor W. A. Brown, in the Journal for 
 August 15, approves my pragmatism for allow- 
 ing that a belief in the absolute may give holi- 
 days to the spirit, but takes me to task for the 
 narrowness of this concession, and shows by 
 striking examples how great a power the same 
 belief may have in letting loose the strenuous 
 life. 
 
 I have no criticism whatever to make upon 
 his excellent article, but let me explain why 
 'moral holidays' were the only gift of the ab- 
 solute which I picked out for emphasis. I was 
 primarily concerned in my lectures with con- 
 trasting the belief that the world is still in pro- 
 cess of making with the belief that there is an 
 'eternal' edition of it ready-made and com- 
 plete. The former, or 'pluralistic' belief, was 
 the one that my pragmatism favored. Both 
 
 ' B«printed from the Journal of Philosophy, etc., 1906. 
 
ABSOLUTE AND STRENUOUS LIFE 
 
 beliefs confirm our strenuous moods. Plural- 
 ism actually demands them, since it makes 
 the world's salvation depend upon the ener- 
 gizing of its several parts, among which we 
 are. Monism permits them, for however furi- 
 ous they may be, we can always justify our- 
 selves in advance for indulging them by the 
 thought that they will have been expressions of 
 the absolute's perfect life. By escaping from 
 your finite perceptions to the conception of the 
 eternal whole, you can hallow any tendency 
 whatever. Tho the absolute dictates nothing, 
 it will sanction anything and everything after 
 the fact, for whatever is once there will 
 have to be regarded as an integral member of 
 the universe's perfection. Quietism and frenzy 
 thus alike receive the absolute's permit to 
 exist. Those of us who are naturally inert 
 may abide in our resigned passivity; those 
 whose energy is excessive may grow more reck- 
 less still. History shows how easily both quiet- 
 ists and fanatics have drawn inspiration from 
 the absolutistic scheme. It suits sick souls and 
 strenuous ones equally well. 
 
 227 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 One cannot say thus of pluralism. Its world 
 is always vulnerable, for some part may go 
 astray; and having no 'eternal' edition of it 
 to draw comfort from, its partisans must al- 
 ways feel to some degree insecure. If, as plu- 
 ralists, we grant ourselves moral holidays, they 
 can only be provisional breathing-spells, in- 
 tended to refresh us for the morrow's fight. 
 This forms one permanent inferiority of plu- 
 ralism from the pragmatic point of view. It 
 has no saving message for incurably sick souls. 
 Absolutism, among its other messages, has 
 that message, and is the only scheme that has 
 it necessarily. That constitutes its chief supe- 
 riority and is the source of its religious power. 
 That is why, desiring to do it full justice, I 
 valued its aptitude for moral-holiday giving 
 so highly. Its claims in that way are unique, 
 whereas its aflSnities with strenuousness are less 
 emphatic than those of the pluralistic scheme. 
 
 In the last lecture of my book I candidly ad- 
 mitted this inferiority of pluralism. It lacks 
 the wide indiflFerence that absolutism shows. It 
 is bound to disappoint many sick souls whom 
 
ABSOLUTE AND STRENUOUS LIFE 
 
 absolutism can console. It seems therefore poor 
 tactics for absolutists to make little of this ad- 
 vantage. The needs of sick souls are surely 
 the most urgent ; and believers in the absolute 
 should rather hold it to be great merit in their 
 philosophy that it can meet them so well. 
 
 The pragmatism or pluralism which I de- 
 fend has to fall back on a certain ultimate 
 hardihood, a certain willingness to live without 
 assurances or guarantees. To minds thus will- 
 ing to live on possibilities that are not certain- 
 ties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation any 
 how, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration 
 about it which has caused it to be looked 
 askance on, even in the church. Which side 
 is right here, who can say.'' Within religion, 
 emotion is apt to be tyrannical ; but philosophy 
 must favor the emotion that allies itself best 
 with the whole body and drift of all the truths 
 in sight. I conceive this to be the more strenu- 
 ous type of emotion ; but I have to admit that 
 its inability to let loose quietistic raptures is a 
 serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy 
 which I profess. 
 
XII 
 
 PROFESSOR HEBERT ON 
 PRAGMATISM' 
 
 Professor Marcel Hubert is a singularly 
 erudite and liberal thinker (a seceder, I be- 
 lieve, from the Catholic priesthood) and an 
 uncommonly direct and clear writer. His book 
 Le Divin is one of the ablest reviews of the 
 general subject of religious philosophy which 
 recent years have produced ; and in the small 
 volume the title of which is copied above he 
 has, perhaps, taken more pains not to do injus- 
 tice to pragmatism than any of its numerous 
 critics. Yet the usual fatal misapprehension 
 of its purposes vitiates his exposition and his 
 critique. His pamphlet seems to me to form a 
 worthy hook, as it were, on which to hang one 
 more attempt to tell the reader what the prag- 
 matist account of truth really means. 
 
 ' Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy for December 
 3, 1908 (vol. V, p. 689), of a review of Le pragmatisme el ses 
 diverses formes anglo-americaines, by Marcel Hebert. (Paris: 
 Librairie critique Emile Nourry. 1908. Pp. 105.) 
 
 230 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 M. Hebert takes it to mean what most people 
 take it to mean, the doctrine, namely, that 
 whatever proves subjectively expedient in the 
 way of our thinking is 'true' in the absolute 
 and unrestricted sense of the word, whether it 
 corresponds to any objective state of things 
 outside of our thought or not. Assuming this 
 to be the pragmatist thesis, M. Hebert opposes 
 it at length. Thought that proves itself to be 
 thus expedient may, indeed, have every other 
 kind of value for the thinker, he says, but cog- 
 nitive value, representative value, valeur de 
 connaissance proprement dite, it has not; and 
 when it does have a high degree of general 
 utility value, this is in every case derived from 
 its previous value in the way of correctly repre- 
 senting independent objects that have an im- 
 portant influence on our lives. Only by thus 
 representing things truly do we reap the useful 
 fruits. But the fruits follow on the truth, they 
 do not constitute it; so M. Hebert accuses 
 pragmatism of telling us everything about 
 truth except what it essentially is. He admits, 
 indeed, that the world is so framed that when 
 
 231 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 men have true ideas of realities, consequential 
 utilities ensue in abundance; and no one of 
 our critics, I think, has shown as concrete a 
 sense of the variety of these utilities as he has ; 
 but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities 
 are secondary, we insist on treating them as 
 primary, and that the connaissance objective 
 from which they draw all their being is some- 
 thing which we neglect, exclude, and destroy. 
 The utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive 
 value of our ideas may perfectly well harmon- 
 ize, he says — and in the main he allows that 
 they do harmonize ^ but they are not logically 
 identical for that. He admits that subjective 
 interests, desires, impulses may even have the 
 active 'primacy' in our intellectual life. Cog- 
 nition awakens only at their spur, and follows 
 their cues and aims ; yet, when it is awakened, 
 it is objective cognition proper and not merely 
 another name for the impulsive tendencies 
 themselves in the state of satisfaction. The 
 owner of a picture ascribed to Corot gets 
 uneasy when its authenticity is doubted. He 
 looks up its origin and is reassured. But his 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 uneasiness does not make the proposition 
 false, any more than his relief makes the pro- 
 position true, that the actual Corot was the 
 painter. Pragmatism, which, according to 
 M. Hebert, claims that our sentiments make 
 truth and falsehood, would oblige us to con- 
 clude that our minds exert no genuinely cogni- 
 tive function whatever. 
 
 This subjectivist interpretation of our posi- 
 tion seems to follow from my having happened 
 to write (without supposing it necessary to 
 explain that I was treating of cognition solely 
 on its subjective side) that in the long run the 
 true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, 
 much as the good is the expedient in the way of 
 our behavior ! Having previously written that 
 truth means 'agreement with reality,' and in- 
 sisted that the chief part of the expediency of 
 any one opinion is its agreement with the rest 
 of acknowledged truth, I apprehended no 
 exclusively subjectivistic reading of my mean- 
 ing. My mind was so filled with the notion of 
 objective reference that I never dreamed that 
 my hearers would let go of it ; and the very last 
 
 233 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 accusation I expected was that in speaking of 
 ideas and their satisfactions, I was denying 
 realities outside. My only wonder now is that 
 critics should have found so silly a personage 
 as I must have seemed in their eyes, worthy of 
 explicit refutation. 
 
 The object, for me, is just as much one part 
 of reality as the idea is another part. The truth 
 of the idea is one relation of it to the reality, 
 just as its date and its place are other relations. 
 All three relations consist of intervening parts 
 of the universe which can in every particular 
 case be assigned and catalogued, and which 
 differ in every instance of truth, just as they 
 diflFer with every date and place. 
 
 The pragmatist thesis, as Dr. Schiller and I 
 hold it, — I prefer to let Professor Dewey speak 
 for himself, — is that the relation called 'truth' 
 is thus concretely definable. Ours is the only 
 articulate attempt in the field to say positively 
 what truth actually consists of. Our de- 
 nouncers have literally nothing to oppose to it 
 as an alternative. For them, when an idea is 
 true, it is true, and there the matter terminates, 
 
 234 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 the word ' true ' being indefinable. The relation 
 of the true idea to its object, being, as they 
 think, unique, it can be expressed in terms of 
 nothing else, and needs only to be named for 
 any one to recognize and understand it. More- 
 over it is invariable and universal, the same in 
 every single instance of truth, however diverse 
 the ideas, the realities, and the other relations 
 between them may be. 
 
 Our pragmatist view, on the contrary, is that 
 the truth-relation is a definitely experienceable 
 relation, and therefore describable as well as 
 namable; that it is not unique in kind, and 
 neither invariable nor universal. The relation 
 to its object that makes an idea true in any 
 given instance, is, we say, embodied in inter- 
 mediate details of reality which lead towards 
 the object, which vary in every instance, and 
 which in every instance can be concretely 
 traced. The chain of workings which an 
 opinion sets up is the opinion's truth, false- 
 hood, or irrelevancy, as the case may be. 
 Every idea that a man has works some conse- 
 quences in hini, in the shape either of bodily 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 actions or of other ideas. Through these conse- 
 quences the man's relations to surrounding 
 realities are modified. He is carried nearer to 
 some of them and farther from others, and 
 gets now the feeling that the idea has worked 
 satisfactorily, now that it has not. The idea 
 has put him into touch with something that 
 fulfils its intent, or it has not. 
 
 This something is the man's object, pri- 
 marily. Since the only realities we can talk 
 about are such objects-helieved-in, the pragma- 
 tist, whenever he says 'reality,' means in the 
 first instance what may count for the man him- 
 self as a reality, what he believes at the mo- 
 ment to be such. Sometimes the reality is a 
 concrete sensible presence. The idea, for ex- 
 ample, may be that a certain door opens into a 
 room where a glass of beer may be bought. If 
 opening the door leads to the actual sight and 
 taste of the beer, the man calls the idea true. 
 Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, 
 say of that between the sides and the hypothe- 
 nuse of a triangle, such a relation being, of 
 course, a reality quite as much as a glass of 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 beer is. If the thought of such a relation leads 
 ' him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare the 
 figures they make, he may at last, perceiving 
 one equality after another, see the relation 
 thought of, by a vision quite as particular and 
 direct as was the taste of the beer. If he does 
 so, he calls that idea, also, true. His idea has, 
 in each case, brought him into closer touch 
 with a reality felt at the moment to verify just 
 that idea. Each reality verifies and validates 
 its own idea exclusively ; and in each case the 
 verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending 
 consequences, mental or physical, which the 
 idea was able to set up. These 'workings' 
 differ in every single instance, they never tran- 
 scend experience, they consist of particulars, 
 mental or sensible, and they admit of con- 
 crete description in every individual case. 
 Pragmatists are unable to see what you can 
 possibly mean by calling an idea true, unless 
 you mean that between it as a terminus a quo 
 in some one's mind and some particular reality 
 as a terminus ad quem, such concrete workings 
 do or may intervene. Their direction consti- 
 
 237 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 tutes the idea's reference to that reality, their 
 satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation 
 thereto, and the two things together constitute 
 the ' truth ' of the idea for its posseissor. With- 
 out such intermediating portions of concretely 
 real experience the pragmatist sees no ma- 
 terials out of which the adaptive relation 
 called truth can be built up. 
 
 The anti-pragmatist view is that the work- 
 ings are but evidences of the truth's previous 
 inherent presence in the idea, and that you 
 can wipe the very possibility of them out of 
 existence and still leave the truth of the idea as 
 solid as ever. But surely this is not a counter- 
 theory of truth to ours. It is the renunciation 
 of all articulate theory. It is but a claim to the 
 right to call certain ideas true anyhow; and 
 this is what I meant above by saying that the 
 anti-pragmatists offer us no real alternative, 
 and that our account is literally the only posi- 
 tive theory extant. What meaning, indeed, can 
 an idea's truth have save its power of adapt- 
 ing us either mentally or physically to a reality ? 
 
 How comes it, then, that our critics so uni- 
 238 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 formly accuse us of subjectivism, of denying 
 the reality's existence ? It comes, I think, from 
 the necessary predominance of subjective lan- 
 guage in our analysis. However independent 
 and ejective realities may be, we can talk about 
 them, in framing our accounts of truth, only as 
 so many objects believed-in. But the process of 
 experience leads men so continually to super- 
 sede their older objects by newer ones which 
 they find it more satisfactory to believe in, that 
 the notion of an absolute reality inevitably 
 arises as a grenzbegrifl, equivalent to that of 
 an object that shall never be superseded, and 
 belief in which shall be endgilltig. Cognitively 
 we thus live under a sort of rule of three: as 
 our private concepts represent the sense- 
 objects to which they lead us, these being 
 public realities independent of the individual, 
 so these sense-realities may, in turn, represent 
 realities of a hypersensible order, electrons, 
 mind-stufiF, God, or what not, existing inde- 
 pendently of all human thinkers. The notion 
 of such final realities, knowledge of which 
 would be absolute truth, is an outgrowth of our 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 cognitive experience from which neither prag- 
 matists nor anti-pragmatists escape. They 
 form an inevitable regulative postulate in every 
 one's thinking. Our notion of them is the most 
 abundantly suggested and satisfied of all our 
 beliefs, the last to suffer doubt. The difference 
 is that our critics use this belief as their sole par- 
 adigm, and treat any one who talks of human re- 
 alities as if he thought the notion of reality 'in 
 itself ' illegitimate. Meanwhile, reality-in- itself, 
 so far as by them talked of, is only a human ob- 
 ject ; they postulate it just as we postulate it ; and 
 if we are subjectivists they are so no less. Reali- 
 ties in themselves can be there for any one, 
 whether pragmatist or anti-pragmatist, only 
 by being believed; they are believed only by 
 their notions appearing true ; and their notions 
 appear true only because they work satisfac- 
 torily. Satisfactorily, moreover, for the par- 
 ticular thinker's purpose. There is no idea 
 which is the true idea, of anything. Whose is 
 the true idea of the absolute.? Or to take 
 M. Hebert's example, what is the true idea of a 
 picture which you possess .? It is the idea that 
 
 240 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 most satisfactorily meets your present interest. 
 The interest may be in the picture's place, its 
 age, its 'tone,' its subject, its dimensions, its 
 authorship, its price, its merit, or what not. If 
 its authorship by Corot have been doubted, 
 what will satisfy the interest aroused in you at 
 that moment will be to have your claim to own 
 a Corot confirmed ; but, if you have a normal 
 human mind, merely calling it a Corot will not 
 satisfy other demands of your mind at the same 
 time. For them to be satisfied, what you learn 
 of the picture must make smooth connection 
 with what you know of the rest of the system 
 of reality in which the actual Corot played his 
 part. M. Hebert accuses us of holding that the 
 proprietary satisfactions of themselves suflfice 
 to make the belief true, and that, so far as we 
 are concerned, no actual Corot need ever have 
 existed. Why we should be thus cut off from 
 the more general and intellectual satisfactions, 
 I know not ; but whatever the satisfactions may 
 be, intellectual or proprietary, they belong to 
 the subjective side of the truth-relation. They 
 found our beliefs; our beliefs are in realities; 
 
 241 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 if no realities are there, the beliefs are false; 
 but if realities are there, how they can ever 
 be known without first being believed; or how 
 believed except by our first having ideas of 
 them that work satisfactorily, pragmatists find 
 it impossible to imagine. They also find it 
 impossible to imagine what makes the anti- 
 pragmatists' dogmatic 'ipse dixit' assurance 
 of reality more credible than the pragmatists' 
 conviction based on concrete verifications. 
 M. Hebert will probably agree to this, when 
 put in this way, so I do not see our inferiority 
 to him in the matter of connaissance propre- 
 ment dite. 
 
 Some readers will say that, altho I may 
 possibly believe in realities beyond our ideas. 
 Dr. Schiller, at any rate, does not. This is a 
 great misunderstanding, for Schiller's doctrine 
 and mine are identical, only our expositions 
 follow different directions. He starts from the 
 subjective pole of the chain, the individual 
 with his beliefs, as the more concrete and im- 
 mediately given phenomenon. 'An individual 
 
 242 
 
M. HUBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 claims his belief to be true,' Schiller says, 'but 
 what does he mean by true ? and how does he 
 establish the claim ?' With these questions we 
 embark on a psychological inquiry. To be 
 true, it appears, means, for that individual, to 
 work satisfactorily for him; and the working 
 and the satisfaction, since they vary from case 
 to case, admit of no universal description. 
 What works is true and represents a reality, 
 for the individual for whom it works. If he is 
 infallible, the reality is 'really' there; if mis- 
 taken it is not there, or not there as he thinks 
 it. We all believe, when our ideas work satis- 
 factorily ; but we don't yet know who of us is 
 infallible; so that the problem of truth and 
 that of error are ebenbiirtig and arise out of the 
 same situations. Schiller, remaining with the 
 fallible individual, and treating only of reality- 
 for-him, seems to many of his readers to ig- 
 nore reality-in-itself altogether. But that is 
 because he seeks only to tell us how truths are 
 attained, not what the content of those truths, 
 when attained, shall be. It may be that the 
 truest of all beliefs shall be that in^transsub- 
 
 243 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 jective realities. It certainly seems the truest, 
 for no rival belief is as voluminously satis- 
 factory, and it is probably Dr. Schiller's own 
 belief; but he is not required, for his imme- 
 diate purpose, to profess it. Still less is he 
 obliged to assume it in advance as the basis 
 of his discussion. 
 
 I, however, warned by the ways of critics, 
 adopt different tactics. I start from the object- 
 pole of the idea-reality chain and follow it in 
 the opposite direction from Schiller's. Antici- 
 pating the results of the general truth-processes 
 of mankind, I begin with the abstract notion 
 of an objective reality. I postulate it, and ask 
 on my own account, / vouching for this reality, 
 what would make any one else's idea of it true 
 for me as well as for him. But I find no differ- 
 ent answer from that which Schiller gives. If 
 the other man's idea leads him, not only to 
 believe that the reality is there, but to use it as 
 the reality's temporary substitute, by letting 
 it evoke adaptive thoughts and acts similar to 
 those which the reality itself would provoke, 
 then it is true in the only intelligible sense, true 
 
M. HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM 
 
 through its particular consequences, and true 
 for me as well as for the man. 
 
 My account is more of a logical definition; 
 Schiller's is more of a psychological descrip- 
 tion. Both treat an absolutely identical mat- 
 ter of experience, only they traverse it in op- 
 posite ways. 
 
 Possibly these explanations may satisfy M. 
 Hebert, whose little book, apart from the false 
 accusation of subjectivism, gives a fairly in- 
 structive account of the pragmatist episte- 
 mology. 
 
XIII 
 
 ABSTRACTIONISM AND 
 'RELATIVISMUS' 
 
 Abstract concepts, such as elasticity, volu- 
 minousness, disconnectedness, are salient as- 
 pects of our concrete experiences which we 
 find it useful to single out. Useful, because 
 we are then reminded of other things that 
 offer those same aspects; and, if the aspects 
 carry consequences in those other things, we 
 can return to our first things, expecting those 
 same consequences to accrue. 
 
 To be helped to anticipate consequences is 
 always a gain, and such being the help that ab- 
 stract concepts give us, it is obvious that their 
 use is fulfilled only when we get back again 
 into concrete particulars by their means, bear- 
 ing the consequences in our minds, and enrich- 
 ing our notion of the original objects there- 
 withal. 
 
 Without abstract concepts to handle our 
 perceptual particulars by, we are Uke men hop- 
 
 246 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 ping on one foot. Using concepts along with 
 the particulars, we become bipedal. We throw 
 our concept forward, get a foothold on the con- 
 sequence, hitch our line to this, and draw our 
 percept up, travelling thus with a hop, skip and 
 jump over the surface of life at a vastly rapider 
 rate than if we merely waded through the thick- 
 ness of the particulars as accident rained them 
 down upon our heads. Animals have to do this, 
 but men raise their heads higher and breathe 
 freely in the upper conceptual air. 
 
 The enormous esteem professed by all phi- 
 losophers for the conceptual form of conscious- 
 ness is easy to understand. From Plato's time 
 downwards it has been held to be our sole 
 avenue to essential truth. Concepts are uni- 
 versal, changeless, pure; their relations are 
 eternal ; they are spiritual, while the concrete 
 particulars which they enable us to handle are 
 corrupted by the flesh. They are precious in 
 themselves, then, apart from their original use, 
 and confer new dignity upon our life. 
 
 One can find no fault with this way of feel- 
 ing about concepts so long as their original 
 
 247 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 function does not get swallowed up in the ad- 
 miration and lost. That function is of course 
 to enlarge mentally our momentary experi- 
 ences by adding to them the consequences con- 
 ceived ; but unfortunately, that function is not 
 only too often forgotten by philosophers in 
 their reasonings, but is often converted into its 
 exact opposite, and made a means of diminish- 
 ing the original experience by denying (im- 
 plicitly or explicitly) all its features save the 
 one specially abstracted to conceive it by. 
 
 This itself is a highly abstract way of stating 
 my complaint, and it needs to be redeemed 
 from obscurity by showing instances of what 
 is meant. Some beliefs very dear to my own 
 heart have been conceived in this viciously ab- 
 stract way by critics. One is the 'will to be- 
 lieve,' so called; another is the indeterminism 
 of certain futures; a third is the notion that 
 truth may vary with the standpoint of the man 
 who holds it. I believe that the perverse abuse 
 of the abstracting function has led critics to 
 employ false arguments against these doc- 
 trines, and often has led their readers too to 
 
 248 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 false conclusions. I should like to try to save 
 the situation, if possible, by a few counter- 
 critical remarks. 
 
 Let me give the name of 'vicious abstrac- 
 tionism' to a way of using concepts which may 
 be thus described : We conceive a concrete sit- 
 uation by singling out some salient or import- 
 ant feature in it, and classing it under that; 
 then, instead of adding to its previous charac- 
 ters alL^ejpositive consequences which the new 
 
 ERRATUM 
 
 On page 249, line 12, for " privately " read 
 ' privatively." 
 
 things ; it creates difficuTties and finds impossi- 
 
 ' Let not the reader confound the fallacy here described 
 with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in 
 the mood 'celarent' of the logic-books. 
 
 249 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 function does not get swallowed up in the ad- 
 miration and lost. That function is of course 
 to enlarge mentally our momentary experi- 
 ences by adding to them the consequences con- 
 ceived ; but unfortunately, that function is not 
 only too often forgotten by philosophers in 
 their reasonings, but is often converted into its 
 exact opposite, and made a means of diminish- 
 ing the original experience by denying (im- 
 plicitly or explicitly) all its features save the_„ 
 
 who holds it. I believe that the perverse abuse 
 of the abstracting function has led critics to 
 employ false arguments against these doc- 
 trines, and often has led their readers too to 
 
 248 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 false conclusions. I should like to try to save 
 the situation, if possible, by a few counter- 
 critical remarks. 
 
 Let me give the name of 'vicious abstrac- 
 tionism' to a way of using concepts which may 
 be thus described : We conceive a concrete sit- 
 uation by singling out some salient or import- 
 ant feature in it, and classing it under that; 
 then, instead of adding to its previous charac- 
 ters all the positive consequences which the new 
 way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed 
 to use our concept privately ; we reduce the 
 originally rich phenomenon to the naked sug- 
 gestions of that name abstractly taken, treating 
 it as a case of ' nothing but ' that concept, and 
 acting as if all the other characters from out 
 of which the concept is abstracted were ex- 
 punged.' Abstraction, functioning in this way, 
 becomes a means of arrest far more than a 
 means of advance in thought. It mutilates 
 things ; it creates diflSculties and finds impossi- 
 
 ' Let not the reader confound the fallacy here described 
 with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in 
 the mood 'celarent' of the logic-books. 
 
 249 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 bilities; and more than half the trouble that 
 metaphysicians and logicians give themselves 
 over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of 
 the universe may, I am convinced, be traced 
 to this relatively simple source. The viciously 
 ■privative employment of abstract characters and 
 class names is, I am persuaded, one of the 
 great original sins of the rationalistic mind. 
 
 To proceed immediately to concrete exam- 
 ples, cast a glance at the belief in 'free will,' 
 demolished with such specious persuasiveness 
 recently by the skilful hand of Professor Ful- 
 lerton.^ When a common man says that his will 
 is free, what does he mean.? He means that 
 there are situations of bifurcation inside of his 
 life in which two futures seem to him equally 
 possible, for both have their roots equally 
 planted in his present and his past. Either, if 
 realized, will grow out of his previous motives, 
 character and circumstances, and will continue 
 uninterruptedly the pulsations of his personal 
 life. But sometimes both at once are incom- 
 
 ^ Popular Science Monthly, N. Y., vols. Iviii and lix. 
 250 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 patible with physical nature, and then it seems 
 to the naifve observer as if he made a choice 
 between them now, and that the question of 
 which future is to be, instead of having been 
 decided at the foundation of the world, were 
 decided afresh at every passing moment in 
 which fact seems livingly to grow, and possi- 
 bility seems, in turning itself towards one act, 
 to exclude all others. 
 
 He who takes things at their face-value here 
 may indeed be deceived. He may far too often 
 mistake his private ignorance of what is pre- 
 determined for a real indetermination of what 
 is to be. Yet, however imaginary it may be, 
 his picture of the situation offers no appear- 
 ance of breach between the past and future. 
 A train is the same train, its passengers are the 
 same passengers, its momentum is the same 
 momentum, no matter which way the switch 
 which fixes its direction is placed. For the in- 
 determinist there is at all times enough past 
 for all the different futures in sight, and more 
 besides, to find their reasons in it, and which- 
 ever future comes will slide out of that past as 
 
 251 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 easily as the train slides by the switch. The 
 world, in short, is just as continuous with itself 
 for the believers in free will as for the rigorous 
 determinists, only the latter are unable to be- 
 lieve in points of bifurcation as spots of really 
 indifferent equilibrium or as containing shunts 
 which there — and there only, not before — 
 direct existing motions without altering their 
 amount. 
 
 Were there such spots of indifference, the 
 rigorous determinists think, the future and the 
 past would be separated absolutely, for, ab- 
 stractly taken, the word 'indifferent^ suggests 
 disconnection solely. Whatever is indifferent is 
 in so far forth unrelated and detached. Take 
 the term thus strictly, and you see, they tell us, 
 that if any spot of indifference is found upon 
 the broad highway between the past and the 
 future, then no connection of any sort what- 
 ever, no continuous momentum, no identical 
 passenger, no common aim or agent, can be 
 found on both sides of the shunt or switch 
 which there is moved. The place is an im- 
 passable chasm. 
 
 252 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 Mr. Fullerton writes — the italics are mine 
 — as follows : — 
 
 'In so far as my action is free, what I have 
 been, what I am, what I have always done or 
 striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or 
 resolve to do at the present moment — these 
 things can have no more to do with its future 
 realization than if they had no existence. . . . 
 The possibility is a hideous one; and surely 
 even the most ardent free-willist will, when 
 he contemplates it frankly, excuse me for hop- 
 ing that if I am free I am at least not very free, 
 and that I may reasonably expect to find some 
 degree of consistency in my life and actions. 
 . . . Suppose that I have given a dollar to a 
 blind beggar. Can I, if it is really an act of 
 free-will, be properly said to have given the 
 money? Was it given because I was a man 
 of tender heart, etc., etc. ? . . . What has all 
 this to do with acts of free-will .'' If they are 
 free, they must not be conditioned by antece- 
 dent circumstances of any sort, by the misery 
 of the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the 
 passer-by. They must be causeless, not deter- 
 
 253 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 mined. They must drop from a clear sky out 
 of the void, for just in so far as they can be 
 accounted for, they are not free. 
 
 Heaven forbid that I should get entangled 
 here in a controversy about the rights and 
 wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I 
 am only trying to illustrate vicious abstraction- 
 ism by the conduct of some of the doctrine's 
 assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as 
 the indeterminist seems to himself to experi- 
 ence them, are moments both of re-direction 
 and of continuation. But because in the 
 ' either — or ' of the re-direction we hesitate, 
 the determinist abstracts this little element of 
 discontinuity from the superabundant con- 
 tinuities of the experience, and cancels in its 
 behalf all the connective characters with which 
 the latter is filled. Choice, for him, means 
 henceforward disconnection pure and simple, 
 something undetermined in advance in any 
 respect whatever, and a life of choices must 
 be a raving chaos, at no two moments of 
 which could we be treated as one and the 
 
 ' Loc. ciL, vol. Iviii, pp. 189, 188. 
 254 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 same man. If Nero were 'free' at the mo- 
 ment of ordering his mother's murder, Mr. 
 McTaggart' assures us that no one would 
 have the right at any other moment to call 
 him a bad man, for he would then be an 
 absolutely other Nero. 
 
 A polemic author ought not merely to de- 
 stroy his victim. He ought to try a bit to make 
 him feel his error — perhaps not enough to 
 convert him, but enough to give him a bad 
 conscience and to weaken the energy of his 
 defence. These violent caricatures of men's 
 beliefs arouse only contempt for the inca- 
 pacity of their authors to see the situations out 
 of which the problems grow. To treat the 
 negative character of one abstracted element as 
 annulling all the positive features with which 
 it coexists, is no way to change any actual 
 indeterminist's way of looking on the matter, 
 tho it make the gallery applaud. 
 
 Turn now to some criticisms of the ' will to 
 believe,' as another example of the vicious way 
 
 * Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 179. 
 255 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 in which abstraction is currently employed. 
 The right to believe in things for the truth of 
 which complete objective proof is yet lacking 
 is defended by those who apprehend certain 
 human situations in their concreteness. In 
 those situations the mind has alternatives be- 
 fore it so vast that the full evidence for either 
 branch is missing, and yet so significant that 
 simply to wait for proof, and to doubt while 
 waiting, might often in practical respects be 
 the same thing as weighing down the negative 
 side. Is life worth while at all ? Is there any 
 general meaning in all this cosmic weather.? 
 Is anything being permanently bought by all 
 this suffering.? Is there perhaps a transmun- 
 dane experience in Being, something corre- 
 sponding to a 'fourth dimension,' which, if we 
 had access to it, might patch up some of this 
 world's zerrissenheit and make things look 
 more rational than they at first appear.? Is 
 there a superhuman consciousness of which 
 our minds are parts, and from which inspira- 
 tion and help may come ? Such are the ques- 
 tions in which the right to take sides practi- 
 
 256 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 cally for yes or no is aflBrmed by some of us, 
 while others hold that this is methodologically 
 inadmissible, and summon us to die professing 
 ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every 
 one to refuse to believe. 
 
 I say nothing of the personal inconsistency 
 of some of these critics, whose printed works 
 furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to 
 believe, in spite of their denunciations of it as 
 a phrase and as a recommended thing. Mr. 
 McTaggart, whom I will once more take as 
 an example, is sure that 'reality is rational 
 and righteous' and 'destined sub specie tem- 
 poris to become perfectly good'; and his call- 
 ing this belief a result of necessary logic has 
 surely never deceived any reader as to its real 
 genesis in the gifted author's mind. Mankind 
 is made on too uniform a pattern for any of us 
 to escape successfully from acts of faith. We 
 have a lively vision of what a certain view of 
 the universe would mean for us. We kindle or 
 we shudder at the thought, and our feeling runs 
 through our whole logical nature and animates 
 its workings. It can't be that, we feel ; it must 
 
 257 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 be this. It must be what it ought to be, and it 
 ought to be this; and then we seek for every 
 reason, good or bad, to make this which so 
 deeply ought to be, seem objectively the prob- 
 able thing. We show the arguments against 
 it to be insufficient, so that it may be true ; we 
 represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's 
 loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of 
 syllogistic proof. We reinforce it by remem- 
 bering the enlargement of our world by music, 
 by thinking of the promises of sunsets and the 
 impulses from vernal woods. And the essence 
 of the whole experience, when the individual 
 swept through it says finally 'I believe,' is the 
 intense concreteness of his vision, the individ- 
 uality of the hypothesis before him, and the 
 complexity of the various concrete motives 
 and perceptions that issue in his final state. 
 
 But see now how the abstractionist treats 
 this rich and intricate vision that a certain 
 state of things must be true. He accuses the 
 believer of reasoning by the following syllo- 
 gism : — 
 
 All good desires must be fulfilled ; 
 
 258 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 The desire to believe this proposition is a 
 good desire; 
 
 Ergo, this proposition must be believed. 
 
 He substitutes this abstraction for the con- 
 crete state of mind of the believer, pins the 
 naked absurdity of it upon him, and easily 
 proves that any one who defends him must be 
 the greatest fool on earth. As if any real be- 
 liever ever thought in this preposterous way, 
 or as if any defender of the legitimacy of men's 
 concrete ways of concluding ever used the 
 abstract and general premise, 'All desires 
 must be fulfilled' ! Nevertheless, Mr. McTag- 
 gart solemnly and laboriously refutes the syl- 
 logism in sections 47 to 57 of the above-cited 
 book. He shows that there is no fixed link in 
 the dictionary between the abstract concepts 
 'desire,' 'goodness' and 'reality'; and he 
 ignores all the links which in the single con- 
 crete case the believer feels and perceives to 
 be there ! He adds : — 
 
 ' When the reality of a thing is uncertain, the 
 argument encourages us to suppose that our 
 approval of a thing can determine its reality. 
 
 259 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 And when this unhallowed link has once been 
 established, retribution overtakes us. For 
 when the reality of the thing is independently 
 certain, we [then] have to admit that the reality 
 of the thing should determine our approval of 
 that thing. I find it difficult to imagine a more 
 degraded position.' 
 
 One here feels tempted to quote ironically 
 Hegel's famous equation of the real with the 
 rational to his english disciple, who ends his 
 chapter with the heroic words : — 
 
 ' For those who do not pray, there remains 
 the resolve that, so far as their strength may 
 permit, neither the pains of death nor the pains 
 of life shall drive them to any comfort in that •• 
 which they hold to be false, or drive them 
 from any comfort [discomfort ?] in that which 
 they hold to be true.' 
 
 How can so ingenious-minded a writer fail to 
 see how far over the heads of the enemy all his 
 arrows pass ?. When Mr. McTaggart himself 
 believes that the universe is run by the dialectic 
 energy of the absolute idea, his insistent desire 
 to have a world of that sort is felt by him to be 
 
 260 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 no chance example of desire in general, but an 
 altogether peculiar insight-giving passion to 
 which, in this if in no other instance, he would 
 be stupid not to yield. He obeys its concrete 
 singularity, not the bare abstract feature in it 
 of being a 'desire.' His situation is as particu- 
 lar as that of an actress who resolves that it is 
 best for her to marry and leave the stage, of a 
 priest who becomes secular, of a politician who 
 abandons public life. What sensible man 
 would seek to refute the concrete decisions of 
 such persons by tracing them to abstract 
 premises, such as that 'all actresses must 
 marry,' 'all clergymen must be laymen,' 'all 
 ' politicians should resign their posts'.'' Yet 
 this type of refutation, absolutely unavailing 
 though it be for purposes of conversion, is 
 spread by Mr. McTaggart through many 
 pages of his book. For the aboundingness of 
 our real reasons he substitutes one narrow 
 point. For men's real probabilities he gives a 
 skeletonized abstraction which no man was 
 ever tempted to believe. 
 
 The abstraction in my next example is less 
 261 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 simple, but is quite as flimsy as a weapon of 
 attack. Empiricists think that truth in general 
 is distilled from single men's beliefs ; and the 
 so-called pragmatists 'go them one better' by 
 trying to define what it consists in when it 
 comes. It consists, I have elsewhere said, in 
 such a working on the part of the beliefs as 
 may bring the man into satisfactory relations 
 with objects to which these latter point. The 
 working is of course a concrete working in 
 the actual experience of human beings, among 
 their ideas, feelings, perceptions, beliefs and 
 acts, as well as among the physical things of 
 their environment, and the relations must be 
 understood as being possible as well as actual. 
 In the chapter on truth of my book Pragma- 
 tism I have taken pains to defend energetically 
 this view. Strange indeed have been the mis- 
 conceptions of it by its enemies, and many have 
 these latter been. Among the most formidable- 
 sounding onslaughts on the attempt to intro- 
 duce some concreteness into our notion of what 
 the truth of an idea may mean, is one that has 
 been raised in many quarters to the eflFect that 
 
 262 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 to make truth grow in any way out of human 
 opinion is but to reproduce that protagorean 
 doctrine that the individual man is ' the meas- 
 ure of all things,' which Plato in his immortal 
 dialogue, the Thseatetus, is unanimously said to 
 have laid away so comfortably in its grave two 
 thousand years ago. The two cleverest bran- 
 dishers of this objection to make truth concrete. 
 Professors Rickert and Miinsterberg, write in 
 German,* and 'relativismus' is the name they 
 give to the heresy which they endeavor to 
 uproot. 
 
 The first step in their campaign against 
 'relativismus' is entirely in the air. They 
 accuse relativists — and we pragmatists are 
 typical relativists — of being debarred by their 
 self-adopted principles, not only from the 
 privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, 
 of believing that these principles of their own 
 are truth impersonal and absolute, but even of 
 framing the abstract notion of such a truth, 
 in the pragmatic sense, of an ideal opinion in 
 
 ' Miinsterberg's book has just appeared in an english 
 version: The Eternal V allies, Boston, 1909. 
 
 263 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 which all men might agree, and which no man 
 should ever wish to change. Both charges fall 
 wide of their mark. I myself, as a pragmatist, 
 believe in my own account of truth as firmly as 
 any rationalist can possibly believe in his. 
 And I believe in it for the very reason that I 
 have the idea of truth which my learned adver- 
 saries contend that no pragmatist can frame. 
 I expect, namely, that the more fully men dis- 
 cuss and test my account, the more they will 
 agree that it fis, and the less will they desire a 
 change. I may of course be premature in this 
 confidence, and the glory of being truth final 
 and absolute may fall upon some later revision 
 and correction of my scheme, which latter 
 will then be judged untrue in just the measure 
 in which it departs from that finally satisfac- 
 tory formulation. To admit, as we pragmatists 
 do, that we are liable to correction (even tho 
 we may not expect it) involves the use on our 
 part of an ideal standard. Rationalists them- 
 selves are, as individuals, sometimes scepti- 
 cal enough to admit the abstract possibility of 
 
 their own present opinions being corrigible and 
 
 264 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 revisable to some degree, so the fact that 
 the mere notion of an absolute standard should 
 seem to them so important a thing to claim for 
 themselves and to deny to us is not easy to 
 explain. If, along with the notion of the stand- 
 ard, they could also claim its exclusive war- 
 rant for their own fulminations now, it would 
 be important to them indeed. But absolutists 
 like Rickert freely admit the sterility of the 
 notion, even in their own hands. Truth is 
 what we ought to believe, they say, even tho 
 no man ever did or shall believe it, and even 
 tho we have no way of getting at it save by 
 the usual empirical processes of testing our 
 opinions by one another and by facts. Prag- 
 matically, then, this part of the dispute is idle. 
 No relativist who ever actually walked the 
 earth ' has denied the constitutive character in 
 his own thinking of the notion of absolute 
 
 ' Of course the bugaboo creature called 'the sceptic' in the 
 
 logic-books, who dogmatically makes the statement that no 
 
 statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere 
 
 mechanical toy-target for the rationalist shooting-gallery — 
 
 hit him and he turns a summersault — yet he is the only sort 
 
 of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to 
 
 exist. 
 
 265 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 truth. What is challenged by relativists is the 
 pretence on any one's part to have found for 
 certain at any given moment what the shape 
 of that truth is. Since the better absolutists 
 agree in this, admitting that the proposition 
 'There is absolute truth' is the only absolute 
 truth of which we can be sure/ further de- 
 bate is practically unimportant, so we may 
 pass to their next charge. 
 
 It is in this charge that the vicious abstrac- 
 tionism becomes most apparent. The anti- 
 pragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, re- 
 fuses to give any account of what the words 
 may mean. For him they form a self-explana- 
 tory term. The pragmatist, on the contrary, 
 articulately defines their meaning. Truth ab- 
 
 ' Compare Rickert's Gegenstand der ErkerUniss, pp. 137, 
 138. Munsterberg's version of this first truth is that 'Es gibt 
 eine Welt,' — see his Philosophie der Werte, pp. 38 and 74. 
 And, after all, both these philosophers confess in the end that 
 the primal truth of which they consider our supposed denial 
 so irrational is not properly an insight at all, but a dogma 
 adopted by the will which any one who turns his back on duty 
 may disregard ! But if it all reverts to ' the will to believe,' 
 pragmatists have that privilege as well as their critics. 
 
 266 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 solute, he says, means an ideal set of formu- 
 lations towards which all opinions may in the 
 long run of experience be expected to converge. 
 In this definition of absolute truth he not only 
 postulates that there is a tendency to such con- 
 vergence of opinions, to such ultimate con- 
 sensus, but he postulates the other factors of 
 his definition equally, borrowing them by an- 
 ticipation from the true conclusions expected 
 to be reached. He postulates the existence of 
 opinions, he postulates the experience that 
 will sift them, and the consistency which that 
 experience will show. He justifies himself in 
 these assumptions by saying that they are not 
 postulates in the strict sense but simple in- 
 ductions from the past extended to the future 
 by analogy ; and he insists that human opin- 
 ion has already reached a pretty stable equi- 
 librium regarding them, and that if its future 
 development fails to alter them, the defini- 
 tion itself, with all its terms included, will 
 be part of the very absolute truth which it 
 defines. The hypothesis will, in short, have 
 worked successfully all round the circle and 
 
 267 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 proved self-corroborative, and the circle will 
 be closed. 
 
 The anti-pragmatist, however, immediately 
 falls foul of the word 'opinion' here, abstracts 
 it from the universe of life, and uses it as a 
 bare dictionary-substantive, to deny the rest 
 of the assumptions which it coexists withal. 
 The dictionary says that an opinion is 'what 
 some one thinks or believes.' This definition 
 leaves every one's opinion free to be autoge- 
 nous, or unrelated either to what any one else 
 may think or to what the truth may be. 
 Therefore, continue our abstractionists, we 
 must conceive it as essentially thus unrelated, 
 so that even were a billion men to sport the 
 same opinion, and only one man to differ, we 
 could admit no collateral circumstances which 
 might presumptively make it more probable 
 that he, not they, should be wrong. Truth, 
 they say, follows not the counting of noses, 
 nor is it only another name for a majority vote. 
 It is a relation that antedates experience, be- 
 tween our opinions and an independent some- 
 thing which the pragmatist account ignores, 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 a relation which, tho the opinions of individ- 
 uals should to all eternity deny it, would still 
 remain to qualify them as false. To talk of 
 opinions without referring to this independent 
 something, the anti-pragmatist assures us, is to 
 play Hamlet with Hamlet's part left out. 
 
 But when the pragmatist speaks of opin- 
 ions, does he mean any such insulated and un- 
 motived abstractions as are here supposed .^ 
 Of course not, he means men's opinions in the 
 flesh, as they have really formed themselves, 
 opinions surrounded by their causes and the 
 influences they obey and exert, and along with 
 the whole environment of social communica- 
 tion of which they are a part and out of which 
 they take their rise. Moreover the 'experience' 
 which the pragmatic definition postulates is 
 the independent something which the anti- 
 pragmatist accuses him of ignoring. Already 
 have men grown unanimous in the opinion 
 that such experience is 'of an independent 
 reality, the existence of which all opinions must 
 acknowledge, in order to be true. Already do 
 they agree that in the long run it is useless to 
 
 269 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 resist experience's pressure ; that the more of it 
 a man has, the better position he stands in, in 
 respect of truth; that some men, having had 
 more experience, are therefore better authori- 
 ties than others ; that some are also wiser by 
 nature and better able to interpret the experi- 
 ence they have had ; that it is one part of such 
 wisdom to compare notes, discuss, and fol- 
 low the opinion of our betters; and that the 
 more systematically and thoroughly such com- 
 parison and weighing of opinions is pursued, 
 the truer the opinions that survive are likely to 
 be. When the pragmatist talks of opinions, it 
 is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly 
 and interactingly and correlatively exist that 
 he has in mind; and when the anti-pragmatist 
 tries to floor him because the word ^opinion' 
 can also be taken abstractly and as if it had 
 no environment, he simply ignores the soil out 
 of which the whole discussion grows. His 
 weapons cut the air and strike no blow. No one 
 gets wounded in the war against caricatures 
 of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the 
 
 German onslaughts upon ' relativismus ' con- 
 
 270 
 
ABSTRACTIONISM 
 
 sists. Refuse to use the word ' opinion ' ab- 
 stractly, keep it in its real environment, and 
 the withers of pragmatism remain unwrung. 
 
 That men do exist who are 'opinionated,' in 
 the sense that their opinions are self-willed, is 
 unfortunately a fact that must be admitted, 
 no matter what one's notion of truth in gen- 
 eral may be. But that this fact should make it 
 impossible for truth to form itself authentically 
 out of the life of opinion is what no critic has 
 yet proved. Truth may well consist of certain 
 opinions, and does indeed consist of nothing 
 but opinions, tho not every opinion need be 
 true. No pragmatist needs to dogmatize about 
 the consensus of opinion in the future being 
 right — he need only postulate that it will 
 probably contain more of truth than any one's 
 opinion now. 
 
XIV 
 
 TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 Mr. Bertrand Russell's article entitled 
 'Transatlantic Truth, '^ has all the clearness, 
 dialectic subtlety, and wit which one expects 
 from his pen, but it entirely fails to hit the 
 right point of view for apprehending our posi- 
 tion. When, £»r instance, we say that a true 
 proposition is one the consequences of believ- 
 ing which are good, he assumes us to mean 
 that any one who believes a proposition to be 
 true must first have made out clearly that its 
 consequences are good, and that his belief must 
 primarily be in that fact, — an obvious absurd- 
 ity, for that fact is the deliverance of a new 
 proposition, quite different from the first one 
 and is, moreover, a fact usually very hard to 
 verify, it being 'far easier,' as Mr. Russell 
 justly says, 'to settle the plain question of 
 fact: "Have popes always been infallible .!*" 
 than to settle the question whether the eflFects 
 
 ' In the Albany Review for January, 1908. 
 272 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 of thinking them infalUble are on the whole 
 good.' 
 
 We affirm nothing as silly as Mr. Russell sup- 
 poses. Good consequences are not proposed by 
 us merely as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by 
 which truth's presence is habitually ascertained, 
 tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a 
 sign; they are proposed rather as the lurking 
 motive inside of every truth-claim, whether the 
 'trower' be conscious of such motive, or whether 
 he obey it blindly. They are proposed as the 
 causa existendi of our beliefs, not as their log- 
 ical cue or premise, arid still less as their ob- 
 jective deliverance or content. They assign the 
 only intelligible practical meaning to that differ- 
 ence in our beliefs which our habit of calling 
 them true or false comports. 
 
 No truth-claimer except the pragmatist him- 
 self need ever be aware of the part played in 
 his own mind by consequences, and he himself 
 is aware of it only abstractly and in general, 
 and may at any moment be quite oblivious of 
 it with respect to his own beliefs. 
 
 Mr. Russell next joins the army of those 
 273 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 who inform their readers that according to the 
 pragmatist definition of the word 'truth' the 
 belief that A exists may be 'true,' even when 
 A does not exist. This is the usual slander, 
 repeated to satiety by our critics. They forget 
 that in any concrete account of what is de- 
 noted by 'truth' in human life, the word can 
 only be used relatively to some particular 
 trower. Thus, I may hold it true that Shake- 
 spere wrote the plays that bear his name, and 
 may express my opinion to a critic. If the 
 critic be both a pragmatist and a baconian, he 
 will in his capacity of pragmatist see plainly 
 that the workings of my opinion, I being what 
 I am, make it perfectly true for me, while in 
 his capacity of baconian he still believes that 
 Shakespere never wrote the plays in question. 
 But most anti-pragmatist critics take the word 
 'truth' as something absolute, and easily play 
 on their reader's readiness to treat his own 
 truths as the absolute ones. If the reader whom 
 they address believes that A does not exist, while 
 we pragmatists show that those for whom the 
 belief that it exists works satisfactorily will al- 
 
 274 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 ways call it true, he easily sneers at the naivete 
 of our contention, for is not then the belief in 
 question 'true,' tho what it declares as fact 
 has, as the reader so well knows, no existence ? 
 Mr. Russell speaks of our statement as an ' at- 
 tempt to get rid of fact' and naturally enough 
 considers it ' afailure ' (p. 410). ' The old notion 
 of truth reappears, ' he adds — that notion being, 
 of course, that when a belief is true, its object 
 does exist. 
 
 It is, of course, hound to exist, on sound 
 pragmatic principles. Concepts signify con- 
 sequences. How is the world made different 
 for me by my conceiving an opinion of mine 
 under the concept 'true'.'' First, an object 
 must be findable there (or sure signs of such 
 an object must be found) which shall agree 
 with the opinion. Second, such an opinion 
 must not be contradicted by anything of which 
 I am aware. But in spite of the obvious prag- 
 matist requirement that when I have said truly 
 that something exists, it shall exist, the slander 
 which Mr. Russell repeats has gained the 
 widest currency. 
 
 275 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 Mr. Russell himself is far too witty and 
 athletic a ratiocinator simply to repeat the 
 slander dogmatically. Being nothing if not 
 mathematical and logical, he must prove the 
 accusation secundum artem, and convict us 
 not so much of error as of absurdity. I have 
 sincerely tried to follow the windings of his 
 mind in this procedure, but for the life of me 
 I can only see in it another example of what I 
 have called (above, p. 249) vicious abstrac- 
 tionism. The abstract world of mathematics 
 and pure logic is so native to Mr. Russell that 
 he thinks that we describers of the functions 
 of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathe- 
 matical terms and functions. A mathematical 
 term, as a, b, c, x, y, sin., log., is self-sufficient, 
 and terms of this sort, once equated, can be 
 substituted for one another in endless series 
 without error. Mr. Russell, and also Mr. Haw- 
 trey, of whom I shall speak presently, seem to 
 think that in our mouth also such terms as 
 'meaning,' 'truth,' 'belief,' 'object,' 'defini- 
 tion,' are self -sufficients with no context of 
 varying relation that might be further asked 
 
 276 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 about. Wliat a word means is expressed by its 
 definition, is n't it ? The definition claims to 
 be exact and adequate, does n't it ? Then it 
 can be substituted for the word — since the 
 two are identical — can't it ? Then two words 
 with the same definition can be substituted for 
 one another, n'est-ce pas R Likewise two defi- 
 nitions of the same word, nicht wahr, etc., etc., 
 till it will be indeed strange if you can't con- 
 vict some one of self-contradiction and ab- 
 surdity. 
 
 The particular application of this rigoristic 
 treatment to my own little account of truth as 
 working seems to be something like what fol- 
 lows. I say 'working' is what the 'truth' of 
 our ideas means, and call it a definition. But 
 since meanings and things meant, definitions 
 and things defined, are equivalent and inter- 
 changeable, and nothing extraneous to its defi- 
 nition can be meant when a term is used, it fol- 
 lows that whoso calls an idea true, and means by 
 that word that it works, cannot mean anything 
 else, can believe nothing but that it does work, 
 and in particular can neither imply nor allow 
 
 277 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 anything about its object or deliverance. 'Ac- 
 cording to the pragmatists,' Mr. Russell writes, 
 'to say "it is true that other people exist" 
 means " it is useful to believe that other peo- 
 ple exist." But if so, then these two phrases 
 are merely different words for the same pro- 
 position; therefore when I believe the one I 
 believe the other' (p. 400). [Logic, I may say 
 in passing, would seem to require Mr. Russell 
 to believe them both at once, but he ignores this 
 consequence, and considers that ' other people 
 exist' and 'it is useful to believe that they do 
 even if they don't,' must be identical and there- 
 fore substitutable propositions in the pragma- 
 tist mouth. J 
 
 But may not real terms, I now ask, have ac- 
 cidents not expressed in their definitions ? and 
 when a real value is finally substituted for the 
 result of an algebraic series of substituted 
 definitions, do not all these accidents creep 
 back? Beliefs have their objective 'content' 
 or 'deliverance' as well as their truth, and 
 truth has its implications as well as its work- 
 ings. If any one believe that other men exist, 
 
 278 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 it is both a content of his belief and an impli- 
 cation of its truth, that they should exist in 
 fact. Mr. Russell's logic would seem to ex- 
 clude, 'by definition,' all such accidents as 
 contents, implications, and associates, and 
 would represent us as translating all belief into 
 a sort of belief in pragmatism itself — of all 
 things ! If I say that a speech is eloquent, and 
 explain 'eloquent' as meaning the power to 
 work in certain ways upon the audience ; or if 
 I say a book is original, and define ' original ' 
 to mean differing from other books, Russell's 
 logic, if I follow it at all, would seem to doom 
 me to agreeing that the speech is about elo- 
 quence, and the book about other books. When 
 I call a belief true, and define its truth to mean 
 its workings, I certainly do not mean that the 
 belief is a belief about the workings. It is a 
 belief about the object, and I who talk about 
 the workings am a different subject, with a 
 different universe of discourse, from that of 
 the believer of whose concrete thinking I pro- 
 fess to give an account. 
 
 The social proposition 'other men exist' 
 279 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 and the pragmatist proposition ' it is expedient 
 to believe that other men exist' come from dif- 
 ferent universes of discourse. One can beheve 
 the second without being logically compelled 
 to believe the first; one can believe the first 
 without having ever heard of the second; or 
 one can believe them both. The first expresses 
 the object of a belief, the second tells of one 
 condition of the belief's power to maintain it- 
 self. There is no identity of any kind, save the 
 term 'other men' which they contain in com- 
 mon, in the two propositions; and to treat 
 them as mutually substitutable, or to insist that 
 we shall do so, is to give up dealing with reali- 
 ties altogether. 
 
 Mr. Ralph Hawtrey, who seems also to serve 
 under the banner of abstractionist logic, con- 
 victs us pragmatists of absurdity by argu- 
 ments similar to Mr. Russell's.^ 
 
 As a favor to us and for the sake of the ar- 
 gument, he abandons the word 'true' to our 
 fury, allowing it to mean nothing but the fact 
 
 ' See The New Quarterly, for March, 1908. 
 280 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 that certain beliefs are expedient ; and he uses 
 the word 'correctness' (as Mr. Pratt uses the 
 word 'trueness') to designate a fact, not about 
 the belief, but about the belief's object, namely 
 that it is as the belief declares it. ' When there- 
 fore,' he writes, 'I say it is correct to say that 
 Caesar is dead, I mean " Caesar is dead." This 
 must be regarded as the definition of correct- 
 ness.' And Mr. Hawtrey then goes on to de- 
 molish me by the conflict of the definitions. 
 What is 'true' for the pragmatist cannot be 
 what is 'correct,' he says, 'for the definitions 
 are not logically interchangeable; or if we in- 
 terchange them, we reach the tautology : 
 " Caesar is dead" means "it is expedient to be- 
 lieve that Caesar is dead." But what is it expe- 
 dient to believe .'' Why, " that Caesar is dead." ' 
 A precious definition indeed of * Caesar is 
 dead.' 
 
 Mr. Hawtrey's conclusion would seem to be 
 that the pragmatic definition of the truth of a 
 belief in no way implies — what .'' — that the 
 believer shall believe in his own belief's de- 
 liverance ? — or that the pragmatist who is 
 
 281 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 talking about him shall believe in that deliver- 
 ance? The two cases are quite different. For 
 the believer, Caesar must of course really ex- 
 ist ; for the pragmatist critic he need not, for 
 the pragmatic deliverance belongs, as I have 
 just said, to another universe of discourse al- 
 together. When one argues by substituting 
 definition for definition, one needs to stay in 
 the same universe. 
 
 The great shifting of universes in this dis- 
 cussion occurs when we carry the word 'truth' 
 from the subjective into the objective realm, 
 applying it sometimes to a property of opin- 
 ions, sometimes to the facts which the opin- 
 ions assert. A number of writers, as Mr. Rus- 
 sell himself, Mr. G. E. Moore, and others, 
 favor the unlucky word 'proposition,' which 
 seems expressly invented to foster this confu- 
 sion, for they speak of truth as a property of 
 'propositions.' But in naming propositions it 
 is almost impossible not to use the word ' that' 
 That Caesar is dead, that virtue is its own re- 
 ward, are propositions. 
 
 I do riot say that for certain logical purposes 
 282 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 it may not be useful to treat propositions as 
 absolute entities, with truth or falsehood inside 
 of them respectively, or to make of a complex 
 like 'that-Csesar-is-dead' a single term and 
 call it a 'truth.' But the 'that' here has the 
 extremely convenient ambiguity for those who 
 wish to make trouble for us pragmatists, that 
 sometimes it means the fact that, and some- 
 times the belief that, Csesar is no longer living. 
 When I then call the belief true, I am told that 
 the truth means the fact ; when I claim the fact 
 also, I am told that my definition has excluded 
 the fact, being a definition only of a certain 
 peculiarity in the belief — so that in the end 
 I have no truth to talk about left in my 
 possession. 
 
 The only remedy for this intolerable am- 
 biguity is, it seems to me, to stick to terms con- 
 sistently. 'Reality,' 'idea' or 'belief,' and the 
 'truth of -the idea or belief,' which are the 
 terms I have consistently held to, seem to be 
 free from all objection. 
 
 Whoever takes terms abstracted from all 
 their natural settings, identifies them with 
 
 283 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 definitions, and treats the latter more algehraico, 
 not only risks mixing universes, but risks 
 fallacies which the man in the street easily 
 detects. To prove 'by definition' that the 
 statement ' Caesar exists ' is identical with a 
 statement about 'expediency' because the one 
 statement is ' true' and the other is about ' true 
 statements,' is like proving that an omnibus is a 
 boat because both are vehicles. A horse may be 
 defined as a beast that walks on the nails of his 
 middle digits. Whenever we see a horse we see 
 such a beast, just as whenever we believe a 
 * truth' we believe something expedient. Messrs. 
 Russell and Hawtrey, if they followed their anti- 
 pragmatist logic, would have to say here that 
 we see thM it is such a beast, a fact which 
 notoriously no one sees who is not a compar- 
 ative anatomist. 
 
 It almost reconciles one to being no logician 
 that one thereby escapes so much abstraction- 
 ism. Abstractionism of the worst sort dogs 
 Mr. Russell in his own trials to tell positively 
 what the word 'truth' means. In the third of 
 his articles on Meinong, in Mind, vol. xiii, 
 
 284 
 
TWO ENGLISH CRITICS 
 
 p. 509 (1904), he attempts this feat by limiting 
 the discussion to three terms only, a proposi- 
 tion, its content, and an object, abstracting 
 from the whole context of associated realities 
 in which such terms are found in every case of 
 actual knowing. He puts the terms, thus taken 
 in a vacuum, and made into bare logical en- 
 tities, through every possible permutation and 
 combination, tortures them on the rack until 
 nothing is left of them, and after all this logical 
 gymnastic, comes out with the following por- 
 tentous conclusion as what he believes to be 
 ' the correct view : that there is no problem at 
 all in truth and falsehood, that some proposi- 
 tions are true and some false, just as some 
 roses are red and some white, that belief is a 
 certain attitude towards propositions, which 
 is called knowledge when they are true, error 
 when they are false' — and he seems to think 
 that when once this insight is reached the ques- 
 tion mav be considered closed forever! 
 
 In spite of my admiration of Mr. Russell's 
 analytic powers, I wish, after reading such an 
 article, that pragmatism, even had it no other 
 
 285 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 function, might result in making him and other 
 similarly gifted men ashamed of having used 
 such powers in such abstraction from reality. 
 Pragmatism saves us at any rate from such 
 diseased abstractionism as those pages show. 
 
 P. S. Since the foregoing rejoinder was writ- 
 ten an article on Pragmatism which I believe 
 to be by Mr. Russell has appeared in the Edin- 
 burgh Review for April, 1909. As far as his dis- 
 cussion of the truth-problem goes, altho he has 
 evidently taken great pains to be fair, it seems 
 to me that he has in no essential respect im- 
 proved upon his former arguments. I will 
 therefore add nothing further, but simply refer 
 readers who may be curious to pp. 272-280 
 of the said article. 
 
XV 
 
 A DIALOGUE 
 
 After correcting the proofs of all that pre- 
 cedes I imagine a residual state of mind on the 
 part of my reader which may still keep him 
 unconvinced, and which it may be my duty to 
 try at least to dispel. I can perhaps be briefer 
 if I put what I have to say in dialogue form. 
 Let then the anti-pragmatist begin : — 
 
 Anti-Pragmatist: — You say that the truth 
 of an idea is constituted by its workings. 
 Now suppose a certain state of facts, facts 
 for example of antediluvian planetary history, 
 concerning which the question may be asked : 
 'Shall the truth about them ever be known.''' 
 And suppose (leaving the hypothesis of an 
 omniscient absolute out of the account) that 
 we assume that the truth is never to be known. 
 I ask you now, brother pragmatist, whether 
 according to you there can be said to be any 
 truth at all about such a state of facts. Is 
 
 287 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 there a truth, or is there not a truth, in 
 cases where at any rate it never comes to 
 be known ? 
 
 Pragmatist: — Why do you ask me such a 
 question ? 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Because I think it puts you 
 in a bad dilemma. 
 
 Prag.: — How so ? 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Why, because if on the one 
 hand you elect to say that there is a truth, you 
 thereby surrender your whole pragmatist the- 
 ory. According to that theory, truth requires 
 ideas and workings to constitute it ; but in the 
 present instance there is supposed to be no 
 knower, and consequently neither ideas nor 
 workings can exist. What then remains for 
 you to make your truth oi? 
 
 Prag.: — Do you wish, like so many of 
 my enemies, to force me to make the truth 
 out of the reality itself.-* I cannot: the truth 
 is something known, thought or said about 
 the reality, and consequently numerically 
 additional to it. But probably your intent 
 is something different; so before I say 
 
 288 
 
A DIALOGUE 
 
 which horn of your dilemma I choose, I ask 
 you to let me hear what the other horn 
 may be. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — The other horn is this, that 
 if you elect to say that there is no truth under 
 the conditions assumed, because there are no 
 ideas or workings, then you fly in the face 
 of common sense. Does n't common sense 
 believe that every state of facts must in the 
 nature of things be truly statable in some kind 
 of a proposition, even tho in point of fact the 
 proposition should never be propounded by 
 a living soul .'' 
 
 Prag.: — Unquestionably common sense be- 
 lieves this, and so do I. There have been 
 innumerable events in the history of our planet 
 of which nobody ever has been or ever will be 
 able to give an account, yet of which it can 
 already be said abstractly that only one sort 
 of possible account can ever be true. The truth 
 about any such event is thus already generically 
 predetermined by the event's nature ; and one 
 may accordingly say with a perfectly good 
 conscience that it virtually pre-exists. Com- 
 
 289 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 mon sense is thus right in its instinctive con- 
 tention. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Is this then the horn of the 
 dilemma which you stand for? Do you say 
 that there is a truth even in cases where it shall 
 never be known? 
 
 Prag.: — Indeed I do, provided you let me 
 hold consistently to my own conception of 
 truth, and do not ask me to abandon it for 
 something which I find impossible to compre- 
 hend. — You also believe, do you not, that there 
 is a truth, even in cases where it never shall be 
 known ? 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — I do indeed believe so. 
 
 Prag.: — Pray then inform me in what, ac- 
 cording to you, this truth regarding the un- 
 known consists. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Consists ? — pray what do 
 you mean by ' consists' ? It consists in nothing 
 but itself, or more properly speaking it has 
 neither consistence nor existence, it obtains, 
 it holds. 
 
 Prag.: — Well, what relation does it bear to 
 the reality of which it holds ? 
 
 290 
 
A DIALOGUE 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Row do you mean, 'what 
 relation' ? It holds of it, of course; it knows 
 it, it represents it. 
 
 Prag.: — Who knows it? What represents 
 it? 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — The truth does; the truth 
 knows it; or rather not exactly that, but any 
 one knows it who possesses the truth. Any 
 true idea of the reality represents the truth 
 concerning it. 
 
 Prag.: — But I thought that we had agreed 
 that no knower of it, nor any idea representing 
 it was to be supposed. 
 
 Anti-Prag. : — Sure enough ! 
 
 Prag.: — Then I beg you again to tell me 
 in what this truth consists, all by itself, this 
 tertium quid intermediate between the facts 
 per se, on the one hand, and all knowledge of 
 them, actual or potential, on the other. What 
 is the shape of it in this third estate ? Of what 
 stuff, mental, physical, or ' epistemological,' 
 is it built ? What metaphysical region of reality 
 does it inhabit? 
 
 Anti-Prag. : — What absurd questions ! Is n't 
 291 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 it enough to say that it is true that the facts 
 are so-and-so, and false that they are other- 
 wise? 
 
 Prag. : — 'It ' is true that the facts are so-and- 
 so — I won't yield to the temptation of asking 
 you what is true; but I do ask you whether 
 your phrase that 'it is true that' the facts are 
 so-and-so really means anything really addi- 
 tional to the bare being so-and-so of the facts 
 themselves. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — It seems to mean more than 
 the bare being of the facts. It is a sort of men- 
 tal equivalent for them, their epistemological 
 function, their value in noetic terms. 
 
 Prag.: — A sort of spiritual double or ghost 
 of them, apparently! If so, may I ask you 
 where this truth is found. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Where .? where? There is no 
 'where' — it simply obtains, absolutely obtains. 
 
 Prag.: — Not in any one's mind? 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — No, for we agreed that no 
 actual knower of the truth should be assumed. 
 
 Prag.: — No actual kijower, I agree. But 
 are you sure that no notion of a potential or 
 
 292 
 
A DIALOGUE 
 
 ideal knower has anything to do with forming 
 this strangely elusive idea of the truth of the 
 facts in your mind ? 
 
 Anti-Pmg.: — Of course if there be a truth 
 concerning the facts, that truth is what the ideal 
 knower would know. To that extent you can't 
 keep the notion of it and the notion of him 
 separate. But it is not him first and then it; 
 it is it first and then him, in my opinion. 
 
 Prag.: — But you still leave me terribly puz- 
 zled as to the status of this so-called truth, 
 hanging as it does between earth and heaven, 
 between reality and knowledge, grounded in 
 the reality, yet numerically additional to it, and 
 at the same time antecedent to any knower's 
 opinion and entirely independent thereof. Is 
 it as independent of the knower as you suppose ? 
 It looks to me terribly dubious, as if it might be 
 only another name for a potential as distin- 
 guished from an actual knowledge of the real- 
 ity. Isn't your truth, after all, simply what 
 any successful knower would have to know in 
 case he existed? And in a universe where no 
 knowers were even conceivable would any 
 
 293 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 truth about the facts there as something nu- 
 merically distinguishable from the facts them- 
 selves, find a place to exist in ? To me such 
 truth would not only be non-existent, it would 
 be unimaginable, inconceivable. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — But I thought you said a 
 while ago that there is a truth of past events, 
 even tho no one shall ever know it. 
 
 Prog.: — Yes, but you must remember that 
 I also stipulated for permission to define the 
 word in my own fashion. The truth of an 
 event, past, present, or future, is for me only 
 another name for the fact that if the event ever 
 does get known, the nature of the knowledge 
 is already to some degree predetermined. 
 The truth which precedes actual knowledge 
 of a fact means only what any possible knower 
 of the fact will eventually find himself necessi- 
 tated to believe about it. He must believe some- 
 thing that will bring him into satisfactory rela- 
 tions with it, that will prove a decent mental 
 substitute for it. What this something may be 
 is of course partly fixed already by the nature of 
 the fact and by the sphere of its associations. 
 
 294 
 
A DIALOGUE 
 
 This seems to me all that you can clearly 
 mean when you say that truth pre-exists to 
 knowledge. It is knowledge anticipated, know- 
 ledge in the form of possibility merely. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — But what does the know- 
 ledge know when it comes .'' Does n't it know 
 the truth ? And, if so, must n't the truth be 
 distinct from either the fact or the knowledge ? 
 
 Prag. : — It seems to me that what the know- 
 ledge knows is the fact itself, the event, or 
 whatever the reality may be. Where you see 
 three distinct entities in the field, the reality, 
 the knowing, and the truth, I see only two. 
 Moreover, I can see what each of my two en- 
 tities is Icnown-as, but when I ask myself what 
 your third entity, the truth, is known-as, I can 
 find nothing distinct from the reality on the 
 one hand, and the ways in which it may be 
 known on the other. Are you not probably 
 misled by common language, which has found 
 it convenient to introduce a hybrid name, 
 meaning sometimes a kind of knowing and 
 sometimes a reality known, to apply to either 
 of these things interchangeably .^ And has 
 
 295 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 philosophy anything to gain by perpetuating 
 and consecrating the ambiguity? If you call 
 the object of knowledge ' reality,' and call the 
 manner of its being cognized ' truth,' cognized 
 moreover on particular occasions, and vari- 
 ously, by particular human beings who have 
 their various businesses with it, and if you hold 
 consistently to this nomenclature, it seems to 
 me that you escape all sorts of trouble. 
 
 Anti-Prag.: — Do you mean that you think 
 you escape from my dilemma ? 
 
 Prag.: — Assuredly I escape; for if truth 
 and knowledge are terms correlative and in- 
 terdependent, as I maintain they are, then 
 wherever knowledge is conceivable truth is con- 
 ceivable, wherever knowledge is possible truth 
 is possible, wherever knowledge is actual 
 truth is actual. Therefore when you point 
 your first horn at me, I think of truth actual, 
 and say it does n't exist. It does n't ; for by 
 hypothesis there is no knower, no ideas, no 
 workings. I agree, however, that truth possibb 
 or virtual might exist, for a knower might pos- 
 sibly be brought to birth ; and truth conceivable 
 
 296 
 
A DIALOGUE 
 
 certainly exists, for, abstractly taken, there is 
 nothing in the nature of antediluvian events 
 that should make the application of knowledge 
 to them inconceivable. Therefore when you 
 try to impale me on your second horn, I think 
 of the truth in question as a mere abstract 
 possibility, so I say it does exist, and side with 
 common sense. 
 
 Do not these distinctions rightly relieve me 
 from embarrassment.? And don't you think 
 it might help you to make them yourself? 
 
 Anti-Prag. : — Never ! — so avaunt with your 
 abominable hair-splitting and sophistry ! Truth 
 is truth; and never will I degrade it by iden- 
 tifying it with low pragmatic particulars in the 
 way you propose. 
 
 Prag.: — Well, my dear antagonist, I hardly 
 hoped to convert an eminent intellectualist 
 and logician like you ; so enjoy, as long as you 
 live, your own ineffable conception. Perhaps 
 the rising generation will grow up more ac- 
 customed than you are to that concrete and 
 empirical interpretation of terms in which 
 the pragmatic method consists. Perhaps they 
 
 297 
 
THE MEANING OF TRUTH 
 
 may then wonder how so harmless and natu- 
 ral an account of truth as mine could have 
 found such difficulty in entering the minds of 
 men far more intelligent than I can ever hope 
 to become, but wedded by education and tra- 
 dition to the abstractionist manner of thought. 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A