THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 PROFESSOR JOHN ELOF BOODIN 
 
 MEMORIAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 COLLECTION 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 C. 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL 
 
 AN EXPOSITION OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH 
 
 PRECEDED BY A CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM 
 AND AN APPRECIATION OF ITS LEADER 
 
 BY 
 
 PAUL CARUS 
 
 Tlavruv fiirpov a 
 
 aM? av6p&7rov ftirpov TO "Ev ncuflav. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 LONDON AGENTS 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. 
 1911 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUB. CO. 
 1911
 
 B 
 
 83L2, 
 CV 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 Truth I 
 
 PRAGMATISM. 
 
 The Meaning of the Word 4 
 
 The Pragmatist's Conception of Truth 5 
 
 The Useful Lie 7 
 
 Truth Compared to Cash Value 8 
 
 The Objective Significance of Truth n 
 
 Truth Made or Found ? 12 
 
 Oneness and Reason 13 
 
 The Mind of the Universe 15 
 
 Time and Space 17 
 
 Love of Facts and Mysticism 19 
 
 Misunderstood 21 
 
 Temperamental Philosophy 25 
 
 The Plasticity of Truth 27 
 
 Ptolemy and Copernicus 28 
 
 Euclid and Aristotle 30 
 
 Materialism and Spiritualism 31 
 
 Religious Problems 33 
 
 Mr. Charles S. Peirce's Tychism 36 
 
 The Enemies of Pragmatism 37 
 
 The Philosophy of Tolerance 40 
 
 The Leader of the Pragmatist Movement 42 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 
 
 The Importance of Personal Equation 46 
 
 Personal Equation at Fault 48 
 
 The Elimination of the Subjective Element 49 
 
 1821622 ; 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 631
 
 IV TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 The Objectivity of Science 51 
 
 The Supremacy of the Intellect 52 
 
 Inconsistency in Definition 53 
 
 Truth as an Idea that Works Satisfactorily 55 
 
 A Lie that Works Satisfactorily 56 
 
 Truth as Objects Believed In 57 
 
 The Fixation of Belief 58 
 
 Truth as a Feeling 60 
 
 How a Lie Develops Into a Truth 61 
 
 An Old Truth Carried Too Far 63 
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 
 
 A Pluralistic View of Science 65 
 
 Method the Essential Feature of Science 66 
 
 Theories and Truths 68 
 
 The Law of Causation 70 
 
 Points of Reference 72 
 
 The Stability of Truth 73 
 
 System the Aim of Science 74 
 
 Stating a Truth and Telling the Truth 76 
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 
 
 The Word "Truth" in European Languages 78 
 
 The Hebrew, the Egyptian and the Chinese Notions of Truth. . 81 
 
 A Description of the Nature of Truth 84 
 
 The Philosophers of Classical Antiquity 86 
 
 Christianity and the Doctrine of Two Truths 89 
 
 Modern Thinkers 92 
 
 Truth and Mind 96 
 
 Sense Perceptions and Hallucinations 98 
 
 Universals and Their Correlates 100 
 
 The Oneness of All Truths 104 
 
 CONCLUSION no 
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 
 
 A German Critic of Pragmatism 113 
 
 Pragmatism, a Teleological View 115 
 
 Utility as a Criterion of Truth 117 
 
 Protagoras Redivivus 1 18 
 
 The Supremacy of the Will 119
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. V 
 
 PAGl 
 
 Kant's Opinion of Pragmatism 120 
 
 Contrasts Reconciled 121 
 
 Professor Stein on Pragmatism 123 
 
 Critics of Pragmatism Rebuked 126 
 
 Science Superseded 128 
 
 Often Wrong But Never Dull 129
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 WHO WITH THE BEST INTENTIONS PUT 
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL 
 
 AND BY HIS VERY ERRORS ADVANCED THE CAUSE OF TRUTH 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
 
 IN FRIENDLY REMEMBRANCE OF COURTESIES 
 
 EXCHANGED IN SPITE OF RADICAL 
 
 DIFFERENCE OF OPINION
 
 A PROLOGUE ON TRUTH.* 
 
 Hdvrwv perpov 
 
 d\X' avOpu-rrov p.irpov rt> "Ev Kal Hav. 
 
 TRULY, the measure of all things is Man ; 
 But Man is measured by the One and All. 
 
 Man is a microcosm, and he grows 
 Unto the stature of full manhood, only 
 When to the One and All his soul responds. 
 There is a gauge that measures man, a norm 
 By which the truth that's in him must be tested. 
 'T is the Eternal in the change of time, 
 It is the Law, the Uniformity, 
 It is the One in this great All, 't is God I 
 
 Mind you, 't is Man, not men, that measures things; 
 Not I, nor you, nor any other being; 
 Man only, Man alone. 
 
 And what is Man ? 
 
 Man is the type of Mankind, men's ideal; 
 Yea, men's ideal! 
 
 Are ideals sham? 
 
 Deem ye that only things concrete are true ? 
 O, learn to prize the power of ideals 
 Which more efficient is than Nature's forces 
 And stronger far than footpound-energy. 
 
 * Reprinted from The Monist, Jan. 1910.
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Ideals are the factors of man's life ; 
 They are no vain illusions, they are real, 
 Nay, super real. Yea, they are Man's guides ; 
 And they, like guardian angels, help him find 
 The pre-determined goal of cosmic life. 
 
 Man, the ideal, is no transient thing : 
 He is the cosmic law assuming flesh, 
 The norm of being in a creature's garb, 
 An incarnation of the Deity, 
 
 Of that All-One which shapes and moulds the world, 
 Which manifests itself in motes and stars, 
 And thrills through all their uniformities. 
 'T is Man, not men, in whom the glory dwells 
 Of the great One in All, the Man of Truth. 
 
 "Truth changes," sayest thou, and thou art right, 
 E'en man himself is changing with his truth. 
 Both change! for nothing is at rest 
 In this corporeal world of flux. And yet 
 Things transient mirror the Etern which always 
 Keeps faith unto itself and its own law. 
 
 Truth changes as our knowledge broader grows, 
 As science gains in depth and definition; 
 But verily the new and broader Truth 
 Will never call the older Truth a lie, 
 For lo! it is the selfsame older Truth 
 As from a higher standpoint it appears, 
 And all the truths are ultimately one. 
 
 Truth is beheld by mind, and not by sense. 
 'T is not a thing which merchants keep in store, 
 'T is no commodity which we possess. 
 Truth is a superhuman power, and
 
 A PROLOGUE ON TRUTH. 3 
 
 From generation unto generation 
 
 Truth marches on, unfolding and revealing 
 
 The wondrous mysteries of cosmic life. 
 
 Truth is too great that ever it be final. 
 Knowledge expandeth, and the work of science 
 Can never be completed, never finished. 
 One goal attained entails still further tasks, 
 And so before our raptured vision stretches 
 The promised land of vistas infinite. 
 
 Truth is no child of human superstition; 
 It is no idol, nor an errant light, 
 'T is not an ignis fatuus, no comet. 
 Truth is God's clearest, highest revelation. 
 In life Truth serves us as our guiding star, 
 And like the sailor's compass on high seas. 
 It draws us gently onward, step by step, 
 With duly well prescribed approximations, 
 On its own path in definite direction. 
 
 Truth is life's factor and determinant, 
 And we are workers in Truth's noble cause. 
 We yearn for Truth, we need its light ; and Truth 
 Enters our Soul; it takes abode in us, 
 And consecrates our lives to higher service. 
 Not we own Truth, 't is Truth that owneth us. 
 
 Search for the Truth ! Truth's problems are not vain. 
 Love thou the Truth ! trust Truth, and live the Truth ! 
 Walk on Truth's path and Truth will guide thee right.
 
 PRAGMATISM.* 
 
 THE MEANING OF THE WORD. 
 
 PRAGMATISM is a new philosophical movement, but 
 the word "pragmatic" 1 from which the term is de- 
 rived has been in existence for more than two thousand 
 years. In ancient Greece it meant "businesslike, practical, 
 or ready for action" ; it was applied to lawyers, statesmen 
 and soldiers. In Rome the adjective practicus became a 
 noun and denoted an attorney or legal adviser, and a man 
 who gave points to orators ; we might translate it by "prac- 
 titioner of law." An imperial edict was called pragmatica 
 jussio, and a decree in state affairs that should be regarded 
 as inviolate, pragmatica sanctio. The best known prag- 
 matic sanction of history is the pact which Emperor 
 Charles VI made with the European powers to recognize 
 the succession of his daughter Maria Theresa to the throne 
 of all the possessions of the house of Hapsburg, in the 
 absence of male heirs. 
 
 In philosophical language Kant used the word "prag- 
 matic" in the sense of "prudent," meaning thereby a mode 
 of action by which a purpose might be attained. 
 
 In the middle of the nineteenth century it was cus- 
 tomary in Germany to speak of pragmatic historiography* 
 by which term was meant a description of historic events 
 in their causal connection, and under Bismarck's regime 
 
 * Republished from The Monist, July, 1908. 
 
 1 Pragmatische Geschichtschreibung.
 
 PRAGMATISM. 5 
 
 "pragmatic politics" denoted a policy which was bent on 
 success without regard to principle. 
 
 THE PRAGMATIST'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH. 
 
 Pragmatism in philosophy is of recent date and what 
 it means is best stated in the words of the late Professor 
 William James of Harvard, who says on page 46 of his 
 work on Pragmatism: 3 
 
 "The term is derived from the same Greek word wpay/ua, mean- 
 ing action, from which our words 'practice' and 'practical' come. 
 It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 
 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' in the 
 Popular Science Monthly for January of that year Mr. Peirce, 
 after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said 
 that, to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what 
 conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole sig- 
 nificance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought- 
 distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine 
 as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To 
 attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need 
 only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object 
 may involve what sensations we are to expect from it, and what 
 reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether 
 immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of 
 the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all." 
 
 The statement of Mr. Charles S. Peirce, "that our 
 beliefs are really rules for action," is an explanation, not a 
 principle, and the explanation is made so that we may 
 rightly understand the nature of belief. Beliefs are never 
 held at random; they serve a purpose and the purpose of 
 a belief is ultimately to insure a definite line of conduct. 
 It is not probable that any one would take exception to 
 this. Professor James, however, goes beyond the original 
 meaning of the term by changing the statement of fact into 
 a principle, and he applies it to his conception of truth. 
 
 ' New York : Longmans, Green & Co., 19x17.
 
 6 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Let us see what he makes of it. We read on page 76 an 
 italicized definition of truth: 
 
 "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good 
 in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons." 
 
 Professor James seems to outdo Bentham's utilitarian- 
 ism. He continues : 
 
 "If there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowl- 
 edge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the 
 only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and 
 precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or be- 
 come a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun 
 truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only 
 agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and our 
 tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or 
 agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they 
 are also helpful in life's practical struggles." 
 
 We grant that in the long run truth will always be the 
 best, but for that reason we deem it rash to identify "the 
 true" with "whatever proves itself to be good in the way 
 of belief." Certain foods are agreeable to our taste and 
 good for our teeth, but obnoxious to our health; can we 
 then identify what is wholesome with what is palatable? 
 So there may be certain ideas "good for definite, assignable 
 reasons," but they need not on that account be true. 
 
 Professor James's definition of truth is reiterated in 
 various ways. On page 77 we are told: 
 
 " 'What would be better for us to believe' ! This sounds very 
 like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we 
 ought to believe' : and in that definition none of you would find any 
 oddity. 
 
 "Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe ? 
 And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what 
 is true for us, permanently apart? Pragmatism says no, and I 
 fully agree with her." 
 
 In the chapter entitled "The Action of Truth" we read 
 on p. 20 1 another italicized definition of the same kind:
 
 PRAGMATISM. 
 
 "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corrobo- 
 rate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. 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 USEFUL LIE. 
 
 Science rests upon the supposition that a statement once 
 actually proved to be true remains true, while utility is sub- 
 ject to change. Professor James says of truth (p. 204) : 
 
 "You can say of it then either that 'it is useful because it is 
 true' or that 'it is true because it is useful/ Both these phrases 
 mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets 
 fulfilled and can be verified." 
 
 What of a useful lie ? It accomplishes its purpose, for 
 it will bring help in a dilemma. The Cynic's Calendar thus 
 substitutes the word "lie" in the familiar proverb, saying, 
 "A lie in time saves nine." Perhaps the liar knows that 
 a lie goes only a little way, but it may go far enough to 
 suit his purpose. And what of that villainous maxim to 
 force a belief upon people who are unwilling to accept it? 
 Has not the Inquisition succeeded in keeping Spain under 
 the influence of Rome down to our own day ? Was not the 
 night of Bartholomew a success ? The Huguenots have been 
 swept out of France and are even to-day but a small minor- 
 ity. Was not the Reformation suppressed by foul means 
 in Bohemia, when at the time of the Hussite movement 
 it seemed to be lost to the Church ? Must we be reconciled 
 to a pragmatic policy of this kind because it works within 
 certain limits ? It certainly paid those who acted upon this 
 pragmatic conception of truth. Would not Professor 
 James himself demur at this? At least I hope he would 
 be sufficiently inconsistent, not to accept the consequences 
 of his definitions. 
 
 Even as matters are, judging from his own statements, 
 he goes very far in his practical admissions, and he claims
 
 8 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 that for the very plasticity of its view of truth, pragmatism 
 is at a great advantage in the religious field. If one finds 
 it profitable to believe in God, very well, to him the exist- 
 ence of God is a truth. If another finds a scientific satis- 
 faction in the non-existence of God, to him atheism is true. 
 
 TRUTH COMPARED TO CASH VALUE. 
 
 Professor James speaks of his definitions of truth as 
 "the truth's cash value in experiential terms" (p. 200) ; 
 and years ago, in 1888, in an article entitled "Cognition, 
 Knowledge and Truth," I used the very same expression : 4 
 "Abstract thoughts do not on the one hand represent ab- 
 solute existences, nor on the other are they mere air cas- 
 tles ; they are built upon the solid ground of reality. The 
 facts of nature are specie and our abstract thoughts are 
 bills which serve to economize the process of an exchange 
 of thought. We must know the exact value in specie of 
 every bill which is in our possession. And if the values 
 of our abstract ideas are not ultimately founded upon the 
 reality of positive facts, they are like bills or drafts for the 
 payment of which there is no money in the bank." 
 
 This looks like an agreement between his views and 
 my own, but there seems to be an important difference, 
 for according to Professor James, ideas are not true or 
 untrue, they become true. He says (p. 201): 
 
 "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in 
 it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by 
 events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process : the process namely 
 of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process 
 of its valid-ation." 
 
 This will be a puzzle to the reader until he understands 
 the statement in the light of another passage. Professor 
 James means that an idea must be assimilated in order to 
 
 * First published in The Open Court, Vol. II, p. 1458, and reprinted in 
 Fundamental Problems, p. 17-18.
 
 PRAGMATISM. 9 
 
 become true to us. As a psychologist he studies the 
 origin of a conviction and identifies conviction with truth. 
 He says : 
 
 "A new opinion counts as 'true' just in proportion as it gratifies 
 the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to 
 his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new 
 fact; and its success (as I said a moment ago) in doing this, is a 
 matter for the individual's appreciation. When old truth grows, 
 then, by new truth's addition, it is for subjective reasons. We 
 are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest 
 which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double 
 urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the 
 way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, 
 which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new 
 layer of cambium." 
 
 Must we use truth to make truth true? "An opinion" 
 that "counts as true" or a belief that is deemed to be true 
 and is practically applied, need not be true. To Professor 
 James truth is not the cash value of ideas, but their actual use 
 when put into circulation. But truth remains truth even if 
 not exploited. The cash value of a bank deposit remains the 
 same even when we do not invest it in profitable enterprises, 
 and it would certainly be a mistake to identify the nature of 
 money with the interest it will bring if invested. What 
 is commonly understood by "truth," Professor James calls 
 "a static relation of 'correspondence' " and denounces it 
 as "inert." In our opinion truth may indeed be inert, 
 just as money may lie unutilized, but pragmatism shuts 
 its eyes to the fact and denounces the old view as an inert 
 conception of truth : 
 
 "It converts the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 
 'correspondence' between our minds and reality, into that of a rich 
 and active commerce (that any one may follow in detail and under- 
 stand) between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe 
 of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their 
 uses."
 
 IO TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 My own conception of truth is neither "empty" nor 
 "inert," for I believe that the truth is exceedingly prac- 
 tical, and (like many others before me) I have most 
 vigorously insisted upon the maxim that truth must be 
 sought and found, not to keep it in cold storage but that 
 we may apply it in our own lives. The truth must be 
 lived. 
 
 I have gone further; I have emphatically insisted on 
 the principle that science, knowledge, truth, do not exist 
 for their own sake but must prove helpful to us. I would 
 not endorse the maxim "science for science's sake," as 
 I said in The Soul of Man, page 361 : "The purpose of 
 thinking is adaptation to surrounding conditions. Thought, 
 you may object, sometimes does not end in action, but in 
 the suppression of action. Inhibition, however, is an ac- 
 tion also. Thought should always end in the regulation 
 or adjustment of our behavior toward our surroundings. 
 If it does not, it is not the right kind of thought. Thought 
 for its own sake is a disease. If muscles contract neither 
 for a special purpose nor for the general purpose of exer- 
 cise, we call the contraction 'a cramp.' Thought for its 
 own sake is a spasm of the brain." 
 
 While I regard a scientific inquiry into irrelevant truths 
 as useless, and while scientists can gauge the importance 
 of a truth by its practical significance, I deem it a very 
 slipshod method of philosophizing to identify the utility 
 of an idea with its truth. Yet this is actually the meaning 
 of pragmatism according to Professor James (p. 75) who 
 says: 
 
 "An idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our 
 lives." 
 
 If pragmatism means that our philosophy must be 
 tested by its practical application, we are all pragmatists, 
 and for myself I would claim to be a better pragmatist 
 than Professor James.
 
 PRAGMATISM. II 
 
 THE OBJECTIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUTH. 
 
 Professor James is right when he means to say that 
 truth is not an object, not a thing outside of us, and that 
 we must distinguish between facts and truths. Facts are 
 real, they are in themselves neither untrue nor true. Truth 
 resides in ideas only, viz., in representations or conceptions 
 of facts. In this sense, therefore, I also say that truth 
 originates in us, exactly because truth is a relation, which, 
 strange to say, is denied by Professor James. Truth orig- 
 inates and exists through an agreement between the idea 
 and the reality represented. 
 
 I will quote what I said on the subject years ago in an 
 article on "The Origin of Mind" 5 : "Truth exists in think- 
 ing subjects only. Truth affirms that certain subjective 
 representations of the objective world can be relied upon, 
 that they are deduced from facts and agree with facts. 
 Based upon past experience, they can be used as guides for 
 future experience. If there were no subjective beings, no 
 feeling and comprehending minds, there would be no truth. 
 Facts in themselves, whether they are or are not repre- 
 sented in the mind of a feeling and thinking subject, are 
 real, yet representations alone, supposing they agree with 
 facts, are true." 
 
 While truth can exist in thinking beings only, while 
 it is subjective in its nature, we must bear in mind that 
 it has an objective significance. The several truths are 
 not arbitrary statements, but their character is predeter- 
 mined. If we are confronted with a scientific problem, we 
 seek a solution, and if the problem is genuine and legiti- 
 mate, there will be but one solution of it that is right, all 
 others are either false or perhaps at best approximations. 
 The solution that is predetermined, at which all inquirers 
 that do not go astray must arrive, is the ideal of truth, 
 
 * The Monist, I, 69 ; reprinted in The Soul of Man, p. 42.
 
 12 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 and this ideal must be discovered. Nor do I hesitate to 
 say that although truth is an idea and not a concrete thing, 
 not a material existence, not a fact, the ideal of truth, 
 viz., its predetermination of the solution to be obtained, is 
 the most significant presence in the world. 
 
 The identification of truth with mere workable belief 
 is positively injurious. In limiting truth to its pragmatic 
 significance, Professor James obliterates the most signifi- 
 cant feature of truth. Charles S. Peirce, in the article 
 referred to, describes most clearly the origin of belief and 
 how an idea becomes accepted as true in the proportion 
 in which it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate 
 it; it is accepted for subjective reasons and it affects our 
 conduct in life. But in the name of logic how can we call 
 an idea true, simply when or because it is held to be true? 
 We grant that it appears true to those who hold it ; let us 
 even go so far as to say that it is true to them ; but it need 
 not for that reason be as yet really true. With all due 
 respect for psychology we do not see why logic must needs 
 be sacrificed in order to leave the field solely to psychology. 
 The test of truth is its agreement with experience, not with 
 one isolated fact or set of facts, but with all the facts of 
 experience, and the ultimate agreement of all truths is the 
 ideal of science. 8 
 
 TRUTH MADE OR FOUND? 
 
 In spite of Professor James we insist that truth is not 
 made by man, but must be discovered, for as we said above, 
 the nature of truth is predetermined. Truth must be 
 found; it is rigid and not plastic, it is independent of our 
 likes and dislikes, and there is a pre-established harmony 
 of all truths. Professor James does not brook truth in the 
 singular. His "account of truth is an account of truths 
 
 "This idea has been developed in an editorial article entitled "The Cri- 
 terion of Truth," published in The Monist, Vol. I, No. 2, p. 229.
 
 PRAGMATISM. 13 
 
 in the plural" (p. 218), and he denounces truth in any 
 other sense except his limited use of it. He says (pp. 
 64-65) : 
 
 "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth 
 independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable 
 to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists 
 indeed superabundantly or is supposed to exist by rationalistically 
 minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the 
 living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its 
 paleontology, and its 'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years 
 of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer an- 
 tiquity." 
 
 Do scientists, inventors, and generally all who recog- 
 nize the objective significance of truth, follow an ignis 
 fatuus? Is it true that the laws established by science 
 "are only a man-made language" (p. 57) ? Professor 
 James says: 
 
 "As the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained 
 ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. 
 The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there 
 is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed 
 in all the branches of science that investigators have become ac- 
 customed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of 
 reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be 
 useful." 
 
 In common parlance the word truth contains not only 
 the idea of the correctness of our subjective notion but also 
 the objective condition itself. We speak for instance of 
 the eternality of truth, meaning thereby not the man-made 
 formulas but the laws of nature, theorems of mathematics 
 etc., and I have on former occasions proposed to call the 
 latter "verities," so as to enable us to distinguish between 
 the subjective and objective elements of truth. 
 
 ONENESS AND REASON. 
 
 In the chapter "The One and the Many" I had hoped 
 to find a refutation of monism, and a justification of plural-
 
 14 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 ism, but Professor James remains on the surface in his 
 discussion of this contrast. Nowhere does he discover the 
 ultimate reason of the unity which is such a powerful de- 
 mand in the human mind. He seems to think that it is a 
 question of number, not (as it actually is) of unity or con- 
 sistency, and suggests that the oneness of the universe 
 would exclude variety and multiplicity. He says: 
 
 "The world is One just so far as its parts hang together by any 
 definite connection. It is many just so far as any definite connec- 
 tion fails to obtain." 
 
 The human mind which naturally and necessarily views 
 the world as one, is viewed by him psychologically in its 
 complex elements as a plurality. He says: 
 
 "Our minds thus grow in spots ; and like grease-spots, the spots 
 spread." 
 
 Apparently he has never become acquainted with a 
 justification of the monistic tendency that pervades science. 
 He overlooks the fact that reason is a unity, and that in 
 its gradual evolution it has developed under the influence 
 of the principle of oneness. An explanation of the nature 
 of reason is no easy task and would take more space than 
 can be justified here, but I will try to state it in as few 
 words as possible. 
 
 The problem of reason is the problem of formal thought. 
 We distinguish between the sense element in our experience 
 and the relational or formal. The pure form of actual 
 succession in motion is time. The pure form of thought 
 is logic. The general rules which we derive from pure 
 forms can be formulated in general statements which we 
 find to be reliable norms not only for the subjective sphere 
 of reasoning, but also in the objective domain of existence. 
 The norms of the purely formal are the same throughout, 
 which appears first of all in the fact that for all of us there 
 is but one space, one time, one reason. Though meta-
 
 PRAGMATISM. 15 
 
 geometricians have tampered with the conception of space, 
 the philosophers have not dared as yet to touch time or to 
 doubt the sameness, oneness and harmonious unity and 
 the uniqueness of reason. I have been hoping from year 
 to year that some one would invent a two-dimensional 
 time,'or some supra-, infra- or extra-temporal chronometry, 
 or that a metalogician would publish a book on curved 
 reason, or propound a pluralistic logic that would stand 
 in contradiction to the Aristotelian logic in which the 
 categories would not hold good, and where the law of 
 contradiction would have no application. 
 
 Here is a task worthy the efforts of the pragmatist. 
 Perhaps Mr. Charles S. Peirce can offer additional sug- 
 gestions. What glorious vistas for the philosopher of the 
 future ! In the meantime we venture to think that so long 
 as the unity of reason stands unchallenged, the pragmatist 
 has no right to doubt the ultimate unity of the world. 
 
 THE MIND AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 The best justification of monism is the constitution of 
 the human mind. Professor James himself recognizes our 
 craving for consistency, for unity, for a harmony of all 
 truths; and is not the human mind a product of the uni- 
 verse? Is not its unity as well as its need of tracing the 
 unity of things, an echo of the unity (i. e., the harmonious- 
 ness, or consistency) in the constitution of the world? 
 
 Lotze said somewhere about the mind and its relation 
 to reality, "May not previous reality itself be there (viz., 
 in the mind) ?", and the passage is quoted by Professor 
 James with approval. I would indeed say that some fea- 
 ture of reality exists in the mind, and it is exactly that 
 principle of oneness which appears in reason. It is founded 
 upon our conception of form, and the conception of form 
 arises from our becoming conscious of the uniformities 
 which are inseparably connected with all reality, objective
 
 l6 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 as well as subjective. We reproduce the oneness, or let 
 us rather say the universal sameness, of all form in our 
 formulations of the norms of form and of the natural laws, 
 and this is the condition of the oneness of reason, and of 
 the principle of consistency so important in science and 
 philosophy. This principle of oneness otherwise called 
 "reason" is a feature of reality which has been developed 
 in the mind and is a reflection only of the oneness of the 
 universe. Of it every being is a part and into the image of 
 it the intellect of rational beings has been molded. 
 
 Near the conclusion of his chapter on "Humanism," 
 Professor James sums up the case as follows : 
 
 "The import of the difference between pragmatism and ration- 
 alism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential 
 contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete 
 from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and 
 awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side 
 the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its 
 adventures." 
 
 I do not mean to defend what Professor James at- 
 tacks as rationalism, but will say that in my opinion reality 
 is a constant flux and accordingly is never ready made or 
 complete. It is always changing in a kaleidoscopic manner. 
 What is really complete from all eternity is the constitu- 
 tion of the world, and it is this constitution which is re- 
 flected in man's reason. The constitution of the world 
 is not an unintelligible enigma, but it is the systematic unit 
 of norms of its formal relations, and human reason is the 
 totality of the formal relations of thought reduced to 
 logical rules. 
 
 Professor James uses the term "reality" first in the 
 sense of the world-constitution, and then in the sense of 
 the unstable condition of nature. If rationalism means that 
 reality is ready made, it can only mean that the constitu- 
 tion of the world, the sum total of natural laws, is im-
 
 PRAGMATISM. 17 
 
 mutable. If pragmatism means that reality is still in the 
 making, he can reasonably refer only to nature with all 
 its bodily existences the very condition of which is always 
 instability; but in thus using his words with no definite 
 meaning Professor James succeeds in pointing out the ad- 
 vantages of his philosophy and representing the views of 
 the rationalists, the intellectualists, and the monists as ut- 
 terly untenable. 
 
 Professor James recognizes uniformity of nature, but 
 it is only a general and vague idea. He says: 
 
 "The general 'uniformity of nature' is presupposed by every 
 lesser law. But nature may be only approximately uniform." 
 
 TIME AND SPACE. 
 
 We ought to let pragmatism swallow its own medicine 
 and request it to become pragmatic, which means to measure 
 values according to the practical use of things. Would it 
 then not learn to appreciate theory, abstraction, the prin- 
 ciple of consistency, logic and in general intellectualism 
 and rationalism even in preference to mood, temperament, 
 sentiment and the gratification of other purely subjective 
 dispositions? 
 
 Has not the logical faculty developed solely for the 
 pragmatic reason that the simian brute was thereby changed 
 into rational man? Does not the whole apparatus of ab- 
 stract thought serve very practical purposes, and is it 
 really so desirable to live in facts only and ignore all these 
 useful implements of theory, abstraction, and generaliza- 
 tion? Does not even monism, or rather the systematic 
 method of reducing the plurality of our sensations to unity, 
 serve a very practical purpose? If we had to surrender 
 all these methods simply because they are mental con- 
 structions and artifices invented for the simplification of 
 knowledge, because they do not possess the same reality
 
 1 8 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 as do our sensations, our sense experience, and our senti- 
 ments, would we not sink back to the level of childhood? 
 To characterize the situation we will quote the passage 
 on time and space on pp. 177-178: 
 
 "That one Time which we all believe in and in which each 
 event has its definite date, that one Space in which each thing has 
 its position, these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; 
 but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from 
 the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men! 
 Everything that happens to us brings its own duration and exten- 
 sion, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more' that 
 runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. 
 But we soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our 
 children make no distinction between yesterday and the day before 
 yesterday, the whole past being churned up together, but we adults 
 still do so whenever the times are large. It is the same with spaces. 
 On a map I distinctly see the relation of London, Constantinople, 
 and Pekin to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to feel 
 the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances 
 are vague, confused and mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, 
 so far from being the intuitions that Kant said they were, are con- 
 structions as patently artificial as any that science can show. The 
 great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live 
 in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander." 
 
 This passage is characteristic. 
 
 Time is one and space is one; no one doubts it. Yet 
 "our time and space experiences" are "vague, confused and 
 mixed." 
 
 When using the map Professor James "can distinctly 
 see the relation of London, Constantinople and Pekin to 
 the place where he is"; but he "utterly fails to see the 
 facts which the map symbolizes." Should we not conclude 
 then that these artificial constructions are of paramount 
 pragmatic importance? And that the intellectualists and 
 rationalists have not labored in vain? My conclusion 
 points that way, and I am convinced that Professor James 
 has misinterpreted their philosophies as much as he fails
 
 PRAGMATISM. 19 
 
 to understand Kant. Kant says that time and space are 
 Anschauungen, which means that they are data of im- 
 mediate experience as much as are the objects of sight. 
 The translation "intuition" carries with it a mysterious 
 and mystical meaning which is utterly absent in the Ger- 
 man text and was absolutely foreign to Kant. 7 
 
 Considering the fact that the illiterate and the uncul- 
 tured can still be found in all the continents of the earth, 
 we will not dispute the statement, that "the great majority 
 of the human race. . . .live in plural times and spaces, inter- 
 penetrant and durcheinander." Still we do not see what 
 renders the notion of the oneness of time and space objec- 
 tionable, and fail to appreciate the advantage of pluralism. 
 
 LOVE OF FACTS AND MYSTICISM. 
 
 In his dread of abstractions Professor James forgets 
 or loses sight of the fact that man has acquired his human- 
 ity through his reason and that reason is the faculty of 
 thinking in abstractions. We grant that abstractions that 
 have no reference to facts are either empty and useless or 
 even positively erroneous, but because there are wrong 
 abstractions we can not overlook the paramount impor- 
 tance of abstract thought. Professor James says: 
 
 "Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts. Rationalism 
 is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist 
 talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, 
 about the success with which they 'work,' etc., suggests to the 
 typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate make- 
 shift article of truth." 
 
 The pragmatist seems to adopt the principle of posi- 
 tivism in that he clings to facts. Sometimes it will be 
 difficult to distinguish between facts and our interpreta- 
 tion of facts, but pragmatism offers no objective criterion 
 for a distinction between the two. We read on p. 68 : 
 
 T Compare the author's article "What Does Anschauung Mean ?" in The 
 Monist, II, 527, and in Kant and Spencer, p. 33 ff.
 
 2O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 "The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes 
 truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for 
 him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values 
 in experience." 
 
 This might be construed as discarding everything that 
 is not particular and concrete sense-experience; but it 
 would be wrong to think that Professor James does not 
 cherish a belief in some reality above the facts of sense. 
 Indeed, his great interest in mystical phenomena proves it, 
 and he uses a very pretty allegory to justify his belief in 
 some superreal world which interacts with the world of 
 sense in which we live, and yet constitutes a sphere of its 
 own and is the product of theory. The recognition of the 
 reality of this abstract realm is so ingenuous and it stands 
 in such a contrast, I might almost say in contradiction, to 
 so many of Professor James's utterances that we will quote 
 the passage in full in order to show how Professor James 
 justifies his eccentric excursions into the realm of the ab- 
 struse. He says (pp. 127-128) : 
 
 "I have sometimes thought of the phenomenon called 'total 
 reflection' in Optics as a good symbol of the relation between ab- 
 stract ideas and concrete realities, as pragmatism conceives it. Hold 
 a tumbler of water a little above your eyes and look up through the 
 water at its surface or better still look similarly through the flat 
 wall of an aquarium. You will then see an extraordinarily brilliant 
 reflected image say of a candle-flame, or any other clear object, 
 situated on the opposite side of the vessel. No ray, under these 
 circumstances gets beyond the water's surface: every ray is totally 
 reflected back into the depths again. Now let the water represent 
 the world of sensible facts, and let the air above it represent the 
 world of abstract ideas. Both worlds are real, of course, and inter- 
 act ; but they interact only at their boundary, and the locus of every- 
 thing that lives, and happens to us, so far as full experience goes, 
 is the water. We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, 
 bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure 
 or penetrate it. We get our oxygen from it, however, we touch it 
 incessantly, now in this part, now in that, and every time we touch
 
 PRAGMATISM. 21 
 
 it, we turn back into the water with our course re-determined and 
 re-energized. The abstract ideas of which the air consists are in- 
 dispensable for life, but irrespirable by themselves, as it were, and 
 only active in their re-directing function. All similes are halting, 
 but this one rather takes my fancy. It shows how something, not 
 sufficient for life in itself, may nevertheless be an effective deter- 
 minant of life elsewhere." 
 
 Dreams are realities to the visionary, and the mystic 
 does not hesitate to look upon the most abstruse theories 
 of his imagination as facts. If we want to know the truth, 
 we must learn to distinguish between the objective fact and 
 our interpretation of it. 
 
 MISUNDERSTOOD. 
 
 Professor James emphasizes one aspect of the truth only 
 and loses sight of another that is of greater importance. 
 He himself feels that he speaks in paradoxes, and so he 
 says of his definition of truth : 
 
 "But is it not a strange misuse of the word 'truth/ you will 
 say, to call ideas also 'true' for this reason?" 
 
 When Professor James identifies that which is profit- 
 able, satisfactory, better to believe, etc., with truth, he 
 says to his reader in anticipation of his misgivings: 
 
 "Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, 
 but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything 
 that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found 
 indulging all kinds of fancies about this world's affairs, and all 
 kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your 
 suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded." 
 
 Professor James grants that our suspicion is "well- 
 founded," but he does not trouble to remove the suspicion. 
 He simply adds: 
 
 "It is evident that something happens when you pass from the 
 abstract to the concrete that complicates the situation."
 
 22 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Man possesses a very inconvenient hankering for con- 
 sistency, and when he adopts an idea as true because he 
 finds that it is expedient to believe it, it sometimes happens 
 that it clashes with other beliefs of vital benefit. Professor 
 James refers to this problem, and if he had solved it he 
 would have discovered that the old-fashioned ideal of the 
 oneness of truth contains a lesson, but he feared to lose 
 himself in the absolute, and he loved pluralism too much 
 to make the attempt. On page 77 Professor James says : 
 
 "I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true 
 unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. 
 Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours 
 most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits 
 yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the 
 first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our 
 truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this 
 desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish 
 whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on 
 the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs." 
 
 And how does Professor James escape the difficulty? 
 His answer is made in a whisper: 
 
 "Let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in 
 my own private person, it clashes with other truths of mine whose 
 benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated 
 with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it en- 
 tangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. 
 But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the 
 trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally 
 just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays; or else 
 as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other 
 principle." 
 
 This looks very much like a surrender of truth in order 
 to let a belief that at the time is profitable, count as a truth. 
 And yet woe to any one who would point this out to 
 Professor James! He says on page 233: 
 
 "These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say,
 
 PRAGMATISM. 2$ 
 
 and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula 
 for describing Mr. Schiller's doctrines and mine is that we are 
 persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to 
 say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement. 
 I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander." 
 
 Professor James is very good-natured and can smile 
 at criticism, but here he loses his temper. He adds: 
 
 "The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the 
 silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to 
 their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history." 
 
 Is it sheer modesty when Professor James speaks of his 
 discourse as so far having been "crude in an unpardonable, 
 nay, in an almost incredible degree"? (p. 33). 
 
 He seems to be in the habit of sometimes saying what 
 he does not mean and then blames the world for misunder- 
 standing him. Here is his own statement: 
 
 "I once wrote an essay on our right to believe, which I un- 
 luckily called the Will to Believe. All the critics, neglecting the 
 essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible, 
 morally it was iniquitous." 
 
 Now it seems to me that the most important sentence 
 written in an essay is its title. It is in the light of the 
 title that the reader reads the whole essay, and if the title 
 reads "The Will to Believe" it is likely that the author 
 really means that which he puts in the most conspicuous 
 place. Moreover I would add that although the essay 
 may be wrongly entitled "The Will to Believe," it actually 
 reflects the author's meaning. He has certainly no right 
 to blame the readers for misunderstanding him. Never- 
 theless Professor James loses his temper and blames his 
 
 critics as "iniquitous." 
 
 Some of his critics, however, may not have missed his 
 meaning when they attributed to him the proposition that 
 it is the right of everybody to believe as he wills, and that 
 the will (i. e., the idiosyncrasies) of every man is the main
 
 24 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 factor in the makeup of his belief and that arguments are 
 of no avail. In the present volume, on page 296, Professor 
 James says: 
 
 "In the end it is our faith and not our logic 'that decides such 
 questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my 
 own faith." 
 
 Professor James is possessed of an exuberance of tem- 
 perament, and in his philosophy temperament rules su- 
 preme. He claims for his faith the right to be impervious 
 to logic ; and he denies the right of any pretended logic to 
 veto his own faith. Of course that closes the case and all 
 argument must cease. 
 
 In the meantime I must confess that my temperament 
 differs, for my convictions have been profoundly influenced 
 by logical argument, and there are many other people in 
 the same plight as I am. In fact I know that whole na- 
 tions have changed their faith under the influence of purely 
 intellectual considerations; yea, I have some slight sus- 
 picion that Professor James himself can not entirely with- 
 draw himself from the influence of logic, and it may be 
 a mistake to take his utterances too seriously. 
 
 It may be that even the present book on pragmatism 
 contains statements which, by some ill luck, Professor James 
 did not mean, and that when we criticize him we stand in 
 the same condemnation as the critics of his essay on "The 
 Right to Believe." 
 
 We do not wish to misrepresent Professor James and 
 have therefore characterized his pragmatism in his own 
 words. We grant that he believes in truth, but his several 
 definitions and expositions of his conception of truth are 
 either wrong or misleading, and though he may not ac- 
 tually deny the objective standard of truth, he elevates 
 mere subjective belief to the dignity of the name truth 
 which, if this were justifiable, would practically render the 
 latter irrelevant. Indeed he glories in this looseness of
 
 PRAGMATISM. 25 
 
 truth which ignores the ideal of both the objectivity and the 
 oneness of truth for the sake of its subjective conceptions, 
 resulting in Protean truths in the plural. 
 
 TEMPERAMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is very difficult to obtain objective statements of fact 
 because a subjective element enters into every observation 
 and consequently also into every presentation of a fact. 
 It is the ambition of the scientist to reduce the personal 
 element and, whenever possible, to eliminate it. 
 
 Professor James says: 
 
 "Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he 
 tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. 
 Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges 
 impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament 
 really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly ob- 
 jective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the 
 other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view 
 of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts 
 his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in 
 any representation of the universe that does suit it." 
 
 This passage contains the key to the philosophical doc- 
 trine of Professor James. He possessed a very tempera- 
 mental personality, and he judged others by himself. 
 
 Scientific inquiry demands that the scientist should 
 sink his own personality before the cause of truth. His 
 temperament has nothing to do with the facts he investi- 
 gates; if permitted to interfere with his investigation it 
 can only vitiate his arguments and lack of self-control is 
 pathological. In Professor James, thought and sentiment 
 are so intricately interwoven that his preferences enter into 
 his conclusions ; his temperament is always one of his prem- 
 ises, and to pass it by in silence seems to him hypocritical. 
 He says: 
 
 "There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic dis- 
 cussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned."
 
 26 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 We do not deny that one's personal attitude is an im- 
 portant factor in life, nor would we object to an author 
 who with ability and grace descants on any subject in his 
 peculiar characteristic mood, but he must not claim that 
 his effusions are philosophy. Let him announce his lec- 
 tures as rhapsodies and publish his books under the name 
 of poetry; we will gladly welcome him as the creator of 
 a new department in literature. But it is not philosophy, 
 and least of all, what is so strongly needed in our day, a 
 philosophy of science, a philosophy that is worth while 
 studying and which is a desideratum of scientists. 
 
 Professor James is an empiricist. He "turns his back 
 resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits 
 dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from 
 abstractions. . . .from fixed principles, closed systems. . . . 
 He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards 
 facts, towards action and towards power." He adds p. 51 : 
 
 "That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist 
 temper sincerely given up." 
 
 But the facts of Professor James are not facts in the 
 usual sense of the word. They are psychical states, atti- 
 tudes, and interpretations of facts. An hallucination is 
 most assuredly a fact too. The sensation experienced by 
 a man who sees a ghost is a fact ; but his experience may 
 be the expression of a wrong interpretation. Another man 
 under the same conditions may see a shirt on a clothes 
 line; that too is a fact and an interpretation. Necessarily 
 both interpretations are contradictory, and men of a ra- 
 tionalist temper will not rest satisfied until the contradic- 
 tion is removed. The pragmatism of Professor James is 
 pluralistic, and different interpretations remain peacefully 
 side by side. If we can not eliminate the personal equation 
 and must accept moods as facts, all interpretations are 
 equally true. This renders the conception of truth elusive, 
 or as Professor James calls it, "plastic."
 
 PRAGMATISM. 27 
 
 THE PLASTICITY OF TRUTH. 
 
 The plasticity of truth makes pragmatism elastic and 
 this playing fast and loose with truth is deemed a great 
 advantage. It makes "pragmatism a mediator and recon- 
 ciler/' for "she 'unstiffens' our theories" (p. 79). Thus 
 it is possible that pragmatism may be acceptable to all, 
 the materialist and the spiritualist, the infidel and the un- 
 believer, the skeptic, the mystic, the visionary, and what 
 not. We are told: 
 
 "It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its methods. As the 
 young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst 
 of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers 
 open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic 
 volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and 
 strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. 
 In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated ; 
 in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But 
 they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want 
 a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms." 
 
 The excuse for ignoring the ideal of truth, so important 
 in our conception of the world, is stated by Professor James 
 as follows: 
 
 "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience 
 will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we im- 
 agine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. It 
 runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the abso- 
 lutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, 
 they will all be realized together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day 
 by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call 
 it falsehood." 
 
 I would not characterize the ideal of truth by which I 
 understand that solution of a problem which is predeter- 
 mined, as "the 'absolutely' true." There is nothing "ab- 
 solute" in it, and by using the word "absolute" (albeit not 
 in its proper meaning, but in a loose way in the sense of
 
 28 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 "positive"), we introduce an idea which spreads vague- 
 ness. It makes a final truth appear as an "ideal vanishing 
 point," i. e., an unrealizable quantity at an infinite distance. 
 I grant Professor James that "we must live to-day by what 
 truth we can get to-day," but I deny that we must "be 
 ready to call it falsehood to-morrow." This view is based 
 upon an utter misapprehension of the nature of truth. 
 
 I beg leave to belong to the old-fashioned people who 
 still believe that all truths must agree and that the truth 
 of yesterday will be the truth of to-morrow. Here lies the 
 rock of ages which is the basis of science. If this rock 
 should prove an illusion, then indeed pluralism would be 
 established for good, and pluralism would look very much 
 like nihilism. But let us hear what Professor James has to 
 say on the variability of truth : 
 
 "Ptolemaic astronomy, Euclidean space, Aristotelian logic, scho- 
 lastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human ex- 
 perience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things 
 only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience. 
 'Absolutely' they are false; for we know that those limits were 
 casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as 
 they are by present thinkers." 
 
 We will take up each single statement by itself. 
 
 PTOLEMY AND COPERNICUS. 
 
 Ptolemaic astronomy was not true at the time of Ptol- 
 emy; it never was true, nor ever will be true. What from 
 our standpoint Professor James can reasonably mean is 
 this, that Ptolemaic astronomy satisfied certain demands 
 of scientific inquiry in the time when Alexandria was flour- 
 ishing. It summarizes certain facts in a better way than 
 was done in the views that were held by Ptolemy's prede- 
 cessors except Eudoxus who seems to have been nearer the 
 truth than Ptolemy. Only in so far as it systematized some 
 observations, can we say that the Ptolemaic system was
 
 PRAGMATISM. 2Q 
 
 correctly formulated ; but it was not true even at the time, 
 because it did not satisfy all observations, and the astron- 
 omy of that age had to slur over those observations which 
 clashed with the theory. But Ptolemy and his followers 
 "had enough trouble in life already without adding the 
 trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies." 
 Their calculations were sufficiently complicated and so they 
 took a holiday and thought that their system worked well 
 enough for their own needs. In other words they turned 
 pragmatists and ceased to trouble about consistency. 
 
 We might enter here upon a discussion of the right to 
 choose a point of reference. We have a right to use the 
 earth as a point of reference as did the Ptolemaic astron- 
 omers; and we have a right to use the sun as our point 
 of reference as did Copernicus. The former is as much 
 justified as the latter, and the advantage of the latter con- 
 sists solely in rendering the calculation more simple. That 
 is true enough according to assumption, but to use this as 
 an argument for the purpose of making Ptolemaic astron- 
 omy appear to be as true as the Copernican system would 
 be mere quibbling. This inability to take the right point 
 of reference which would render the calculation of the 
 planetary movements simple, is exactly what constituted 
 the fault of Ptolemaic astronomers, and veiled from them 
 the fact that the earth is a planet among the other planets. 
 
 We do not deny that the progress of science is by ap- 
 proximation, and the Ptolemaic system is indeed an ap- 
 proximation of the attempt to calculate and predict certain 
 events in the starry heavens ; but one of its premises was 
 wrong, and it prevented its supporters from solving the 
 astronomical problem satisfactorily. This wrong premise 
 which was their idea of the fixed position of the earth in 
 the center of the solar system, was eliminated by Coper- 
 nicus who recognized that the earth had to be classed to- 
 gether with the planets, and the problem was finally solved
 
 3O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 by Kepler through the formulation of the laws which bear 
 his name. 
 
 Kepler has definitely solved the problem. He has not 
 solved all the problems of astronomy, but I would like to 
 see the astronomer who would be ready to call the three 
 laws of Kepler falsehoods to-morrow. 
 
 The same may be said of the problem of the acceleration 
 of gravity. Gravity itself taken as a fact, the Newtonian 
 formula is final. It satisfies all instances of gravitating 
 bodies. The question of fact "why does gravity act at 
 all ?" remains, but that being granted as a matter of fact, 
 the formula is valid. 
 
 EUCLID AND ARISTOTLE. 
 
 The last century has witnessed a remarkable progress 
 in mathematics and logic in the invention of non-Euclidean 
 geometries and the suggestion of new truths in logic, and 
 this is used to advantage by Professor James to prove the 
 plasticity of truth. He says: 
 
 "How plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really are has 
 been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical 
 and mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be 
 invading physics." 
 
 Does Professor James mean to say that Euclidean ge- 
 ometry and Aristotelian logic have ceased to be true? 
 Scarcely. Euclid's geometry holds good to-day as well 
 as in Euclid's time, and the same is true of Aristotle's 
 logic. Professor James himself knows it, for he adds: 
 
 "The ancient formulas are reinterpreted as special expressions 
 of much wider principles, principles that our ancestors never got 
 a glimpse of in their present shape and formulation." 
 
 A wider interpretation of an old truth does not make 
 the old truth false, but widens and deepens our compre- 
 hension of it. That is a big difference, and the same is
 
 PRAGMATISM. 3! 
 
 true of all truths. A truth once positively proved to be a 
 truth is and will remain a truth forever. 
 
 But what of the discovery of new facts such as the 
 Rontgen rays, and radium ? Do they not upset science and 
 render the most basic truth antiquated? We can hear 
 this statement often enough, but we have not yet seen the 
 day on which it was verified. The discovery of new facts 
 may upset pet theories of ours, but it will never upset old 
 truths, not even those which have become paleontological 
 with age. If formulas describe certain features of facts 
 without any admixture of theory, they will remain true 
 forever. In case we should learn something about the 
 ultimate constitution of matter which would reveal to us 
 the secret of gravity, we would not have to discard the 
 Newtonian formula of the mutual attraction of masses as 
 a falsehood, but we would see its truth in a clearer light. 
 In other words, we would not replace one truth that has 
 become antiquated by another truth that is more up to 
 date and happens to agree with the present fashion of 
 our intellectual atmosphere, but we would add to the old 
 truth a new truth, and the unity of all the truths we know 
 would thereby only become the more apparent. 
 
 MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM. 
 
 Professor James knows how to put his paints on thick, 
 and so his pictures exhibit strong contrasts. He generally 
 omits the softer tones between the opposites and so fails 
 to find that the truth lies in the middle. Take for instance 
 his ingenious description of materialism (on pp. 92-93) 
 which is contrasted to theism and spiritualism. 
 
 "Philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit up with belief 
 in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may deny matter in 
 that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be phenomenalist 
 like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the wider 
 sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving
 
 $2 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces. 
 It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed 
 to spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what 
 run things, materialism says. 
 
 "The highest productions of human genius might be ciphered 
 by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their 
 physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only 
 for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case 
 would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as 
 operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion 
 of present-day materialism, which may better be called naturalism. 
 Over against it stands 'theism/ or what in a wide sense may be 
 termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind not only wit- 
 nesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the 
 world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher ele- 
 ment." 
 
 According to Professor James every naturalist would 
 have to be classed with the materialists, and according to 
 his division, which with all its faults and in spite of its 
 being based upon a wrong generalization has the advan- 
 tage of a drastic vividness, I would myself count as a 
 materialist. And yet I protest against calling the laws 
 of nature blind, and while I would attempt to explain 
 higher phenomena from lower ones I would not have the 
 higher degraded into the lower. Man does not become a 
 brute even if his pedigree be traced back to brute animals 
 and still further back to moners or amcebas. For all that, 
 man's soul has been molded not by matter but by the forma- 
 tive factors of the world in which all things exist and move 
 and have their being. 
 
 The romantic temperament of Professor James appears 
 not only in his spiritualism but also in his theology, for 
 even here pluralism enters. He says: 
 
 "Monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme 
 of classroom instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed 
 God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the 
 shapers of the great world's fate."
 
 PRAGMATISM. 33 
 
 RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS. 
 
 Pragmatism applied to religion has great advantages. 
 Says Professor James : 
 
 "It follows that in the religious field she [pragmatism] is at a 
 great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti- 
 theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive 
 interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the 
 way of conception. 
 
 "In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism 
 sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the ex- 
 ternal senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow 
 either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most per- 
 sonal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they 
 have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in 
 the very dirt of private fact if that should seem a likely place to 
 find him. 
 
 "Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the 
 way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines 
 with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. 
 If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, 
 should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's 
 existence? She could see no meaning in treating as 'not true' a 
 notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of 
 truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete 
 reality?" 
 
 The issue between atheism and theism, and materialism 
 and spiritualism, before the tribunal of pragmatism be- 
 comes "little more than a conflict between esthetic prefer- 
 ences" (page 94). Professor James says: 
 
 "What practical difference can it make now that the world 
 should be run by matter or by spirit?. . . . 
 
 "The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, 
 in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same 
 thing 
 
 "And how, experience being what is once for all, would God's 
 presence in it make it any more living or richer? Candidly, it is 
 impossible to give any answer to this question 
 
 "Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be de-
 
 34 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 duced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and 
 theism becomes quite idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that 
 event mean exactly the same thing the power, namely, neither 
 more nor less, that could make just this completed world and the 
 wise man is he who in such a case would turn his back on such a 
 supererogatory discussion." 
 
 It would seem quite indifferent then whether God or 
 law, or matter, or energy, or whatever other principle 
 ruled the world. Professor James says in this connection : 
 
 "Doing practically all that a God can do, it is equivalent to God, 
 its function is a God's function, and in a world in which a God 
 would be superfluous; from such a world a God could never law- 
 fully be missed." 
 
 Pragmatism recognizing the plurality of truths need 
 not be consistent, and so Professor James sees nevertheless 
 a difference between materialism and spiritualism, and he 
 gives his preference to the latter, not because he can prove 
 that it is truer but because spiritualism is a doctrine of 
 promise, of hope, of consolation, and the same is true of 
 some other metaphysical problems, such as free will, design 
 in nature etc. 
 
 Professor James says: 
 
 "Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is 
 eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means 
 the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of 
 hope 
 
 "Spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of prom- 
 ise, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of disappointment 
 
 "Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of re- 
 lief 
 
 "Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, 
 design, etc., have none." 
 
 Professor James appears to have an aversion to argu- 
 ments. They smack of intellectualism which is an abomi- 
 nation in his eyes. His preference is based upon senti- 
 mental grounds.
 
 PRAGMATISM. 35 
 
 It stands to reason that those who have worked out doc- 
 trines and theories and dogmas, who have endeavored to 
 have them promulgated, adopted and believed in, have done 
 so because they were conscious of the practical significance 
 of their propositions, but Professor James imputes to them 
 the idea that they have lost sight of facts, and that their 
 ultimate questions are "something august and exalted above 
 facts." His pragmatism alone gives meaning to theories 
 which otherwise would have been senseless. He says : 
 
 "See then how all these ultimate questions turn, as it were, 
 upon their hinges; and from looking backwards upon principles, 
 upon an erkenntnisstheoretisches Ich, a God, a Kausalitdtsprinsip, 
 a Design, a Free-will, taken in themselves, as something august and 
 exalted above facts, see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the em- 
 phasis and looks forward into facts themselves." 
 
 I cherish the opinion that every belief has been framed 
 with a practical intent (or in adaptation to Professor 
 James I may say, for a "pragmatic" purpose) and in 
 order to find out the significance of a theory we ought 
 to see how it works. The intellectual struggle concerning 
 God, the soul, and immortality have not been mere quibbles 
 in my opinion, and I trust that the problems of philos- 
 ophy can be correctly formulated and solved. 
 
 I believe that we can define God in terms of experience 
 and say with exactness what is true of the idea of God 
 and what is not true. I believe myself that the theist and 
 the atheist may come to terms, but two contradictory ideas 
 can not for that reason both be true. An idea ( such as the 
 God idea) may be approximately true. It may contain an 
 important truth dressed up in an allegorical garb. The 
 atheist is right when he negates the allegorical formulation 
 of it, he is wrong when he negates the spirit of the dogma ; 
 and vice versa, the theist is wrong when he insists on the 
 allegory as being literally true, but he is right when he
 
 36 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 recognizes the essential part of it that is backed up by facts, 
 and insists upon it. 8 
 
 MR. CHARLES S. PEIRCE'S TYCHISM. 
 
 Our readers may have noticed that since "pragmatism" 
 has become the watchword of a new and popular movement 
 with which Mr. Peirce, the inventor of the term, does not 
 appear to be in full accord, he has introduced the word 
 "pragmaticism" as if to point out the difference between 
 his own philosophy and that of Professor James. 
 
 I regret that I shall not be able to enter here into a 
 discussion of the views of Mr. Charles S. Peirce whose 
 conception of the instability of natural laws is one of the 
 most original and most ingenious theories ever brought 
 forth. I will only briefly refer our readers to the vigorous 
 controversy with him which has appeared in The Monist, 9 
 where he defends the doctrine of tychism versus necessi- 
 tarianism, while I take the opposite position. Mr. Peirce 
 believes that natural laws are the product of evolution. In 
 the beginning there was Chance (Tyche). Chance is not 
 subject to law, it is free as we know spirit to be. Chance 
 acts arbitrarily but gradually it took on habits and habits 
 became more and more solidified and hardened into laws. 
 Hence the order of the universe is not the cause of evolu- 
 tion but its product. 
 
 It is not impossible that Professor James follows Mr. 
 Peirce, for there is a passage which seems to justify this 
 assumption. Professor James says on p. 249: 
 
 "Between categories fulminated before nature began, and cate- 
 gories gradually forming themselves in nature's presence, the whole 
 chasm between rationalism and empiricism yawns." 
 
 In another passage (p. 158-9) we read: 
 
 * For details see my discussions on the God problem, especially in The 
 Monist, Vol. IX, p. 106. The articles have been collected in book form. 
 
 * Compare The Monist, Vol. II, pp. 321 ff., 442 ff. ; and III, pp. 526 ff. and 
 57i ff.
 
 PRAGMATISM. 37 
 
 "With the whole of past eternity open for our conjectures to 
 range in, it may be lawful to wonder whether the various kinds of 
 union now realized in the universe that we inhabit may not possibly 
 have been successively evolved after the fashion in which we now 
 see human systems evolving in consequence of human needs. If 
 such an hypothesis were legitimate, total oneness would appear at 
 the end of things rather than at their origin. In other words the 
 notion of the 'Absolute' would have to be replaced by that of the 
 'Ultimate.' " 
 
 The language of Professor James is poetic, not exact. 
 What he means is not that the rationalist (i. e., a man 
 like Kant) believed that the categories fulminated before 
 nature began, but that the categories, or better the entire 
 cosmic order, are an eternal condition uncreated and in- 
 destructible, while the empiricist (or the pragmatist) be- 
 lieves that the categories are a product of evolution. 
 
 We may incidentally call our readers' attentions to the 
 first chapter in Prof. Benjamin Peirce's Analytic Mechan- 
 ism, where the father of the founder of pragmatism utters 
 a few brief suggestions which seem to have taken deep 
 root in the soul of his son. Benjamin Peirce regarded 
 "matter as inert" and thought that "force may be regarded 
 as having a spiritual origin." 
 
 THE ENEMIES OF PRAGMATISM. 
 
 Pragmatism is a philosophy manufactured to suit all; 
 it is pluralistic and tolerates any amount of diversity of 
 opinion; it ought to have no enemies, for every one can 
 be, and according to Professor James ought to be, a prag- 
 matist; but his book on pragmatism is in parts extremely 
 pugnacious, his enemies being the monist, the rationalist, 
 the intellectualist, and their ilk. For reasons unknown to 
 me Professor James complains most of the monists. He 
 says: 
 
 "The temper of monists has been so vehement, as almost at 
 times to be convulsive."
 
 38 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 I am sure I am innocent. The present article is my first 
 attack on pragmatism. 
 
 It is strange that the pragmatist welcomes every one 
 except men of theory, and to them he imputes all kinds of 
 erroneous notions. 
 
 The reader will ask why the pragmatist who welcomes 
 every vagary of the human mind and whose tolerance is 
 unbounded, should decry in pretty harsh terms monism, 
 intellectualism and rationalism. Pragmatism, according 
 to Professor James, is the philosophy of temperament, of 
 mood, of personal attitude, and so he naturally resents 
 whatever would put a check upon the liberty of his prefer- 
 ences. He imputes to the intellectualist the slogan: 
 
 "Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!" 
 
 Professor James himself wants the vagueness of psy- 
 chological moods recognized as philosophy, and he scorns 
 logic. He has no patience with a thinker who demands 
 consistency or endeavors to systematize the plurality of 
 facts. Scientific exactness appears to the pragmatist as 
 mere pedantry. Professor James says: 
 
 "The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism 
 makes systems, and systems must be closed." 
 
 Professor James's philosophy can dispense with system. 
 He says: 
 
 "We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, 
 against the flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is 
 enough. 
 
 " 'Statt der lebendigen Natur.' we say, 'da Gott die Menschen 
 schuf hinein,' that nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight- 
 laced thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, 
 that sick man's dream! Away with it. Away with all of them! 
 Impossible ! Impossible !" 
 
 The pragmatist says, "Gefiihl ist Alles we need nei- 
 ther intellect, nor reason, nor a systematization of facts, 
 nor theories, nor abstractions. We live in facts."
 
 PRAGMATISM. 39 
 
 Professor James censures some views with regard to 
 the importance of the intellect and the indispensableness 
 of reason, which are commonly held by believers in monism, 
 but these propositions are so strangely adulterated with 
 notions which are scarcely held by any one, that we wonder 
 who these sorry enemies of Professor James may be, and 
 we are inclined to regard them as men of straw who do 
 not possess a concrete existence. 
 
 We are told that according to the intellectualist "truth 
 means essentially an inert static relation" (p. 200), and 
 in another passage that, "for the rationalist it remains a 
 pure abstraction to the bare name of which we must de- 
 fer" (p. 68). 
 
 It is difficult to find out who is meant by intellectualists 
 and rationalists, for we have yet to meet the man to whom 
 truth remains "a pure abstraction" or who would insist 
 that truth should be "inert." Clifford has already pointed 
 out with great clearness that every scientific truth is a 
 norm of conduct and can be expressed as such. Further 
 it is a truism that scientists formulate truths in abstract 
 terms, but they always bear in mind that their formulas 
 are generalizations from actual facts, and that they de- 
 scribe certain features of reality. The truth or untruth 
 of these formulas depends upon the correspondence of the 
 ideas with the facts in question. Truth accordingly does 
 not reside in the abstraction alone, but depends upon the 
 relation of the abstraction to facts. Cancel the facts, and 
 where is truth? 
 
 Theories are attempts at explaining facts by the as- 
 sumption of other facts. If these other facts are verified, 
 the theory is regarded true and may then be justly called a 
 law of nature. A law of nature is always (or at least should 
 be) a systematic description of a certain group of facts. 
 
 We often hear abstractions and generalizations de- 
 nounced as empty, but that is merely the prattle of those
 
 4O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 who do not know that all abstractions signify definite fea- 
 tures of facts. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOLERANCE. 
 
 In The Monist of April, 1908, Prof. John E. Boodin, of 
 the philosophical department at the University of Kansas, 
 contributed an article on "Philosophic Tolerance" which is 
 very well written and shows the inclination of the writer 
 to the pragmatic movement. The title is significant, and 
 the essay might be called a pragmatic rhapsody. It is 
 pleasant reading, and I am sure that no one can read it 
 without enjoying both the style and the thoughts of the 
 essay. Nevertheless it is not philosophy, and pretty though 
 it is as a literary composition, it becomes warped by its 
 philosophical claim, which is exactly the same fault which 
 we find with Professor Boodin's master, Professor James. 
 
 In this pragmatic interpretation philosophy has given 
 up its ambition to become a science. It has no dogmas, no 
 doctrines, no position either to defend or to attack, and so 
 it is tolerant. Professor Boodin claims that "philosophy 
 like poetry and art, when it is genuine, is only the expres- 
 sion of the mood of a soul." Mr. Boodin wants to procure 
 for philosophy the same variety that is possessed by art. 
 
 With reference to art and poetry Professor Boodin 
 says, "We do not demand rigid consistency here," and he 
 longs for plasticity in philosophy too, saying, "Why should 
 not every sincere man express his philosophy that seems 
 reasonable to him at the time?" We answer that he most 
 assuredly may, but the expression of moods will be a poor 
 contribution to philosophy as a science, in fact it would be 
 no philosophy whatever. It would be a soi disant philos- 
 ophy, a poetic expression of a transient Stimmung, a 
 sentiment. 
 
 Far be it from me to denounce or object to poetical ex- 
 pressions of our moods; they are quite legitimate in the
 
 PRAGMATISM. 41 
 
 domain of belles lettres. I would not even find fault with 
 any one for calling them philosophy or philosophical effu- 
 sions, but I do object to regarding them as the philosophy 
 that has come to supersede all other philosophies, denying 
 that there is a true philosophy, a philosophy as a science, 
 or as we call it, the philosophy of science. 
 
 Pragmatism claims to be tolerant. It is tolerant of all 
 philosophies that are merely subjective expressions of per- 
 sonal idiosyncrasies. Mr. Boodin asks, "Why are they 
 not all true, in so far as they are really genuine and really 
 express human nature, then and there?" This tolerance 
 means that whether true or untrue in a scientific sense, 
 they are all on one level, and according to my old-fashioned 
 conception of truth, this is practically a declaration that 
 all philosophies are subjective, all are castles in the air. 
 
 This attitude of pragmatism is about the same as if 
 somebody were to declare that in the realm of science 
 astronomy and all different astrological systems are of 
 equal value. There are no real laws of nature ; all laws of 
 nature are mere approximations. From this standpoint 
 the astrologer might have something to say about "the 
 materialism" of the astronomer who assumes that the 
 stars run their courses according to "the blind laws of 
 nature," but one ought to be as tolerant with the astron- 
 omer as with the different astrological interpretations of 
 the planetary movements, viz., the Babylonian system 
 which looks upon the stars as gods, the medieval method 
 which believed in some mysterious influence of the several 
 planets upon the lives of men, and the modern astrologer 
 who tries to adapt the medieval traditions to the modern 
 conception. 
 
 If it were true, as Mr. Boodin says, that "Truth is at 
 best experimental," there would indeed be no reason to 
 turn our backs upon the old superstitions. It would be 
 an indication of our intolerance. The magus of ancient
 
 42 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Babylon, and the astrologer of the Middle Ages, and 
 finally the occultist of to-day, each in his way proclaims 
 that there is some pragmatic meaning in the positions of 
 the planets, and we ought not to say that their efforts are 
 futile, for, says Mr. Boodin, "nothing can be more fatal 
 than stopping the experiment." 
 
 THE LEADER OF THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT. 
 
 There is no need of prolonging the discussion. With 
 all my admiration for Professor James I can not take 
 kindly to his pragmatism, and must openly confess that 
 his loose way of philosophizing does not exercise a whole- 
 some influence on the young generation. If Professor 
 James were right philosophy as a science would not and 
 should not exist, for all that were left of philosophy would 
 be subjectivism, which means an expression of our attitude 
 towards the world. There would be as many philosophies 
 as there are personal idiosyncrasies, and even every indi- 
 vidual would not always remain the same but have dif- 
 ferent moods. We would all be pragmatists, and we 
 would all exercise the utmost mutual tolerance, for we 
 would grant the privilege to every one to regard his 
 thoughts as true, true to him and true at least at the 
 time. We would draw the line only when we meet with 
 people who have the impudence to believe in the objec- 
 tivity, the permanence, the reliability of their truth, and 
 demand consistency in all statements of truth. In other 
 words, the sentimental and the subjective would be su- 
 preme, while an objective knowledge of truth would be- 
 come a matter of indifference. 
 
 Professor James was a fascinating personality, original 
 and interesting in his very vagaries, genial and ingenious, 
 versatile and learned. He was not scientific in his habits 
 of thought, nor was he critical, and I have the impression 
 that he cherished a dislike for science. Exactness of
 
 PRAGMATISM. 43 
 
 method seems to have hampered his mind and naturally 
 appeared to him as pedantry. He loved to indulge in the 
 chiaroscuro of vague possibilities, and so he showed a han- 
 kering for the mysteries of psychic phenomena, whether 
 due to telepathy or spirit communication, as evidenced in 
 the case of Mrs. Piper. He would resent to have his 
 thoughts restrained by the balance wheel of critique. He 
 seemed to enjoy being freely moved by the spirit. In a 
 word, his temper was not scientific but that of a poet or 
 prophet. He loved to be guided by inspiration. Being in- 
 spired, he was himself inspiring. Hence his unusual mag- 
 netism, and hence also the success of a philosophy which 
 he had made his own. 
 
 In the philosophy of a man like William James the 
 personal equation is the most important item, and he judged 
 science and the scientific labors of others after his own 
 mode of thought. He did not try to eliminate the factor 
 of his idiosyncrasies, and so he assumed that that is the 
 normal condition of all thinkers. This is evidenced in his 
 book entitled The Will to Believe. This attitude is desi- 
 rable in a poet, but not in a philosopher; it is good in 
 belles lettres but not in science; and no harm would be 
 done if his pragmatism were received simply as an artistic 
 movement that has a purely esthetical significance but 
 should not be taken seriously. Pragmatism comes with 
 the pretense of being taken seriously, and it sweeps over 
 the country with the power of a fashionable fad. It claims 
 that now at last we have a philosophy that reconciles all 
 the contradictory religions and philosophies, that redeems 
 the world from the tyranny of definite doctrines, and pro- 
 claims a new view of truth, which is no longer final, rigid 
 and stable but plastic and may suit anybody in any emer- 
 gency. 
 
 Pragmatism insists upon an important truth a truth 
 which is so obvious that it is almost a matter of course;
 
 44 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 but it emphasizes it so onesidedly that it overlooks a more 
 important truth and thereby its very conception of truth 
 becomes warped. However, in this way pragmatism ac- 
 quires the semblance of originality, of something new and 
 unheard of, while in fact it is only a modernized redaction 
 of the ancient philosophy of the sophists and of their prin- 
 ciple, 
 
 TTdvTUV fJLtTpOV av0/3ft>7TOg, 
 
 which also is true in a certain sense but becomes a fallacy 
 if the onesidedness of the principle is lost sight of. 
 
 Pragmatism has appeared cometlike on our intellectual 
 horizon. It flashed up with a sudden fluorescence like a 
 luminous fog which through the extent of its broad sweep 
 threatens to outshine the old stars of a steadier light. The 
 nucleus of the comet is Professor James, brilliant but 
 erratic; and he is attended by a tail of many admirers 
 and imitators, all aglow with the stir of their master's 
 enthusiasm, and the world stands open-eyed at the un- 
 precedented phenomenon. 
 
 Professor James prophesies: 
 
 "The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its 
 place 
 
 "It will be an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds 
 one almost of the Protestant Reformation. And as, to Papal minds, 
 Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and con- 
 fusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-ration- 
 alist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer trash, philo- 
 sophically." 
 
 We answer with Professor James who continues, 
 "But life wags on." 
 
 Cometlike pragmatism has appeared, and we venture 
 to predict that cometlike it will fade again after a while. 
 
 Personally I have a decided liking for Professor James, 
 and I am sure that in expressing it I voice the opinion of
 
 PRAGMATISM. 45 
 
 many. I met him occasionally and always felt the sym- 
 pathetic charm of his personality. I do not begrudge him 
 the brilliant success of his life and the honor of his merited 
 renown. I rejoice that to the end of his life he remained 
 buoyant of spirit and hope that in the history of philos- 
 ophy his significance will not be underrated. But for all 
 that I can not agree with or accept the philosophy of the 
 great Harvard Professor, and I go so far as to look upon 
 its wide acceptance as a symptom of the immaturity and 
 naivete that obtains sometimes even in the professional 
 circles of our universities. 
 
 With all due respect for Professor James, for whose 
 extraordinary and fine personality I cherish an unbounded 
 admiration, I must confess that I would deem it a mis- 
 fortune if his philosophy would ever exercise a determin- 
 ing and permanent influence upon the national life of our 
 country.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION.* 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 
 
 PRAGMATISM may be characterized as a philosophy 
 which insists upon the significance of the personal 
 equation in thinking. There is no doubt that the theory 
 works well in explaining how certain thinkers arrive at 
 definite results. It fails only but in this it fails most sig- 
 nificantly in establishing a true philosophy ; yea we might 
 say that pragmatism (if it is to be taken seriously) actually 
 denies the possibility of philosophy as an objective science. 
 It deems the personal equation to be the essential feature 
 of all philosophies, whereby philosophy changes to a mere 
 expression of temperament, of mood, subjective disposi- 
 tion or the like ; in this case philosophy ought to be classed 
 with belles lettres and be judged as poetry. This is the 
 opinion expressed in the preceding chapter, and we are 
 glad to notice that Prof. Edwin Tausch at the end of his 
 essay on "William James the Pragmatist" (Monist, XIX, 
 i ff.), expresses a similar verdict. 
 
 It is true enough that the personal equation is an im- 
 portant element in all mental activity ; even the most mech- 
 anical transactions of observers exhibit a certain regularity 
 of definite fluctuations due to the makeup of the observer's 
 mental organism. When the astronomer makes his ob- 
 servations he discovers that they are vitiated by certain ir- 
 regularities which in the same person keep within certain 
 
 * Republished from The Monist, Jan., 1909.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 47 
 
 boundaries. They are due to the limit of exactness within 
 which the observer's nervous system, the eye, the ear and 
 the hand, perform their functions. The personal equation 
 is a factor which has to be taken into consideration. Dur- 
 ing the development of science it has been more and more 
 reduced, but it appears that it can never be absolutely ob- 
 literated, because organisms as well as machines are never 
 absolutely perfect but work with accuracy only according 
 to the nicety of their adjustment. 
 
 The factor of the personal equation is less important 
 where the facts are plain and where the observations con- 
 sist (as, e. g., in astronomy) of mere measuring or count- 
 ing, but it grows with the complication of the problem. 
 
 In the domain of philosophy, religion, ethics, sociology, 
 political economy, and generally in the interpretation of all 
 spiritual aspirations of man, more personal interests are 
 at stake than in astronomy; and since a general belief in 
 a certain doctrine is an important factor in actual life, 
 man's judgment is much more easily influenced by his 
 desires than in natural sciences. Hence a widened scope 
 of the personal equation. In political economy the per- 
 sonal equation asserts itself so vigorously that it tries to 
 overrule the facts and is usually in readiness to twist them 
 to suit its own convenience. We know but too well that 
 business interests, not scientific arguments, are the deci- 
 sive factors that shape man's views concerning the tariff, 
 and conditions are similar when our favorite ideals are 
 under discussion, our notions of God, the soul, of immor- 
 tality and ethics. 
 
 Men who allow their views in politics to be shaped by 
 private interests lack breadth of mind and fairness towards 
 others, while sentimentalists who are incapable of logical 
 reasoning whenever their feelings are engaged are patho- 
 logical. It is true that very few people can boast of a 
 perfect mental health, but we need not for that reason sur-
 
 48 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 render our aspiration for objectivity in thought and leave 
 the decision as to what should be recognized as truth to 
 the prejudices of subjective preferences. 
 
 PERSONAL EQUATION A FAULT. 
 
 The mistake of the pragmatist consists in regarding the 
 part which the personal equation plays as the essential 
 feature of cognition. What is a mere shortcoming of 
 thought is raised to the dignity of the main principle. In 
 the pre-scientific age almost all practical problems of life 
 were settled more in accord with the dictates of the will 
 than of the intellect. Nevertheless the intellect was not in- 
 active. The intellect has gradually asserted itself more and 
 more and from the domain of the will it has wrested the 
 formulation of one doctrine after another. Sometimes it 
 upset old cherished errors, and sometimes it modified the 
 traditional view by adapting it to new conditions. 
 
 During the present age the influence of science on re- 
 ligion has grown more and more and the will to believe 
 has become less and less the ultimate determinant of re- 
 ligious convictions. We are fully convinced that there are 
 not two domains of truth, one the noetic, the other the 
 teleological or spiritual. The so-called spiritual sciences, 
 psychology, the history of religion, philosophy, ethics, are 
 based on a condition of objective facts just as much as is 
 the knowledge of the purely mechanical processes of na- 
 ture. There is only this difference, that men of a senti- 
 mental temperament are more easily influenced in their 
 judgments in the so-called spiritual domain of the sciences, 
 philosophy, psychology, ethics, etc., while the scope for 
 difference in the domain of the intellectual truth, logic, 
 physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc., is scarcely any longer 
 possible. 
 
 To the pre-scientific man conviction is truth, and the 
 intensity of his conviction is naively accepted as the meas-
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 49 
 
 ure of the reliability of truth. The pragmatist is really 
 naive enough to continue, or rather to fall back upon, this 
 pre-scientific stage of thought. So he looks upon science 
 as an assumption and has no use for the work of those 
 philosophers who have laid a foundation for philosophy as 
 an objective science. In this sense pragmatists declare 
 Kant to be antiquated, ein iiberwundener Standpunkt. 
 
 Think what would become of the reliability of astron- 
 omy if we had to look upon the theories of Copernicus, 
 Kepler and Newton as the products of personal equations 
 simply because an element of personal equation is to be 
 taken into account in the astronomical calculations. 
 
 Pragmatism has taken a strong hold upon the present 
 generation, but it remains to be hoped that this is more due 
 to the attractive personality of Professor James than to any 
 intrinsic power in its leading ideas. If pragmatism were 
 right the only scientific treatment of a philosophy would 
 be the one which Professor Tausch administers to Pro- 
 fessor James. He abstains from critically investigating 
 the latter's views but analyzes his doctrines and explains 
 them in terms of genetic psychology. It looks more like 
 a physician's diagnosis than a philosophical inquiry, the 
 more so when we notice that even in his methods Professor 
 Tausch is inclined to imitate Dr. Morton Prince when he 
 deals with disintegrated personalities. (Monist, XIX, i.) 
 
 THE ELIMINATION OF THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT. 
 
 I agree with Professor James in the recognition of the 
 personal element that enters into the makeup of our philos- 
 ophies, but while I propose to eliminate it and build upon 
 the assured conclusions of our thought a philosophy of 
 objective significance, he, being a man of strong sentiment, 
 is so overwhelmed by the paramount part which the per- 
 sonal equation plays that he proclaims a doctrine called
 
 5O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 pragmatism which however would be more correctly de- 
 scribed as a philosophy of personal equation. 
 
 It is true that in philosophy, and in still higher degree in 
 religion, it is very difficult for any man to discriminate be- 
 tween objectively assured arguments and his own personal 
 equation, nevertheless it is not impossible to do so, and we 
 take the progress of science, especially the obvious influence 
 of science upon religion, as an evidence of our statement. 
 We grant further that those philosophers in whom the 
 personal equation is greatest, are most emphatic in the 
 defence of their very errors, for when men of intense con- 
 victions are unable to prove their belief, they make up for 
 the lack of logic by a display of the vigor of their faith. This 
 is but natural and Professor James goes too far when he 
 accuses philosophers of dishonesty declaring that they pass 
 over in silence the most important arguments of their 
 views. It is merely the character of a pre-scientific state 
 of culture. 
 
 When I consider my own case, I must grant that the 
 power of sentiment should not be underrated. Having 
 freqently been obliged to let very intense convictions based 
 upon inherited and early acquired habits be overruled by 
 a calm consideration of the truth, I know very w r ell that 
 the personal equation exists, but I know also that it can be 
 reduced to considerably lower terms, and I deem it the 
 duty of every thinker to eliminate as much as possible in 
 his search for truth the vitiating factor of his personal 
 preferences. 
 
 But is not perhaps the entire fabric of all philosophies 
 made up of strands that can be resolved into the fibers of 
 our personal equation? The thoughts of many people are 
 indeed so interlaced with their sentimental natures that if 
 we consider their cases individually it would seem hopeless 
 to let them establish a conception of the universe that would
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 51 
 
 possess any objective reliability. Nevertheless there are 
 scientific minds who can formulate statements with ob- 
 jective exactness. The multitudes of people are unscien- 
 tific, but science is not for that reason impossible. 
 
 THE OBJECTIVITY OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Science stands and falls with the objectivity of truth. 
 If truth were mere opinion, if my truth might be different 
 from your truth, even though all errors due to a difference 
 of terminology were excluded, if both our truths in spite 
 of being contradictory might be truths, truth would be 
 subjective. It would appear different in different minds, 
 and even in the same mind truth would be subject to change. 
 Objective truth would be impossible. 
 
 If objective truth does not exist, science is a chimera, 
 and all our scientific knowledge would have to be regarded 
 as mere assumption. Inventions made through the appli- 
 cation of a scientific insight into nature would in that case 
 be mere happy coincidences. Is that probable? 
 
 Science is not only possible, science is a fact. And if 
 it be granted that science is a fact, we can make bold to 
 say that scientific method must be reliable. Here is the 
 basis of the philosophy of science. 
 
 The philosophy of science is first the science of science, 
 or methodology; then- the synthesis of all the sciences in 
 their unison, or ontology, including their systematized re- 
 sult, or a scientific world-conception ; and thirdly the appli 
 cation of this world-conception to practical life; we may 
 call it pragmatology which includes ethics, sociology, the 
 crafts, inventions, art, etc. This domain of philosophy 
 is as solid ground as any field of the natural sciences and 
 the personal equation of the philosopher, far from being 
 the dominant factor, is here as in astronomical calculations 
 only a source of error.
 
 52 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 THE SUPREMACY OF THE INTELLECT. 
 
 A philosopher's personal equation lies mostly in his 
 sentiments and it would seem that a rigorously scientific 
 thought would leave no room for sentiment, but such is 
 not, or at any rate need not be, the case. Science does not 
 antagonize sentiment ; it would only protest that sentiment 
 should perform the function of thought. Let the mind think 
 and the heart feel, but when the heart governs the head, 
 the mentality of man is apt to lose its strength. 
 
 I grant most emphatically that the noetic function of 
 man's soul is not the only feature that needs cultivation; 
 the domain of sentiment and will with all that they imply, 
 enthusiasm, sympathy, emotional yearnings, devotion, re- 
 ligion, the love of art, music, etc., have their due place in 
 our lives and should not be neglected. But the intellect 
 should after all remain the supreme court of all final de- 
 cisions. The intellect should not be degraded into an an- 
 cilla voluntatis, a handmaid of either the will or sentiment, 
 but should be as independent as is the judiciary in a well- 
 governed state. 
 
 Sentiment, religion and artistic tastes are indispensable 
 attainments, but even these need the guiding hand of in- 
 tellectual comprehension. The intellect is the organ of rea- 
 son, of logic, of inquiry, of grasping the truth, of com- 
 prehending the objective order of the world, of solving the 
 problems of existence, and of a redemption from the many 
 unnecessary evils of life. The intellect is truly the organ 
 in which God, the authority of moral conduct, the standard 
 of truth, the norm of the laws of nature, reveals himself. 
 The intellect distinguishes humanity from the brute crea- 
 tion, for the beast is possessed of sentiment and joy of life 
 (sometimes even of noble sentiments) just as much as man, 
 and the intellect alone can pave the way of progress. Even 
 in the field of sentiment and ethics, it is the guidance of the
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 53 
 
 intellect that can improve the will and ennoble man's feel- 
 ings and purify his religion. Neglect to cultivate the in- 
 tellect and man will return to the savage state. 
 
 In the etymological meaning of the term the philosophy 
 of science is the true pragmatism. It is pragmatic, if prag- 
 matism means that the truth must be tested by practical 
 experience. But pragmatism as propounded by Professor 
 James antagonizes rationalism, monism and the philosophy 
 of science. 
 
 Being opposed to theory, to the principle of consistency, 
 to monism and to any unity or systematization, pragmatism 
 drifts into pluralism as surely as a disintegrated soul will 
 develop a multiple personality. The result will be a real- 
 ism, a clinging to the facts not objectively assured facts, 
 but facts of an uncritical experience, facts, as mirrored in 
 a purely subjective interpretation of sentiment. Such is 
 pragmatism, the philosophy of personal equation ! 
 
 INCONSISTENCY IN DEFINITION. 
 
 Professor James in answer to his critics has selected 
 M. Marcel Hebert 1 for his target. It seems impossible to 
 answer all of them, they are too many, and Professor James 
 takes his French antagonist as a typical instance of one who 
 suffers from "the usual fatal misapprehension" of the crit- 
 ics of pragmatism. It is strange that all the critics of Pro- 
 fessor James agree in misinterpreting his conception of 
 truth. Professor James says: 
 
 "How comes it, then, that our critics so uniformly accuse us of 
 subjectivism, of denying the reality's existence? It comes, I think, 
 from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our anal- 
 ysis." 
 
 In the detailed critique given in the first essay, I 
 
 *In comment on Professor James's review of Marcel Hebert' s book, Le 
 pragmaiisme et ses diverses formes anglo-americaines. Reviewed in The 
 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Dec. 3, 1908.
 
 54 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 have anticipated Professor James's complaint and have 
 therefore avoided recapitulating his views, but always 
 quoted him in his ipsissima verba, and if words mean 
 what they say, Professor James is decidedly to be blamed 
 if he has been uniformly misunderstood. I request our 
 readers to go over the definitions given by Professor 
 James himself, and look them up either in my quotations 
 or, better still, in his own book, Pragmatism. He says: 
 
 "The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be gooa in 
 the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons." 
 Pragm. p. 76. 
 
 " 'What would be better for us to believe' ! This sounds very 
 like a definition of truth." Pragm., p. 77. 
 
 "You can say of it then either that 'it is useful because it is 
 true' or that 'it is true because it is useful.' " Pragm., p. 204. 
 
 "A new opinion counts as 'true' just in proportion as it gratifies 
 the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to 
 his beliefs in stock." Pragm., p. 201. 
 
 "An idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our 
 lives." Pragm., p. 75. 
 
 I could continue quotations from all the chapters of 
 Professor James to prove that the language he uses must 
 actually induce his critics to believe that his conception 
 of truth is subjective. But, in his reply to Professor He- 
 bert he says: 
 
 "This subjectivist interpretation of our position seems to follow 
 from my having happened to write (without supposing it necessary 
 to explain that I was treating of cognition solely on its subjective 
 side) that in the long run the true is the expedient in the way of 
 our thinking much as the good is the expedient in the way of 
 our behaviour ! Having previously written that truth means 'agree- 
 ment with reality,' and insisted that the chief part of the expediency 
 of any one opinion is its agreement with the rest of acknowledged 
 truth, I apprehended no exclusively snbjectivistic reading of my 
 meaning."
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 55 
 
 Judging from this explanation of Professor James, 
 pragmatism agrees after all with the time-worn definition 
 of truth as an idea in agreement with reality. And yet 
 Professor James has declared again and again that prag- 
 matism proposes a new definition of truth. Yea he denies 
 that there is any explanation of truth except in prag- 
 matism. He says in the present review : 
 
 "Ours is the only articulate attempt in the field to say positively 
 what truth actually consists of." 
 
 He italicizes "consists of" to distinguish it from his 
 former definition of truth as "agreement with reality." 
 If we trust him, no one before the appearance of prag- 
 matism had ever a clear idea of what is meant by truth. 
 
 TRUTH AS AN IDEA THAT WORKS SATISFACTORILY. 
 
 Professor James rebukes his "denouncers" severely and 
 censures their conception of truth as too rigid, too stable, 
 too absolute. He says: 
 
 "For them, when an idea is true, it is true, and there the matter 
 terminates, the word 'true' being indefinable. The relation of the 
 true idea to its object, being, as they think, unique, it can be ex- 
 pressed in terms of nothing else, and needs only to be named for 
 any one to recognize and understand it. Moreover it is invariable 
 and universal, the same in every single instance of truth, however 
 diverse the ideas, the realities, and the other relations between them 
 may be." 
 
 The denouncers of Professor James must have strange 
 ideas of truth, for to them, even if "the ideas, realities and 
 other relations" are different, truth remains the same "in- 
 variable and universal." I am unfortunate enough never to 
 have seen such use of the word truth, but let us hear what 
 the truth "consists of" according to Professor James. He 
 continues :
 
 56 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 "Our pragmatist view, on the contrary, is that the truth-relation 
 is a definitely experienceable relation, and therefore describable as 
 well as namable ; that it is not unique in kind, and neither invariable 
 nor universal. The relation to its object that makes an idea true 
 in any given instance, is, we say, embodied in intermediate details 
 of reality which lead towards the object, which vary in every instance, 
 and which in every instance can be concretely traced. The chain of 
 workings which an opinion sets up is the opinion's truth, falsehood, 
 or irrelevancy, as the case may be. Every idea that a man has works 
 some consequences in him, in the shape either of bodily actions or 
 of other ideas. Through these consequences the man's relations to 
 surrounding realities are modified. He is carried nearer to some of 
 them and farther from others, and gets now the feeling that the 
 idea has worked satisfactorily, now that it has not. The idea has 
 put him into touch with something that fulfils its intent, or it has 
 not." 
 
 I have quoted this passage in full lest there be any mis- 
 understanding, and here Professor James says explicitly, 
 "The chain of workings the opinion sets up is the opinion's 
 truth, falsehood, or irrelevancy." And then the man "gets 
 now the feeling that the idea has worked satisfactorily, 
 now that it has not." 
 
 Here we have two definitions of truth side by side, one 
 is agreement with reality, the other, specifically called "what 
 truth actually consists of," is "the chain of workings 
 which an opinion sets up." It must be noticed that an 
 opinion is not truth and that the application of an opinion 
 to practical life is still less the truth, whether or not it 
 works satisfactorily. 
 
 In fact sometimes a positive lie works decidedly satis- 
 factorily. 
 
 A LIE THAT WORKS SATISFACTORILY. 
 
 Ideas are potent factors. If certain errors are helpful 
 to me it may be to my own profit to spread them and make 
 people believe in them. When by special couriers Roth- 
 schild learned of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815,
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 57 
 
 he spread the report through his agents that the French 
 had gained a decisive victory over the allied troops. His 
 own bank began ostentatiously to buy French and sell 
 Prussian consols, but secretly was performing the reverse 
 transactions to a much greater extent. He succeeded in 
 spreading the untruth and it worked satisfactorily and 
 yet we cannot say that thereby it became a truth. Un- 
 doubtedly "the idea had put them into touch with some- 
 thing that fulfilled its intent." There was a chain of work- 
 ings set up, and to the man who pressed the button it 
 worked as calculated. 
 
 The idea and the action which it starts (at least so it 
 appears to me) are two different things which in all circum- 
 stances have to be kept asunder. I know very well that 
 Professor James has in mind other chains of workings, 
 but any impartial reader will grant perhaps he himself 
 will concede that he uses his words very indiscriminately 
 and in his definition he follows the impulse of the moment. 
 
 TRUTH AS OBJECTS BELIEVED IN. 
 
 Some of Professor James's critics seem to have confused 
 the ideas truth and reality, and when noticing the sub- 
 jective trend in his definition of truth have thought that 
 he had denied the existence of reality outside. He ex- 
 pressly states that he believes in realities and so there 
 need be no quarrel about it, although to him realities are 
 only "objects believed in." Professor James says: 
 
 "Since the only realities we can talk about are such objects- 
 believed-in, the pragmatist, whenever he says 'reality,' means in the 
 first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what 
 he believes at the moment to be such." 
 
 According to this definition, the vision of a dreamer 
 if it is only believed in, is a reality, of course we must 
 add, "to him," and "at the moment." It may not be a 
 reality to others or to him at another time. Under these
 
 58 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 circumstances had we not better avoid the phrase "reality 
 to him" and offer in its stead a definition of reality without 
 any qualification, and in contrast to such realities as are 
 mere objects believed in? 
 
 THE FIXATION OF BELIEF. 
 
 Professor James is a pluralist, and everywhere he sees 
 the many where scientific method requires us to single 
 out those features which are typical and universal. He 
 further demands the verification of truth by the senses, 
 the reality must be "felt" to be verified. 
 
 Mr. Charles S. Peirce showed in articles published 
 about thirty years ago, that there is a certain stage in man's 
 development in which he has not yet an adequate concep- 
 tion of truth, nor does he care to discover the truth. What 
 he cares for is merely a settlement of doubt. Doubt is a 
 state of disturbed equilibrium which causes uneasiness. 
 Doubt must be removed in one way or another and Mr. 
 Peirce calls the settlement of doubt very appropriately, 
 "the fixation of belief." Professor James has confessed 
 that this same article of Mr. Peirce has influenced him in 
 the formation of his philosophy of pragmatism, and we 
 cannot help thinking that Professor James calls truth what 
 in Mr. Peirce's language is merely "the fixation of belief." 
 Lest we are accused of misrepresenting Professor James's 
 position we will without any further comments quote the 
 following passage in which he answers his critics: 
 
 "Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence. The idea, 
 for example, may be that a certain door opens into a room where 
 a glass of beer may be bought. If opening the door leads to the 
 actual sight and taste of the beer, the man calls the idea true. Or 
 his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the 
 sides and the hypothenuse of a triangle, such a relation being, of 
 course, a reality quite as much as a glass of beer is. If the thought 
 of such a relation leads him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare 
 the figures they make, he may at last, perceiving one equality after
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 59 
 
 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 conse- 
 quences, mental or physical, which the idea was able to set up. These 
 'workings' differ in every single instance, they never transcend ex- 
 perience, they consist of particulars, mental or sensible, and they 
 admit of concrete description in every individual case. Pragmatists 
 are unable to see what you can possibly mean by calling an idea true, 
 unless you mean that between it as a terminus a quo in some one's 
 mind and some particular reality as a terminus ad quern, such con- 
 crete workings do or may intervene. Their direction constitutes the 
 idea's reference to that reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its 
 adaptation thereto, and the two things together constitute the 'truth' 
 of the idea for its possessor. Without such intermediating portions 
 of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out 
 of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up." 
 
 Professor James speaks also of Professor Schiller of 
 Oxford endorsing his views. He says : "Schiller's doctrine 
 and mine are identical, only our expositions follow different 
 directions." Of Schiller's conception of truth, Professor 
 James says: 
 
 "To be true, it appears, means, for that individual, to work 
 satisfactorily for him ; and the working and the satisfaction, since 
 they vary from case to case, admit of no universal description. What 
 works is true and represents a reality, for the individual for whom it 
 works. If he is infallible, the reality is 'really' there; if mistaken 
 it is not there, or not there as he thinks it. We all believe, when our 
 ideas work satisfactorily; but we don't yet know who of us is in- 
 fallible. Schiller, remaining with the fallible individual, and treating 
 only of reality-for-him, seems to many of his readers to ignore 
 reality-in-itself altogether. But that is because he seeks only to tell 
 us how truths are attained, not what the content of those truths, 
 when attained, shall be. It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall 
 be that in transsubjective realities. It certainly seems the truest, for 
 no rival belief is as voluminously satisfactory, and it is probably Dr. 
 Schiller's own belief ; but he is not required, for his immediate pur-
 
 6O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 pose to profess it. Still less is he obliged to assume it in advance as 
 the basis of his discussion." 
 
 TRUTH AS A FEELING. 
 
 It is astonishing how Professor James ignores the most 
 obtrusive facts of the history of philosophy. To him the 
 pragmatic "is the only articulate attempt in the field to 
 say positively what truth actually consists of," and he as- 
 sumes that the opponents of pragmatism never thought 
 about truth. In his opinion they simply claim that "when 
 an idea is true, it is true, and there the matter terminates." 
 And with this blank in his information concerning all that 
 has been done in the determination of the nature of truth, 
 he starts the world over again and repeats the errors of 
 the sophists which characterize the pre-Socratic period, 
 the very beginning of the history of philosophy. Note at 
 the same time in the pragmatism of Professor James the 
 exaggerated significance of the part which the senses play 
 in the determination of truth. In a passage just quoted, 
 Professor James emphasizes the word "felt" as if a feeling 
 of fitness were the essential element in the constitution of 
 truth. He describes the process of discovering truth by 
 saying that "his idea has in each case brought him into 
 closer touch with a reality felt at the moment to verify 
 just that idea." Note here how he clings to the particular, 
 "in each case," and "felt at the moment," and it must be 
 "just that idea." Nor is it enough to use the word "felt" ; 
 he also speaks of "touch." So much is he afraid to trust 
 the mental process which would lead him to the universal. 
 
 Truth is not of the senses but of the mind. The senses 
 never produce either truth or untruth ; it is our faculty of 
 the purely formal (commonly called reason) that works 
 out judgments that are either true or untrue, and we verify 
 these judgments by exactness in the application of logic, 
 arithmetic, geometry, etc. The senses only furnish the
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 6l 
 
 data ; and if the senses are not sufficiently guided they yield 
 very unreliable results, in evidence of which we refer to 
 so-called sense illusions. 
 
 To the pragmatist, truth is always particular, and in 
 the statement endorsed by Professor James, Professor 
 Schiller even goes so far as to say that truths "admit of 
 no universal description." There are many indications 
 that pragmatism cannot distinguish between facts and 
 truths, and this is one of them. We must remember that 
 a statement of fact may be true, but it is not a truth. A 
 truth is always a formulation of the essential features of 
 a set of facts. Truths are not concrete realities, but ideas 
 that appropriately describe certain characteristics of real- 
 ities, so as to make our anticipations tally with experience 
 in the past and present and even in the future. While 
 facts are always particular, truths are always general; 
 facts are verified by the senses, truths by the mind; facts 
 change, truths (if they were ever real truths and not 
 errors) remain true forever. 
 
 We grant that the way to truth is mostly by approxima- 
 tion, and frequently passes through errors. Yea, these 
 errors are sometimes stoutly believed in with great tenac- 
 ity and are even forced upon unbelievers by such drastic 
 arguments as dungeon and fagots, but this vigor of con- 
 viction never changes them into real truths. 
 
 HOW A LIE DEVELOPS INTO A TRUTH. 
 
 The most humorous critique of pragmatism, which at 
 the same time is a truly scathing one, comes from the pen 
 of Mr. Peter Finley Dunne, the author of the famous 
 Dooley Monologues. One of these, entitled "Mr. Dooley 
 on Philosophy/' echoes the impressions which Professor 
 James's book makes upon the minds of unsophisticated 
 readers, and we will here quote the main passage. Mr. 
 Dooley says 2 : 
 
 'American Magazine, March, 1908.
 
 62 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 "What's it all about? says ye. Faith, 'tis fine exercise f'r th' 
 mind. It's like Turkish bath. It is good f'r th' Pro-fissor an' it don't 
 hurt th' victim much. Hogan says this here philosopher has some 
 fine idees about th' truth. I thought ivrybody knew what was th' 
 truth an' what wasn't. It seemed aisy to me. Th' truth was some- 
 thing I believed an' divvle th' bit I cared whether anny wan else 
 believed it or not. 'Twudden't take me wan minyit to tell ye all 
 about it. But ye ask th' pro-fissor about it an' he says: "Th' truth 
 is something that wurruks. If it don't wurruk it ain't th' truth. 
 A truth that is lying off is not half as true as a good wurrukin' lie. 
 Whin th' truth stops wurrukin' it's a lie, an' whin a lie starts goin', 
 it's th' truth. It is onforchnit that human nature is such that it 
 overwurruks th' truth to such an extint that truth knocks off an' 
 says 'twud rather starve thin go on settin' up all night waitin' f'r 
 people to come home an' thin be abused because it hasn't ivrything 
 comfortable f'r ivrybody. Thin is th' time to call in a few lies as 
 sthrike breakers. They'll do well enough f'r awhile. Th' rale test 
 iv truth is can ye cash it in. F'r a gr-reat manny cinchries th' 
 wurruld was flat. We have th' best iv contimpry ividince on that 
 point. Foolish people say it was round all th' time. I say not, an' 
 I have th' most acc'rate records in me lib'ry. Suddenly, some time 
 ago, it become round. There ye have th' idee. But th' rale test 
 iv a truth is its cash value. What can ye get on it? If it ain't anny 
 good to ye, chuck it away. If it's something ye can't carry in ye'er 
 head, so far as ye are concerned, don't thry to think about it. It 
 is not th' truth onless ye can go down with it to th' exchange an' 
 trade it f'r another truth, or if ye're good at tradin', f'r two or three. 
 Don't be afraid to take a truth because it looks suspicyously new. 
 Nearly all th' old truths are bein' discarded be us profissors as too 
 large an' cumbersome to handle. Don't refuse to accept a truth 
 because it looks like a Mexican truth or because it is made iv Bab- 
 bit-metal an' glass. Ye may be able to pass it off on somebody 
 else 
 
 "If I had a son wud I advise him to take a coorse in philosophy ? 
 Ye bet I wud. It won't help him much in getting a job as a motor- 
 man. It wudden't do him much good to presint a litter fr'm Pro- 
 fissor James to the trainboss sayin': 'I can safely recommind th' 
 bearer f'r any position iv thrust or confidence. He was the bright- 
 est philosopher in my class an' he received hon'rable mention f'r 
 his essay entitled : "Why Hegel Niver Cashed." ' But th' exercise
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONAL EQUATION. 63 
 
 wud be fine f'r his little head an' wan iv th' best things about a 
 college is that ye're taught things there that ye don't have to take 
 out into th' worruld with ye. At th' end iv th' coorse th' philos- 
 ophy team can safely go out on th' campus an' burn their philosophy 
 togs an' grajally acquire mental clothes more suitable to our rugged 
 an' changeable intellekchool climate. It don't take him long to larn 
 that f'r wan truth that cashes the've got to take a milyon on 
 credit." 
 
 AN OLD TRUTH CARRIED TOO FAR. 
 
 Since Professor James endorses the old definition of 
 truth, apparently forgetful of other utterances he has made, 
 we might come to the conclusion that pragmatism (for- 
 merly vaunted as a novel theory of truth) is nothing new 
 after all, and that its sole claim to originality consists in the 
 emphasis laid on the practical application of truth, with- 
 out which truth is not yet truth were it not for the fact that 
 philosophers and educators from the time of Socrates to the 
 present day have insisted on this point almost ad nauseam, 
 so as to make the doctrine that truths must be verified by 
 experience and applied to practical life, trite. 
 
 It appears that pragmatism is still in a plastic state, 
 its doctrines are not yet matured and cannot be expected 
 to be consistent ; they are developing under our eyes. There 
 is reason to hope that when it has attained years of dis- 
 cretion its conception of truth will look very much like that 
 of the old philosophers, now so ostentatiously decried by 
 our pragmatist friends. 
 
 We oppose pragmatism as a philosophy and we criti- 
 cize its conception of truth. But for all that, we find the 
 movement very interesting and instructive. If pragmatism 
 would not lay claim to being a new philosophy, but if it 
 would merely be a psychological method of determining 
 the establishment of truth in the several philosophies by 
 evaluating the purposes and tendencies under which a phi- 
 losophy has been formed and taking into consideration the
 
 04 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 personal equation of the several thinkers, we would recom- 
 mend it as an extremely practical and useful method. The 
 public at large is too apt to overlook that the purpose of 
 science is its practical application. Man is not a purely 
 intellectual animal. His intellect, including all the truths 
 he can establish, serves the purpose of enhancing his life. 
 Accordingly the most important part of every philosophy 
 will always be its pragmatical aspect, and this is a truth 
 which has been recognized since time immemorial, except 
 that now and then it is forgotten. The easiest way to 
 reconstruct the several philosophies of past ages will be to 
 point out the needs of the generation, the duties with which 
 it was confronted, the tasks which had to be performed, 
 and if we bear these practical points in mind we are not 
 likely to misunderstand if in one period emphasis is placed 
 on one special aspect of the truth, while at another the 
 very opposite may come to the fore-ground. And this 
 is true mainly in those branches of philosophy which are of 
 a practical nature, ethics, pedagogy, religion, the policy 
 of the churches, political economy, etc. Pragmatism as 
 a philosophy is an evidence of this. In emphasizing the 
 practical significance of truth, it goes so far as even to 
 deny the value of theory, of consistency, systematization, 
 etc., and when taken to task, Professor James naively de- 
 clares that the old definition of truth has to be taken for 
 granted.
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES.* 
 
 A PLURALISTIC VIEW OF SCIENCE. 
 
 ' I "HE nature of science is much misunderstood even by 
 J_ scientists of rank, and as a result theories such as 
 agnosticism, pluralism, pragmatism, humanism, etc., make 
 their appearance. The truth is that the conception of 
 science as a method, as a systematic plan of investigation, 
 as a consistent principle of arranging facts in order, has 
 not as yet become common property among our main in- 
 vestigators, and there is a notion afloat of the haphazard 
 character of scientific research. 
 
 Mrs. Fiske Warren, whose article "A Philosophical 
 Aspect of Science" appeared in The Monist of April, 1910, 
 is an instance of this tendency. She studied four years at 
 Oxford, taking the full philosophical course with teachers 
 representing opposing schools of philosophical thought. 
 She was introduced to The Monist by Professor William 
 James who spoke of her in the highest terms. 
 
 Mrs. Fiske Warren's conception of science is by no 
 means isolated. In a lucid way she summarizes and ably 
 represents the view common among many scientists, and 
 from this standpoint it almost appears a kindness toward 
 science, this inadequate mode of research, to look upon 
 its future with indulgence and suppress the pessimism of 
 despair. In spite of the many drawbacks of science, Mrs. 
 Warren advocates a conditional optimism which is to com- 
 fort us for the loss of our illusion. 
 
 * Republished from The Monist, April, 1910.
 
 66 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Note that in her conception the progress of science 
 "might be described in a series of successes and failures 
 on an ascending curve; no failure means a total collapse 
 of knowledge, no success is ever complete." Thus she 
 places scientific solutions on a level with haphazard proba- 
 bilities, but even in doing this she ignores the fact that the 
 simile here used is based on the conception of a mathemat- 
 ical curve which would definitely predetermine the progress 
 of science. The development of science is no less subject to 
 law than the growth of animals and plants, the crystalli- 
 zations of minerals, yea, the formation of whole solar sys- 
 tems. This does not prove as yet, but indicates, that sci- 
 ence is not comparable to any haphazard mode of hitting 
 the bull's eye and does not depend on incidental successes, 
 harboring the failures also in its own nature as if they 
 were part and parcel of science itself and did not belong 
 to the struggles of poor mortal and fallible scientists who 
 fail to attain an insight into its truths. 
 
 When Mrs. Fiske Warren calls her position "a philo- 
 sophical conception of science," I must demur, for I hold 
 that her views are unphilosophical and even antiphilosoph- 
 ical; they are pluralistic. Philosophy has always endeav- 
 ored to trace the unity of our conception of the world, and a 
 pluralistic philosophy which, while clinging to particulars 
 and to individual facts, denies unity and scorns system as 
 pure theory is practically a surrender of the ideal of philo- 
 sophical thought and implies, to say the least, a suggestion 
 that science is impossible and that the light of science is a 
 mere will-o'-the-wisp. 
 
 METHOD THE ESSENTIAL FEATURE OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Science is a method of inquiry and as such it means 
 system. The results of science are systematically formu- 
 lated universalities, i. e., groups of facts of the same char-
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 67 
 
 acter described in their essential nature, singling out the 
 determinant features and omitting all the rest. Such a 
 formula describing a definite set of facts is called a natural 
 law, and I will say here incidentally that what Mrs. Warren 
 says concerning the nature of abstraction is quite correct, 
 although she might have better characterized the nature 
 of abstraction if she had borne in mind the significance of 
 the formal sciences, especially logic and mathematics, 
 which play such an important part in abstraction, furnish- 
 ing the backbone of what we call system in science. 
 
 I feel prompted to make a few further comments on 
 the importance of abstraction, for he who truly under- 
 stands the nature of abstraction can no longer cling to a 
 pluralistic conception either in science or philosophy. 
 
 Abstraction singles out some definite features and drops 
 all others. An abstraction is mind-made but it represents 
 a real quality of objective things. People who speak of 
 "empty abstractions" with a view of detracting from their 
 significance know not what they say and only exhibit their 
 own lack of judgment. Abstraction is the scepter with 
 which man rules nature, for by the means of abstraction 
 we recognize the common features of things, classify them 
 as general concepts, and learn to formulate the uniformi- 
 ties of nature, commonly called "natural laws." 
 
 The very existence of abstraction proves that generali- 
 zation is possible and the mere possibility of generalization 
 is an evidence that there are general types, and reason is 
 justified in trusting to logic, arithmetic and mathematics 
 when dealing with facts of the objective world. 
 
 Man is the only living being on earth who can make 
 abstractions, for the organ needed to think of whiteness 
 and not of white snow or other white things, to conceive 
 of numbers by counting things and omitting all qualities 
 of the things counted except their presence as items, pre- 
 supposes the use of words which serve as spoken symbols
 
 68 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 for things or their qualities and the faculty of making ab- 
 stractions, of comprising many sense-impressions into gen- 
 eral concepts, and of classifying them into a system of 
 genera and species, is called reason. The speaking animal 
 becomes a rational animal and the rational animal alone 
 can form abstractions, while a methodical use of abstrac- 
 tions establishes science. 
 
 A formula describing a definite set of facts is a scien- 
 tific acquisition which (notwithstanding Mrs. Warren's 
 statement to the contrary) is a success,' complete in its 
 special field. The three Kepler laws, for instance, are a 
 definite and complete solution of the problem of the move- 
 ments of heavenly bodies. While it is true that the attempts 
 to interpret these facts of nature were failures, of which 
 many were by no means a "total collapse of knowledge," 
 it would be a great mistake to imagine that Kepler had only 
 succeeded in a limited way, and that we had to wait for 
 further facts in order to verify his three laws, or even to 
 expect them to be upset or at least modified by our increase 
 of knowledge. 
 
 Science is not a collection of more or less verified hy- 
 potheses. It is not an aggregate of mere probabilities. 
 Science is a method of determining the truth, and in spite 
 of the many gaps in our comprehension it offers us a well 
 guaranteed fund of knowledge. 
 
 It is characteristic of a conception of science such as 
 underlies Mrs. Fiske Warren's presentation of the case 
 that no distinction is made between theory and well ascer- 
 tained knowledge of facts. Note the instances which our 
 author adduces to prove her case. She selects for the pur- 
 pose a brief review of the vicissitudes of the history of 
 matter, a problem which even to-day is not yet ripe for solu- 
 tion. She presents to us a number of hypotheses, not to 
 say vagaries, of prominent scientists.
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 69 
 
 THEORIES AND TRUTHS. 
 
 Newton formulated the law of gravitation in his Prin- 
 cipia, and this is Newton's immortal work, but otherwise 
 his significance as a scientist is greatly overrated. Bear 
 in mind Schopenhauer's strictures 1 that Newton's fame is 
 based on the statement of a theory which was first pro- 
 nounced by Hooke, whose claim in this case he ignored 
 with persistent narrowness. 2 Note Newton's childish ideas 
 concerning the meaning of the Revelation of St. John, his 
 exaggerated high opinion of these his theological views, 
 and you will understand that his notions concerning the 
 ultimate constitution of matter cannot be treated seriously, 
 as possessing any scientific value. They are theories based 
 upon insufficient data, or we might almost say on pure 
 imagination. Though Newton's Principia is of great im- 
 portance as a definite formulation of the solution of a prob- 
 lem which had been matured in his time, to present his 
 views of matter as a contribution to science" is quite mis- 
 leading. 
 
 When Lord Kelvin visited America he was interviewed 
 by a sage newspaper reporter who wanted an authoritative 
 statement concerning his view of the vortex theory, and 
 Lord Kelvin who had probably been often bored by similar 
 requests simply answered, "It is a mere theory," and so 
 the reporter indulged in extravagant language as to the 
 modesty of the English scientist who spoke of his most 
 famous discovery as a mere hypothesis. The truth is that 
 it was a mere hypothesis, for it is not yet a formula cover- 
 
 1 Welt a. d. V., I, 25: IT, 58, 86 (ad ed., 88). The dispute anent the prior- 
 ity of the invention of the integral in mathematics might find a true solution 
 in the proposition that the first idea came from Leibnitz's fertile brain, to 
 whom it was suggested by his monadology, the theory of infinitesimal par- 
 ticles, while Newton appears to have applied it to the computation of gravi- 
 tating bodies and thus reduced it to exact mathematical concepts. Diihring in 
 his Kritischc Geschichte der Philosophic, pp. 353, is inclined to side with New- 
 ton against Leibnitz. 
 
 See Enc. Brit., s. v. "Newton." XVII, 440 ff.
 
 7O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 ing facts. It is the attempt to explain certain facts for 
 which we have not yet enough data. That Lord Kelvin's 
 theory is not only ingenious, but that it is very helpful, is 
 conceded by all who utilize his suggestion as a working 
 hypothesis and to speak of it as "moribund," creates the 
 suspicion that Mrs. Warren has not grasped its real sig- 
 nificance. 
 
 There is a difference between theory and truth which 
 is this: A theory is a tentative statement of a truth; it is 
 a working hypothesis, temporarily made and awaiting veri- 
 fication, while a truth is a description of a certain set of 
 features or of an interrelation of phenomena which covers 
 the entire range of facts. 
 
 THE LAW OF CAUSATION. 
 
 As an important misconception we will mention Mrs. 
 Fiske Warren's interpretation of causality. She speaks 
 of "the law of causality" as "gradually being excluded 
 from science, which more and more contents itself with 
 description." She says, "it still has a respectable reputa- 
 tion. But is it an accurate law ? What it asserts is this : 
 Reproduce all the conditions of a certain phenomenon, that 
 phenomenon will reappear." It would lead too far to here 
 renew the discussion of the law of causality. I will only 
 refer to former expositions of mine, especially in discus- 
 sions with Professor Ernst Mach. 3 
 
 The law of causation has not been replaced by descrip- 
 tion. It has always been description, except that the term 
 "description" was not introduced until Kirchhoff defined 
 mechanics as an exhaustive and concise description of mo- 
 tion. What Kirchhoff eliminates is the notion of meta- 
 physical factors behind motion, which have sometimes been 
 
 1 The Surd of Metaphysics, pp. 119-130. Cf. "Mach's Philosophy," Monist, 
 XVI, 350-352. See also Fundamental Problems, 79-109; and Primer of Phi- 
 losophy, 137-172. For a treatment of the Hume-Kantian problem of causa- 
 tion, see Kant's Prolegomena, especially pp. 198 ff.
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 7 1 
 
 dignified with the name "cause," but the scholars who 
 used this metaphysical name "cause" did not mean cause 
 at all; they meant "reason," and their notion of reason 
 was based on a distorted view of natural law which then 
 was not conceived as a uniformity but as a metaphysical 
 entity behind phenomena. 
 
 In former discussions of the problem of causation I 
 have pointed out that "a cause" is always a motion, an 
 event, an occurrence, which in a system of conditions 
 changes the arrangement, and results in a new state of 
 things commonly called "the effect." Accordingly the law 
 of cause and effect is the law of transformation. It de- 
 scribes a series of successive changes, the start of which in 
 the system of our investigation we call "a cause," the end 
 "an effect"; and it goes without saying that the effect in 
 its turn may again be a cause, and we thus have a succes- 
 sion of changes which represent causes and effects in an 
 interlinked concatenation. 
 
 Without going into further details, I will only say that 
 Hume's famous investigations of causation have missed the 
 mark in so far as he defined cause and effect as "objects 
 following each other," instead of treating them as two 
 phases of one and the same process; thus he could not 
 understand the necessary connection between strychnine 
 and the dead mouse. 
 
 After all, the law of causation is not being excluded 
 from science. It is nothing more nor less than another 
 aspect of the famous law of the conservation of matter and 
 energy. 
 
 Speaking of the law of the conservation of matter we 
 must bear in mind that matter is to be used in the more 
 general sense of substance, not in its limited definition of 
 mass and volume; for certain facts, now well established, 
 teach us to look upon ponderable matter as subject to or- 
 igin and destruction. We have reasons to assume that new
 
 72 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 matter originates in some nebulas of the starry heavens, 
 in due succession of the Mendeljeff series, according to their 
 atomic weight, while the discovery of radium suggests a 
 final dissolubility of chemical atoms. The new view does 
 not upset the law of conservation of substance, for we 
 assume that the elements thus formed in the celestial re- 
 torts of nebulas are due to a condensation of the ether, 
 or whatever name we may give to the primordial world- 
 stuff. 
 
 POINTS OF REFERENCE. 
 
 If the law of causation were really what Mrs. Fiske 
 Warren says it is, viz., "Reproduce all conditions of a cer- 
 tain phenomenon, that phenomenon will reappear," it would 
 be useless even as a working hypothesis; for, as Mrs. 
 Warren truly explains, we can never reproduce the very 
 same conditions the second time, and this she proclaims in 
 the most exaggerated terms in spite of her former ex- 
 planation of the significance of abstraction. Our method 
 of science consists in eliminating all accidentals and con- 
 fining the attention to essential features. In order to prove 
 her case she, following the example of Poincare, points 
 out some accidental features and thus shows that the repe- 
 tition of the same event is impossible. 
 
 Poincare here makes the same mistake into which Her- 
 bert Spencer falls in his First Principles, where he attempts 
 to prove that the simplest phenomena of motion are un- 
 knowable. He succeeds only by a blunder. He omits the 
 first essential condition of describing a motion, he leaves 
 out a point of reference. If a captain walks on deck of 
 his ship, from east to west and the ship is moving in the 
 opposite direction at the same rate, is he moving or stand- 
 ing still? This conundrum is produced only by muddling 
 up the issues and projecting our own confusion into the 
 world of objective facts. If I promise to return to the
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 73 
 
 Pantheon in Paris on a certain day and hour, I mean that 
 place with reference to our geography and not the very 
 same spot in the solar system or even the stellar universe. 
 The very definition of the hour and day implies incidentally 
 a changed position of the earth with reference to the sun, 
 and the identity of the spot is determined by the accepted 
 meaning of language ; the introduction of astronomical re- 
 lations would be mere quibbling. 
 
 THE STABILITY OF TRUTH. 
 
 In conclusion I will say: It is not true that "over and 
 over again the fundamental 'truths' have been superseded 
 and buried under fresh growth." The real truths of sci- 
 ence, the uniformities of nature, are descriptions of the es- 
 sential features of certain sets of facts, methodically sys- 
 tematized. They are never superseded, but each of them 
 constitutes a KTJJPO. e's act, a possession that has come to 
 stay, and which will be useful as a foundation for further 
 inquiry. 4 
 
 The reason why there is a lack of appreciation of the 
 systematic nature of science, is most likely due to a lack 
 of philosophic training, which in its turn is due to the 
 prevalence of metaphysical and other faulty philosophies 
 such as are sometimes taught even in the foremost and 
 most renowned universities. In order to understand the 
 systematic character of science we must learn to appre- 
 ciate the paramount significance of form and formal 
 thought, for here lies the real problem of the foundation 
 of science. 
 
 The formal sciences give us a key to nature; they en- 
 able us to construct systems of reference which can be 
 utilized for describing events under observation in terms 
 of measuring and counting, or, generally speaking, by a 
 
 * A summary of the author's view is stated very briefly in the introduction 
 to the little book Philosophy as a Science, published by the Open Court Pub- 
 lishing Company.
 
 74 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 description of their formal relations. The formal element 
 in thought as well as in objective reality is the connecting 
 link that overbridges the chasm between subject and ob- 
 ject and which furnishes us with the key by which we may 
 scientifically comprehend nature. 
 
 The view here presented appears to me as the only ten- 
 able interpretation of the nature of science. Neither the 
 extreme empiricists nor the Kantian school have offered 
 a satisfactory solution. The empiricists who are at present 
 in the ascendancy fail to see the systematic nature of sci- 
 ence, and the Kantian school had the misfortune of finding 
 a wrong expounder to the English speaking world in the 
 philosopher Hamilton. His misconstruction of the Kantian 
 a priori changed the Kantian school in England into a 
 metaphysical philosophy involving some inferences which 
 were quite foreign to Kant himself. 
 
 The empiricists on the other hand, having a wrong 
 conception of Kant's a priori, lost the truth of his philos- 
 ophy, and instead of understanding the nature of certitude, 
 of consistency, of a systematic method, they produced a 
 kind of evidence by accumulation of details, thereby miss- 
 ing the essential and characteristic point of science. The 
 only foundation of science is to be sought in a philosophy of 
 pure form. 
 
 SYSTEM THE AIM OF SCIENCE. 
 
 System is the backbone of science, and system is the 
 result of the formal sciences. The latter have been gained 
 through abstraction and constitute what is commonly called 
 "reason." The purely formal aspect of things makes it 
 possible to create purely formal systems of thought such 
 as arithmetic, geometry, and logic. They are a priori in 
 the Kantian sense. They are subjective or purely mental, 
 but serve as models for any object of investigation, be it 
 purely imaginary or actual, merely possible, potential or
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 75 
 
 real, and thus they can be used as means of reference for 
 describing any existence, real or imaginary, which is dom- 
 inated by consistency. Consistency in the realm of the 
 purely formal sciences produces that wonderful harmony 
 which we observe for instance in mathematics. Consist- 
 ency in nature produces what in another place I have called 
 lawdom, 5 a state of things known in German as Gesetz- 
 massigkeit, which makes it possible for certain facts of the 
 same class to be described as uniformities. Consistency 
 in action renders possible the rationality of living crea- 
 tures, enabling them to exercise choice, to make plans, and 
 carry out purposes. 
 
 Though many scientists look upon science, in the light 
 of Hume's skepticism, as the result of good chances, of 
 mere lucky haphazard successes, there is developing in the 
 present age a deeply rooted confidence that science is more 
 than the result of accidental guesses, and we believe that 
 we have produced the evidence of the attainment of scien- 
 tific certitude, the foundation of which is laid in the phi- 
 losophy of form. 
 
 But this confidence is of a broader nature and of a more 
 ancient date than is commonly granted. This same con- 
 fidence has accompanied man from the dawn of his ration- 
 ality and has found expression in his religion. The world 
 was never a chaos to man, but always the law-ordained cos- 
 mos, and this feature of cosmic order was pictured in man's 
 religion as a belief in a divinity of some kind, mostly as 
 a hierarchy of gods, and, in the theistic stage of religious 
 development, simply as God. 
 
 Religion accordingly appears in this conception as an 
 instinctive formulation of a trust in the world-order, and 
 this world-order, which the philosophy of form has been 
 able to trace, constitutes the bed-rock of all our thoughts 
 
 8 See The Monist, XX, p. 36.
 
 76 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 and aspirations in religion as well as in science. In this 
 sense we can truly say that here lies the Rock of Ages. 
 
 STATING A TRUTH AND TELLING THE TRUTH. 
 
 My statement on page 61 that "truths are not concrete 
 realities, but ideas that appropriately describe certain char- 
 acteristics of realities, so as to make our anticipations tally 
 with experience in the past and present and even in the 
 future," was criticized by Mr. E. H. Randle 6 who says that 
 "we must be careful in definitions, for every prominent 
 word has many secondary meanings." 
 
 As to the meaning of truth he finds fault with my propo- 
 sition that "while facts are always particular, truths are 
 always general. Facts are verified by the senses, truths 
 by the mind. Facts change, truths remain forever." 
 
 Mr. Randle says: 
 
 "Facts are always particular but I do not see how a fact can 
 possibly change. 'It is a fact that John shot a bird': Can that fact 
 ever be changed? A fact is something done. Neither can I see 
 that truths are always general; but if Dr. Carus means laws he is 
 correct. Many truths are laws. 'All bodies set free above the 
 ground fall to the earth' : this is a truth and a law. I told the truth 
 when I said, 'John shot a bird.' But the shooting of the bird was 
 a fact and not a truth." 
 
 I grant that Mr. Randle is right when he says that 
 every prominent word has many secondary meanings. This 
 becomes obvious in our use of the term "truth." I do not 
 think that there is any disagreement between his conception 
 of truth and mine, but truth like other words has many 
 secondary meanings, and certain meanings are used with 
 definite phrases and connections. 
 
 I trust that every thoughtful reader will read the pas- 
 sage quoted and criticized by Mr. Randle in the correct 
 sense. Truths are always mental and general, facts are 
 
 * In a brief article on "Truth" in The Open Court, Oct., 1909, pp. 632-634.
 
 THE ROCK OF AGES. 77 
 
 always concrete and particular. Truths are identical with 
 laws and if true are true forever. Facts are the fleeting 
 phenomena in the flux of events that pass by and change, 
 which means that there are always new facts filling the 
 present moment and commanding our attention. 
 
 I do not think that Mr. Randle would find fault with 
 this statement rightly understood, but I grant that the word 
 "truth" is used also with reference to single statements, 
 and in this connection I will call attention to the fact that 
 if the statement be true that "John shot a bird," we never 
 would call it a truth, but we would say of the man who says 
 so that he told the truth. 
 
 To "tell the truth" means that the statement of a 
 special case is true, but to tell, or better to state, a truth 
 has a different meaning, which shows that the phrase "to 
 tell the truth" is idiomatic, and we cannot make use of it 
 for the purpose of formulating an exact definition of the 
 term "truth." 
 
 Accordingly I object to Mr. Randle's expression when 
 he says, "The three angles of a triangle are equal to two 
 right angles ; this statement is true and it tells the truth." 
 He ought not to say, "the statement tells the truth," but 
 simply, "the statement is true." 
 
 The opposite of "telling the truth" is "telling a lie," 
 always implying the reproach of a moral deficiency, but the 
 opposite of "truth" in the scientific sense of the word is not 
 "lie" but "error" or "that which is not true." 
 
 Mr. Randle unconsciously proves his own contention 
 that "every prominent word has many secondary mean- 
 ings" ; thus if an author now and then uses a word in more 
 than one sense, we must be charitable and understand the 
 use of it according to the context.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH.* 
 
 THE WORD "TRUTH" IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. 
 
 THE words true, truth, troth, trust, truster, trustee, 
 truce, etc., are derived from an old Teutonic root 
 which appears also in the modern German words treu, 
 "faithful," trauen, "to have confidence," and also Trost, 
 which means originally "rest" or "assurance," then "re- 
 liance," and finally "comfort" or "solace." 
 
 The noun truth is formed from true by the ending th 
 in the same way as wealth from weal (prosperity), health 
 from hale (sound), dearth from dear (scarce), and hearth 
 from a word now lost corresponding to the Gothic hauri 
 and Icelandic hyrr meaning "coal," a "cinder" or "em- 
 ber." 
 
 By "truth" we generally understand the trustworthi- 
 ness or reliability of an idea. According to the etymology 
 of the word, truth is that which endures, that which con- 
 tinues to remain the same, that which stands the test and 
 is not subject to change. 
 
 The German words wahr and Wahrheit are most prob- 
 ably derived from the root WAS, the infinitive of which in 
 Old German is wesen, "to be," "to exist." Derivatives 
 of this root are preserved in the English "was" and "were." 
 The German word wahr must originally have denoted ac- 
 tual existence, and then acquired the meaning "true" in 
 the sense that what we think is, actually exists. 
 
 * Republished from The Monist, Oct., 1910.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 79 
 
 The English word "worth" as well as its German equiv- 
 alent Wert are probably connected with the same root 
 from which wahr, "true," is derived. It means originally 
 the quality of having substance or reality, that which is 
 wahr or truly being; that which is reliable, because it 
 endures. 
 
 The German word wahr has no direct connection with 
 the Latin verus \ at any rate it is not derived from it, for 
 it existed among the Saxons as well as the Germans and 
 other Germanic nations before Roman civilization began to 
 influence northern Europe; but it is not impossible that 
 verus is derived from the same root, WAS, which is common 
 to all the Indo-Germanic nations. 
 
 In Anglo-Saxon, the word war, "true," meant the same 
 as the German wahr, but it was replaced in English by 
 "true," the German treu, meaning faithful. Judging from 
 the Gothic word tuzwers, "doubtful," the Goths must also 
 have had the root of the German wahr ; it was presumably 
 pronounced wers, but at the time of Ulfila the term sunjis 
 ("true," the root of which is SA or AS, as it appears, for 
 instance, in the German sein and in asmi, ct/u, sum and 
 am) was used in its stead. 
 
 If we attempt to reproduce the Gothic sunjis in modern 
 German, we might render it seinig, analogous to an Eng- 
 lish formation, be-ish. 
 
 The German affirmation ja, "yes," and its English 
 equivalent yea mean "it is true" and are derived from a 
 root which appears in the Old-High-German verb jehan, 
 "to own, to confess, to profess." In Old-Saxon it reads ja 
 and in Anglo-Saxon gea orge-swa, the latter being an 
 amplification meaning "yea thus" or "yea so," and was 
 contracted into gese, from which the modern word yes is 
 derived. 
 
 The root of jehan appears also in the German word
 
 8O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Beichte, "confession," which is derived from the verb be- 
 jehan, or later be-ichten. 
 
 How far ja is connected with je (Old-High-German 
 ie) is doubtful. 
 
 The word ie or iwe (English ever) is preserved in the 
 German je and ewig, "eternal." The same root has produced 
 the German Ehe, "marriage," denoting the alliance be- 
 tween husband and wife destined to last forever. In Greek 
 the word cuwv, an unlimited long period, is etymologically 
 the same as the German Eke. The h in Ehe corresponds 
 to a digamma (pronounced v) in the old Greek aivon as 
 well as the German ewig, but it disappears in the Attic 
 pronunciation of the Greek a tow, as well as in its English 
 derivative "eon." 
 
 The German wahren, "to guard" and wdhren (the lat- 
 ter etymologically the same as the English "wear" in the 
 sense "to last," "to endure") are also kin to wahr, but 
 here the idea of existence has been changed to that of per- 
 sistence. 
 
 How far, and whether at all, the old Slovenian word 
 vera, "faith," and the Irish fir, "truth," are etymologically 
 related to the Teutonic word war, "true," or the root WAS, 
 "real," is doubtful. 
 
 In Greek the word dX^eta means that which is not 
 hidden, that which can be beheld unconcealed, that which 
 is not masked, or does not put on a false show. 
 
 In the Slavic languages truth is called pravda (in Polish 
 spelled prawda) and in Croatia it is called istina. 
 
 The Hungarian word for truth is igaz, and from this 
 same root are derived a number of other words, such as 
 igazsag, literally "truthhood," denoting "justice," igeret, 
 "promise," and igen, "yes" or "yea." 
 
 In addition there exists a special word ige which means 
 truth in a religious sense and denotes especially the scrip- 
 tures, or the Bible, or the word of God. Since Hungarian
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 8 1 
 
 is a non-European language, the roots of which are differ- 
 ent from any Aryan speech, it is difficult to trace the 
 original meaning of these words, but the several derivatives 
 prove that the original meaning can not be much different 
 from their English equivalents, true, truth, troth, and yea 
 or yes, "it is true," as an affirmation. 
 
 THE HEBREW, THE EGYPTIAN AND THE CHINESE NOTIONS 
 
 OF TRUTH. 
 
 In Hebrew there are several words denoting truth, but 
 all of them denote what will last or will stand inquiry. 
 The words 'omen as well as emeth are derived from verbal 
 stems which mean "to be firm." 1 The former verb aman 
 has entered into the New Testament and thence into all 
 modern languages in the shape of Amen, "verily," which 
 literally means "it stands firm," or "it is true." 
 
 Netsakh 2 means originally glory, brightness, then last- 
 ingness and truth, while the affirmation yetseb is used to 
 denote that which will stand in court, being derived from 
 yatzab. 3 
 
 The Chaldee word Qeshotf "truth," is derived from 
 Qashat, "to divide evenly," "to make equal," "to measure 
 off rightly," and is connected with words meaning a pair 
 of balances and weights. The underlying idea of the con- 
 ception is the determination of exact measure. 
 
 * * * 
 
 In Egyptian truth is called Ma'at, represented as a 
 goddess with an ostrich feather, a figure which is different 
 from all other gods in so far as she plays no part in mythol- 
 ogy, except that she is called the daughter of Ra, the Sun- 
 god, and is commissioned with weighing the heart of the 
 
 1 The word ^'N is derived from pX, "to be firm," and n$.X from DttX, n to 
 stable." 
 
 2 Two forms, !"i^J and n^J, are in use, both being derived from n3Jj. 
 8 2? from DIP, "to stand in court." 
 
 truth, and n^$j?, weight, are both derived from
 
 82 
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 soul in the underworld before the throne of Osiris. Other- 
 wise she is the personification of truth and right, but the 
 abstract idea of the term has been and has always remained 
 
 HORUS WEIGHING THE HEART IN 
 THE UNDERWORLD* 
 
 ANCIENT BREASTPLATE 
 REFERRED TO IN TEXT. 
 
 A GOVERNOR OF RAMESES IX. 
 From Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt. 
 
 THE GODDESS MAAT. 
 From Budge's Mummy, p. 29. 
 
 uppermost in the minds of the Egyptian people. She is 
 also spoken of in the dual form ma'ati, "the two truths," 
 
 * In the scale is the hieroglyphic for truth.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 83 
 
 as the goddess who attends to both punishments and re- 
 wards. 
 
 The goddess Ma'at is repeatedly mentioned in the oldest 
 extant Egyptian inscription which praises King Unas be- 
 cause "he loved truth (maa) . . . and the double truth 
 (maati) has heard him. . .the double truth has given com- 
 mand to let him pass through the realm of Seb, and to 
 make him rise at his pleasure. . . .And Unas cometh forth 
 on this day as the fruit of the truth (maa) of a living soul 
 . . . Unas cometh forth according to the truth, which brings 
 him his desire." 
 
 The adjective maa means "straight" or "level," then 
 "right" or "due," and also "genuine" or "real." 
 
 The emblem of Ma'at is the ostrich feather. As a god- 
 dess Ma'at is the patron of justice, and it is reported that 
 the chief judge wore her picture on a chain upon his breast. 
 The breastplate here reproduced shows Ma'at and the 
 hawkheaded Ra, seated on either side of an obelisk. The 
 picture of a governor under Rameses IX shows him in 
 his capacity as a judge, holding the ostrich feather of truth 
 
 in his left hand. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The Chinese word for "truth" is M chan, which is a 
 compound of the two characters A jan, "man," and ill 
 chih, "upright." The character jan appears in the two 
 strokes underneath the word chan. The word "upright" 
 is a compound of three radicals, which are ~h shih, "ten," 
 @ "eye," and L an abbreviation of H yin, which means 
 "hidden." The whole compound character is explained in 
 the Chinese dictionaries as "ten eyes see the hidden." The 
 word "ten" also means "perfect" or "complete," and so it 
 might as well mean, "a perfect vision of the hidden." 5 
 
 As the character chan, "truth," now reads, the radical 
 
 "The character chan, "truth," is found in Chinese dictionaries under the 
 radical No. 109, meaning "eye," as accompanied by five strokes.
 
 54 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 shih f "ten," on top of the old way of writing chan, is re- 
 placed by the radical No. 21, fc pi, "ladle," in the sense 
 "to compare" or "to change," and in this form the word 
 is explained according to the Taoist notion as referring 
 to the changes which spiritual beings or fairies undergo. 
 In explanation of this view we must state that under the 
 influence of mysticism the "true man" has come to denote 
 first a purely spiritual person, then a magician who can 
 change his shape at will. 
 
 The adjective "truthful" in Chinese is fit sin, and the 
 character consists of A "man" (in compounds on the left 
 side written thus 4 ) , and the word It yen, the latter being 
 composed of P "mouth" and four strokes above it, mean- 
 ing "what comes out of the mouth." The whole character 
 "truthful" accordingly depicts "a man standing by his 
 word," a pictorial description than which certainly no 
 better could be invented. 
 
 A DESCRIPTION OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 
 
 Before we enter into further explanations of the sig- 
 nificance of truth we will hear what philosophers have said 
 about it, how they define it and what they think about it. 
 
 But since many of their statements are vague and un- 
 clear, it will render a review of their definitions easier if 
 we know the state of things which suggested the coinage 
 of the word. It is advisable for this reason that we under- 
 stand exactly why and how the word originated and what 
 we ourselves mean by truth. If we are clear ourselves 
 we shall the quicker see what our predecessors intended 
 to say even when they missed the point or could not find the 
 right expression. 
 
 The need of communicating our intentions, our re- 
 quests and our ideas concerning things has produced lan- 
 guage; but incidentally while this purpose is fulfilled, lan- 
 guage accomplishes a task which grows in importance;
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 85 
 
 it clarifies the mind, it begets abstract ideas and thereby 
 produces that order in the methods of thought which is 
 called reason. The speaking animal becomes a rational 
 being. 
 
 All speech is representative. Every word stands for 
 something, and every sentence either is itself a declara- 
 tion or implies one. Every statement refers to some object 
 of thought which may be anything or of any kind and need 
 not be a bodily and concrete object. It may be a mere 
 relation and even, as in mathematics, a purely mental 
 conception, or the product of a mental function. 
 
 A declaration may describe its object of thought cor- 
 rectly or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately, 
 with exactness or inadequately. In the former case it is 
 called true; in the latter false, erroneous, untrue or in- 
 complete. 
 
 When we ask what truth means, we must first bear in 
 mind that truth always refers to a statement made con- 
 cerning some fact. If the statement describes the fact as 
 it is, it is called "true." We do not speak of facts as being 
 true; facts are either "real" or "unreal." The existence 
 of the chair, the table, the pen is not called "true," but the 
 statement that the chair on which I sit, or the table on 
 which I write, has four legs, is either "true" or "untrue." 
 A statement, as a rule, can be verified. We can count the 
 legs of the table, and if we count to four we say, "It is true 
 that the table has four legs." 
 
 Truth accordingly consists in a relation. There is a 
 subjective statement and an objective condition of things. 
 Truth means that the former properly describes or repre- 
 sents the latter. If I investigate and find my expectations 
 fulfilled, I call the statement true, and this correspondence, 
 this congruence of thought and thing, is called truth.
 
 86 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY. 
 
 A review of philosophical definitions of truth must 
 naturally be very incomplete, because not every philos- 
 opher has left a succinct exposition of the subject, and what 
 can be offered here is practically a mere compilation of 
 extracts made from the history of philosophy, having no 
 other merit than that they furnish a brief synopsis of 
 various views and explanations. 
 
 We will introduce our collection with a quotation from 
 the literature of the Old Testament Apocrypha, which is 
 not a definition but an appreciation of truth. It is not 
 philosophical but religious and reflects in general and emo 
 tional language the reverence in which truth is held by 
 mankind. We read in I Esdras, iv. 38-40: 
 
 "As for the truth, it endureth, and is always strong; it liveth 
 and conquereth for evermore. 
 
 "With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards ; 6 but she 
 doeth the things that are just, and refraineth from all unjust and 
 wicked things ; and all men do well like of her works. 
 
 "Neither in her judgment is any unrighteousness; and she is 
 the strength, kingdom, power, and majesty of all ages. Blessed be 
 the God of truth." 
 
 By turning from the Jewish literature to Greek philos- 
 ophy we must regret the absence of any definition of truth 
 among the oldest thinkers, since, with the exception of 
 a few extracts, quotations and general characterizations, 
 their writings have been lost. 
 
 The oldest Greek philosopher whose definition of truth 
 has been preserved is Parmenides of Elea. He was born 
 about 515 B. C, flourished in the beginning of the fifth 
 century and must have been advanced in years in the time 
 of Socrates. He was the philosopher of pure being to 
 whom reality appeared as merely phenomenal, and ac- 
 
 * In the place of "rewards," the word "privileges" would perhaps better 
 convey the meaning of the text.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 87 
 
 cording to him truth consists in the knowledge that being 
 is and not-being cannot be. The error accordingly arises 
 through the belief that not-being exists. This view of 
 Parmenides is preserved in a passage repeatedly quoted, 
 which according to Proclus in his commentary on Plato's 
 Timaeus (II, 105 b) reads thus: 7 
 
 "Listen and I will instruct thee and thou, when thou hearest, shalt 
 ponder, 
 
 One path is : That Being doth be, and Non-Being is not ; 
 
 This is the way of conviction, for Truth follows hard in her foot- 
 steps. 
 
 The other path is : That Being is not, and Non-Being must be ; 
 
 This one, I tell thee in truth, is an all-incredible pathway. 
 
 For thou never canst know what is not (for none can conceive it) 
 
 Nor canst thou give it expression, for one thing are Thinking and 
 Being." 
 
 We must remember that Parmenides identified pure 
 existence with the absolute conception of pure being, thus 
 identifying existence with pure thought. Plotinus quotes 
 from him, "For one thing are thinking and being," which 
 is thought to belong at the end of the passage just quoted, 
 and has therefore been included with it. 
 
 Plato was greatly influenced by Parmenides and recon- 
 ciled his views with the philosophy of Heraclitus, whose 
 system is characterized by the phrase TTOLVTO, /oet, "Every- 
 thing is in a flux." Plato's view of truth is condensed by 
 Ueberweg as follows: 8 
 
 "Plato opens the exposition of his physics in the Tim. (p. 28 et 
 seq.} with the affirmation that since the world bears the form of 
 yc'veo-is (development, becoming) and not that of true being (ovsia) 
 nothing absolutely certain can be laid down in this field of investi- 
 gation, but only what is probable (ei/cores 11x601). Our knowledge 
 of nature bears not the characters of science f$n*r%tf) or of the 
 
 1 The passage as quoted here is translated from Mullach's Fragmenta 
 Philosophorum Graecorum by Thomas Davidson in the Journal of Speculative 
 Philosophy, Vol. IV, No. I (January, 1870). 
 
 'History of Philosophy, New York, Scribners, 1903, I, 125.
 
 88 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 knowledge of truth (dAr^eia), but those of belief (TTIO-TIS). Plato 
 says (Tim., p. 290) : "What being is to becoming, that is truth to 
 faith" (o TI irep Trpos ylveaiv ovaLa, TOVTO Trpos TTIOTIV dA^eia). What 
 Plato says in the Phaedo, p. 114 d, explains his idea of the probable: 
 'Firmly to assert that this is exactly as I have expressed it, befits 
 not a man of intelligence ; yet that it is either so or something like it 
 (on rf TOUT' 60-riv rj TOMVT' O.TTO.} must certainly be assumed.' ' 
 
 Aristotle's definition of truth commends itself more 
 than Plato's to the scientist, and has been summed up by 
 Ueberweg thus (op. cit., I, 152) : 
 
 "Truth in a logical judgment is the correspondence of the com- 
 bination of mental representations with a combination of things, or 
 (in the case of the negative judgment) the correspondence of a 
 separation of representations in the mind with a separation of things ; 
 falsity in judgments is the variation of the ideal combination or 
 separation from the real relation of the things to which the judg- 
 ments relate." 
 
 Further down Ueberweg says concerning Aristotle: 
 
 "Truth in knowledge is the agreement of knowledge with real- 
 ity (Cdteg., C. 12: TO> yap etvat TO 7rpay/xa r) /u.rj a\if)ffi)<; o Adyos T; \f/ev8r)<i 
 Aeyerai)- This dictum is thus particularized, in Met., IV, 7, with 
 reference to the various possible cases: 'Affirming non-existence of 
 the existent, or existence of the non-existent, is falsehood; but 
 affirming existence of the existent, and non-existence of the non- 
 existent, is truth.' " 
 
 The Stoics have devoted themselves to explaining the 
 method by which truth becomes known, or, as we would 
 now say, they lay much stress on epistemology or the 
 theory of cognition, better expressed by the Saxon for- 
 mation "kenlore." According to them all knowledge 
 arises from sense perception, and the fundamental crite- 
 rion of truth is found in the distinctness with which sense 
 perceptions are represented in the mind. 
 
 Epicurus, though very different from the Stoics in his 
 ethics, agrees closely with their theory of cognition. His
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 89 
 
 criteria of truth are sensation and feeling. To him all 
 sensations are true and indisputable. 
 
 Here Epicurus ought to have said that sensations are 
 the ultimate data from which we derive our knowledge, 
 but a sensation cannot properly be called true. It is simply 
 a fact. 
 
 That Epicurus confused truth and reality appears from 
 his contention that no perception can be proved false (he 
 means unreal) and that even dreams and the hallucinations 
 of the insane are true, because they produce an impression 
 which the non-existent could not do. 
 
 The images of past sensations are remembered, and 
 Epicurus calls them representations. Beliefs are called 
 true or false in so far as they are confirmed or refuted by 
 sensations. It is noteworthy that Epicurus disregarded 
 the value of logical syllogism because according to his view 
 no syllogism could supply the place of direct sensation. It 
 is interesting to note that this view is paralleled in India 
 by the materialist school, the Charvakas or Lokayatas, 
 who also deny that logical argument can carry conviction 
 because they claim that the only source of information is 
 sense-perception. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DOCTRINE OF TWO TRUTHS. 
 
 Augustine understands by truth the norm according 
 to which reason argues, and he declares that it must be un- 
 changeable (De lib. arb., II, 3). To reach the unchange- 
 able is to him the attainment of truth. He says (De vera 
 rel, 72 f ) : 
 
 "If thou findest thy nature to be changeable, rise above thyself 
 to the eternal source of the light of reason. Even if thou only 
 knowest that thou doubtest, thou knowest what is true ; but nothing 
 is true unless truth exists. Hence it is impossible to doubt the 
 existence of the truth itself." 
 
 Truth and existence are the same according to St.
 
 9O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Augustine, and he identifies them with God (De vera rel., 
 57; De trin., VIII, 3). This ultimate truth is the highest 
 good in virtue of which all other blessings are good (De 
 trin., VIII, 4). Created things stand in a contrast to the 
 unchangeable highest good and thus indirectly the muta- 
 bility of created things reminds us of the immutability of 
 truth. 
 
 Thomas Aquinas defines truth as adaequatio intellectus 
 et rei, which is best translated as "agreement of thought 
 and thing." 
 
 During the Middle Ages the church claimed the author- 
 ity of a special divine revelation as the source of truth, 
 its truth, the truth of ecclesiastical dogmas. 
 
 In Spain where in a Mohammedan country a high 
 civilization had developed we find a distinction made be- 
 tween esoteric and exoteric truth. Revealed religion was 
 the truth made palatable to the masses, it was exoteric, 
 while esoteric truth was the special privilege of the thinker, 
 and it was not deemed necessary for the two to agree. In 
 a similar way and not without the influence of Averroes 
 and Maimonides the conflict between scientific truth and 
 religious truth led to the theory of the two truths, theolog- 
 ical and philosophical, and it was assumed that what is 
 true in theology need not be true in philosophy and vice 
 versa. Prof. M. Maywald has made a special study of this 
 strange aberration in his book Die Lehre von der zwei- 
 fachen Wahrheit, Berlin, 1871, and Windelband condenses 
 this subject in his History of Philosophy (pp. 320-321) as 
 follows : 
 
 "If, by theology, we understand the exposition of the positive 
 doctrine of religion, arranged and defended according to the formal 
 laws of science, i. e., Aristotelian logic, and this was the form 
 which the relation of theology to religion had taken in the West as 
 in the East, it follows that something may be true theologically 
 which is not true philosophically, and vice versa. Thus is explained
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 91 
 
 that doctrine of the twofold truth, theological and philosophical, 
 which went through the entire Middle Ages, although we cannot 
 exactly fix the authorship of this formula. It is the adequate ex- 
 pression of the mental state necessarily brought about by the oppo- 
 sition of the two authorities under which the Middle Ages stood, 
 viz., Hellenistic science and religious tradition ; and while at a later 
 time it often served to protect scientific theories from the persecu- 
 tion of the church, it was for the most part, even in these cases, the 
 honest expression of the inner discord in which just the most im- 
 portant minds of the age found themselves. 
 
 "The science of the Christian peoples accepted this antithesis, 
 and while the doctrine of the twofold truth was expressly pro- 
 claimed by bold dialecticians such as Simon of Tournay, or John 
 of Brescia, and was all the more rigidly condemned by the power 
 of the church, the leading minds could not evade the fact that phi- 
 losophy, as it had been developed under the influence of Aristotle 
 and the Arabians, was, and must remain, in its inner nature, alien 
 to precisely those doctrines of the Christian religion which were 
 specific and distinctive." 
 
 The doctrine of the twofold truth found its most ener- 
 getic champion in the French savant Pierre Bayle. Albertus 
 Magnus had distinguished between natural and revealed 
 religion, but he clung to the idea that there might be no 
 contradiction between the two. He tried to show that 
 what science and philosophy teach holds good also in the- 
 ology, but that certain realms inaccessible to natural in- 
 sight (lumen naturale} could be entered only through the 
 mysteries of revelation. Pierre Bayle, however, went so 
 far as to declare that all doctrines of the church were posi- 
 tively contrary to reason, indeed that they were absurd 
 from the standpoint of science. He thus exemplified the 
 sentence credo quia absurdum. But the doctrine of the 
 double truth proved a two-edged sword and in the long 
 run served more to weaken than to establish confidence in 
 the traditional religious belief. 
 
 The church itself with its usual instinctive foresight 
 would not brook the doctrines of the twofold truth, and the
 
 92 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Lateran Council of 1512 condemned this distinction and 
 pronounced everything false which stood in contradiction 
 to revelation. 
 
 MODERN THINKERS. 
 
 Spinoza inserts his definition of truth among the axioms, 
 in the sixth of which he states that "the true representa- 
 tion must agree with the object represented." 
 
 Hume is a skeptic and so has little to say about truth 
 except that all positive attempts at stating truth are futile. 
 
 Kant, who was awakened from his dogmatic slumber 
 by Hume's skepticism, so changed his attitude toward the 
 data of knowledge that instead of a conception of truth 
 he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason an inventory 
 of our faculty of working out sense experience into scien- 
 tific knowledge. He calls his system "critical idealism" 
 and says that since things-in-themselves are unknowable, 
 human knowledge is limited to phenomena. Thus it hap- 
 pens that reason is practically our norm of knowledge; 
 but it may not be accidental that he has nowhere discussed 
 the problem of truth. It is as if this problem had lost its 
 usual significance in his philosophy, and so we find that 
 the very caption of truth is not listed in Gustav Wegener's 
 Kant-Lexikon. 
 
 Schopenhauer adopts Kant's idealism, but he repeatedly 
 discusses the nature of truth and insists most emphatically 
 on its consistency, saying that truth alone agrees through- 
 out with itself and with nature while all wrong views clash 
 internally with themselves and externally with experience. 
 In fact experience protests step by step against errors. 9 
 One truth can never upset another, but all must ultimately 
 agree because no contradiction is possible in intuition (An- 
 schauung} which is their common foundation. Thus no 
 
 Cf. Grundprobe der Ethik, 258, and Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, 
 114.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 93 
 
 truth can be in fear of another. Fraud and error, how- 
 ever, must stand in awe of every truth. All truths form 
 one system. They postulate and complement one another 
 while error collides everywhere. 10 Schopenhauer distin- 
 guishes between general truths and special truths, and of 
 these he rates general truths the higher, as gold is more 
 valuable than silver. Gold can always be easily changed 
 into small coin. 11 
 
 Schopenhauer distinguishes between correct, true, real 
 and evident, saying that concepts are correct, judgments 
 are true, material things are real, and interrelations such 
 as mathematical figures are evident. When he speaks of 
 the foundation of truth as being based on intuition (An- 
 schauung) he means such knowledge as is contained in 
 geometrical and arithmetical theorems, which in Kant's 
 terminology is called a priori and according to Schopen- 
 hauer is based on Anschauung or intuition whose truth 
 appears or becomes evident by merely contemplating the 
 interrelations of geometrical figures. 
 
 There are four kinds of truth according to Schopen- 
 hauer. One is purely formal or logical, referring to syl- 
 logisms and correctness of deductions; the second is em- 
 pirical, referring to statements of fact; the third is tran- 
 scendental where the word is used in the sense of Kant's 
 terminology. It comprises judgments of pure mathemat- 
 ical and pure natural science (referring mainly to the law 
 of causation). The fourth kind of truth is metalogical, 
 referring to the conditions of thinking itself. 
 
 Schopenhauer's philosophy, as is well known, insists 
 on the dominance of the will. The intellect, though really 
 the priestess of truth, is misused by the will as his hand- 
 maid, for the will in Schopenhauer's system plays the part 
 of the devil. But some of his successors, especially Nietz- 
 
 19 Panerga und Paralipomena, II, 253, and I, 136. 
 
 "P. U. P., 11,22.
 
 94 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 sche, accept upon the whole the foundation of Schopen- 
 hauer's world-conception, but they deify the will and claim 
 that the intellect ought to be secondary. Nietzsche goes 
 so far as to deny the right of truth to exist except by the 
 gracious permission of the will, and this same tendency 
 to give preeminence to the will has invaded other circles, 
 as we have seen, and has found definite expression in prag- 
 matism. The great question remains whether or not truth 
 is possible at all, and with this question ethics stands and 
 falls as well as science, for if there is no standard of truth 
 neither can there be a standard of right and wrong. 
 
 The average opinion as to the nature and function of 
 truth among modern scientists is characterized by John 
 Theodore Merz, who speaks as follows in his History of 
 European Thought in the Nineteenth Century: 12 
 
 "At one time and that not very long ago the word truth 
 seemed to indicate to the seeker not only the right method and road 
 for attaining knowledge, but also the end, the crown of knowledge. 
 'Truth, and nothing but truth,' seems still to the popular mind the 
 right maxim for seeking knowledge the whole truth stands before 
 it as the unity of all knowledge, were it found. I think it is now 
 sufficiently clear to the scientific inquirer, as well as to the philosopher, 
 that love of truth, while it does indeed denote the moral attitude 
 of the inquiring mind, is insufficient to define either the path or the 
 end of knowledge. 'What is truth?' is still the unsolved question. 
 The criteria of truth are still unsettled. It would, indeed, be a sor- 
 rowful experience, a calamity of unparalleled magnitude, if ever 
 the moral ideas of truth and faith should disappear out of the soul 
 of either the active worker or the inquiring thinker ; but it is with 
 these as with other treasures of our moral nature, such as goodness 
 and holiness, beauty and poetry our knowledge of them does not 
 begin, nor does it increase, by definition ; and though in the un- 
 thinking years of our childhood we acquire and appropriate these 
 moral possessions through the words of our mother-tongue, they 
 rarely gain in depth or meaning by logical distinctions which we 
 may learn, or to which we have to submit, in later life. These do 
 
 u English translation, p. 29 f.
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 95 
 
 not touch the essence, though very frequently they may succeed in 
 destroying the depth, of our convictions. 
 
 "In the place, then, of the high-sounding but indefinable search 
 after truth, modern science has put an elaborate method of inquiry : 
 this method has to be learned by patient practice, and not by listening 
 to a description of it. It is laid down in the works of those modern 
 heroes of science, from Galileo and Newton onward, who have prac- 
 tised it successfully, and from whose writings philosophers from 
 Bacon to Comte and Mill have not without misunderstanding and 
 error tried to extract the rationale." 
 
 While knowing that this is the average opinion of our 
 scientists we must enter a vigorous protest against the 
 proposition that "the criteria of truth are still unsettled." 
 It is true enough that "the scientific method has to be 
 learned by patient practice, not by listening to a descrip- 
 tion of it," but that what has been successfully practised 
 by the heroes of science from Galileo down to Lord Kelvin, 
 Hertz and their most recent successors, should be equiv- 
 ocal and doubtful is not true. The methods of an investi- 
 gation of truth are not vague nor indefinite. Our scien- 
 tists rely on observations unequivocal and reliable, which 
 are made by mechanical contrivances, registry machines, 
 instruments of precision, with photography and chemical 
 reactions, according to circumstances. We always have 
 a combination of sense perception, which at present is ren- 
 dered more reliable by the invention of various devices, the 
 machinery of the scientist, with the calculation of arith- 
 metic, mathematical construction or logical argumentation. 
 In brief, the scientific method is, as cognition has always 
 been since the beginning of the human race, sense experi- 
 ence treated by the rules of reason (the purely formal 
 sciences). Sense experience furnishes the fact in question, 
 reason (that is, the sum total of all purely formal modes 
 of reasoning) furnishes the method of treating the facts, 
 of classifying and systematizing them.
 
 96 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 TRUTH AND MIND. 
 
 There is an unmistakable agreement among most of 
 these different opinions as to the nature of truth. It seems 
 that all philosophers of the world bear in mind a certain 
 ideal and are guided by the same tendency only with more 
 or less lucidity and with more or less depth. It is plain 
 that truth is a relation, and it always denotes an agree- 
 ment between thought as stated in a formula and the 
 object of thought, whatever the latter may be. If this 
 object of thought be called "thing" we can accept unhesi- 
 tatingly the definition of Thomas Aquinas that truth is the 
 agreement between thought and thing (adaequatio intel- 
 lectus et rei) ; in fact this is the simplest definition, but it 
 needs further explanation as to the nature of both thought 
 and thing. 
 
 Truth is in thought and in thought only. There is no 
 truth elsewhere. What is sometimes called truth ought 
 to be called reality or existence, actuality, fact or what- 
 ever else we may call the objective meaning of a thought. 
 There is a great difference between existence and truth. 
 Facts (by which we mean concrete things, events or con- 
 ditions that obtain independent of what anyone may think 
 of them) are real, while truths are correct images, symbols, 
 descriptions, or representations of such facts. The sense 
 impressions of which a sentient being becomes conscious 
 are not truths but facts. They are the data from which 
 we construct our knowledge of the objective world. These 
 sense impressions are the results of impacts made by the 
 surrounding world upon a sentient being . Sense impres- 
 sions are states of awareness which come to indicate the 
 presence of the causes producing them, and thus these sense 
 impressions acquire meaning, or, as we might say, are 
 worked out into sense perceptions. The external impacts 
 are physical facts ether waves that strike the eye, air
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 97 
 
 waves that strike the ear, mechanical impressions that affect 
 the skin, etc. Sense impressions are psychical, they are 
 states of feelings, and sense perceptions are mental. 
 
 As soon as a sense perception begins to stand for its 
 external cause and is interpreted to picture, delineate or 
 characterize an outside fact, we have to deal with mind, 
 and mind is the domain of truth. While a sense impression 
 is a fact, a sense perception may be true or false. 
 
 Sense impressions work with the infallibility of natural 
 laws, and they are nature's work over which we have no 
 control; but sense perceptions are our own doing. They 
 are the result of a reaction which takes place in us in re- 
 sponse to a number of sense impressions. Every sense 
 perception, even in its simplest form, is an unconscious 
 judgment. It presupposes that a sense impression of the 
 same kind has been received and has left a trace in the 
 sentient substance. If then a new sense impression of the 
 same kind is made, it fits into the path left by the trace of 
 the former sense impression and revives it. Thus we have 
 two feelings, that of the new sense impression and the 
 revived memory of the former sense impression, but in 
 addition there originates another and a new feeling by the 
 fusion of the two which is the perception of the two being 
 of the same kind. The analogy to a logical syllogism is 
 obvious. The memory of the preceding impression repre- 
 sents the major premise, under which the new sense im- 
 pression is subsumed as the minor premise, and the feel- 
 ing that the impression fits is tantamount to the conclusion 
 that the subjects of the premises belong to the same cat- 
 egory. 
 
 So far as prior and subsequent sense impressions tally 
 correctly, they are appropriately called true, and the truth 
 consists in the correct subsumption of what belongs in the 
 same class. Thus truth in its simplest shape is the fitting of 
 a certain form of feeling in its proper place, or by impli-
 
 98 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 cation the correctness of the unconscious judgment that 
 the new sense impression is the same in kind as the pre- 
 ceding one and indicates the presence of the same cause. 
 Truth and mind are twins, and truth is co-existent with 
 mind. When sense impressions acquire meaning, when 
 they develop into perceptions, mind originates and the 
 origin of mind denotes the birth of truth, and also of the 
 possibility of error. 
 
 SENSE PERCEPTIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS. 
 
 The formation of sense perceptions is the beginning 
 of mind, but by the side of sense perceptions there are 
 hallucinations. Does not their mere existence obviously 
 invalidate the character of sense perceptions, especially 
 their reliability, and does it not thereby throw suspicion 
 upon truth? 
 
 We grant the occurrence of hallucinations, but their 
 prevalence no more invalidates the reliability of sense per- 
 ceptions than the prevalence of error invalidates or renders 
 doubtful the character of truth. We must only bear in 
 mind that with the appearance of truth there necessarily 
 rises the possibility of error, and this happens at the very 
 beginning of the origin of mind. In other words, as soon 
 as sense impressions change into sense-perceptions there 
 appears the possibility of mistakes. If a sense impression 
 receives a wrong interpretation it is called an hallucination. 
 Here is an instance. 
 
 The eye of a sentient being gazes fixedly at a red figure 
 on a white sheet of paper and this red spot on the retina 
 is rightly conceived and interpreted by the resulting sense 
 perception. Now the paper is withdrawn, but the image 
 persists, except that in place of the red figure a blue spot 
 of the same outline appears in view, and this seems almost 
 as tangible and real as was the red figure. We call it 
 the after-image of the red figure, and its nature is suffi-
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 99 
 
 ciently explained in the physiology of optics. This after- 
 image is as truly a sensation and it is as real as is the 
 original sense impression, and if we interpret it rightly 
 to be an after-image we cannot speak of it as an hallucina- 
 tion. But suppose the eye were part of the organism of 
 an unsophisticated person who knows nothing about sense 
 illusions, the after-image would naturally be interpreted 
 to indicate the presence of a blue figure, and this wrong 
 interpretation would be called an hallucination. 
 
 Hallucinations accordingly are sensations produced by 
 internal causes which are wrongly interpreted to be of ex- 
 ternal origin. There may be hallucinations of all the senses 
 even tactual and gustatory, but the auditory hallucina- 
 tions caused by some internal disturbance of the ear and 
 also of the center of hearing are the most common. Next 
 to them in frequency are visions which are the hallucina- 
 tions of the sense of sight, frequently caused by disturb- 
 ances in the eye, specks in the circulating fluids of the outer 
 eye or on the retina, but they are sometimes also caused 
 by an abnormal excitation of the cerebral center of vision. 
 
 The sensory part of hallucinations is an actual fact and 
 is as real as any sense impression; the fault of hallucina- 
 tions lies in the wrong interpretation which is superadded 
 by the mind. Therefore, it has been rightly remarked, 
 it is wrong to speak of sense illusions, for in these so-called 
 sense illusions the senses remain reliable, and it is the 
 mind which errs. Sense illusions are instances of such 
 circumstances as are apt to mislead our judgment, but they 
 are really mental mistakes. They are in the domain of 
 sense perception what in the realm of our intellectual ac- 
 tivity is called error, a failure to attain the truth. 
 
 The field of hallucinations is wide but we need not enter 
 into further details. We will only say that dreams are 
 natural occurrences, and we may call them hallucinations 
 experienced in sleep or in any subconscious state in which
 
 IOO TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 the normal waking consciousness is temporarily oblite- 
 rated. The sensory experience of dreams is as real or at 
 least may be as real as the sense impressions of a normal 
 life, and a scientifically educated man knows them to be 
 dreams. But if a nervous patient or the untrained Indian 
 assumes dreams to be realities, he falls into an error, and 
 then his dreams especially if they occur in a half awake 
 state of mind which sometimes may happen become hal- 
 lucinations. 
 
 UNIVERSALS AND THEIR CORRELATES. 
 
 Thus we see that the foundations of truth are laid by 
 nature herself in accordance with natural law and with 
 the same precision as that which originates in a machine 
 by mechanical necessity. This mechanical necessity is pos- 
 sible only on the supposition that the world is law-ordained, 
 that the beams of light are such and always such, that the 
 same causes under the same conditions always produce the 
 same results, and that this world is a world of uniformities, 
 not a sporadic chaos. If the world were a sporadic chaos, 
 mind could not have originated even in its most primitive 
 beginning. In fact mind is nothing but the systematic 
 upbuilding of the lawdom (Gesetxmdssigkeit) that pre- 
 vails in the world, and we may say that this lawdom is the 
 ultimate basis of truth; it is the condition which makes 
 truth possible. 
 
 Facts appear to be chaotic. Not one is exactly like any 
 other. All the various facts that appear in existence pre- 
 sent a kaleidoscopic irregularity which in itself appears 
 to be a hopelessly confused tangle. If mind did not origi- 
 nate, the world would remain a meaningless play of blind 
 forces. But the very origin of mind proves that law rules 
 in the world of facts, and all these innumerable items of 
 material existence and this display of unlimited forces is
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. IOI 
 
 subject to rule, which makes it possible to formulate all 
 occurrences into general formulas. 
 
 There has been much discussion in the history of phi- 
 losophy about universals, and two contradictory views have 
 been taken of this much mooted subject. There are on the 
 one side thinkers who see in universals the only true real- 
 ity, the true being or cWoos 6v, and on the other side ob- 
 servers of nature who look upon them as mere generali- 
 zations which have no true existence and have been in- 
 vented merely for the purpose of classifying the real things. 
 Both views are right, but both are one-sided, and much 
 depends upon the meaning of the word "real." If it means 
 "thingish," as the word implies, universals are nonentities, 
 for they are not things, nor objects, nor concrete material 
 bodies, they cannot be touched by hands or perceived by 
 any one of the senses. 
 
 If concrete actuality of existence is the meaning of 
 "real" we must absolutely grant that universals do not 
 possess reality. From this standpoint the nominalists speak 
 of universals as flatus vocis, as words, and more modern 
 followers of this line of thought treat them as devices for 
 thinking the realities of life. Materially considered uni- 
 versals are non-existent. They are products of the scien- 
 tist's imagination and neither telescopes nor microscopes, 
 no chemist's crucible nor physicist's scales will ever dis- 
 cover the slightest trace of the actual existence of uni- 
 versals, natural laws, formulas, Platonic Ideas, or any- 
 thing that belongs to that class. 
 
 Now let us consider the opposite view. Does the nom- 
 inalist school or any one of their type really mean to say 
 that universals are mere flatus vocis, mere generalizations, 
 mere contrivances to think the world more easily? Many 
 men of this type actually say so, but do they truly mean it ? 
 Would they really be prepared to say that universals pos- 
 sess no objective meaning, that there is nothing corre-
 
 IO2 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 spending to them in the actual world? We have granted 
 that no actual things, no material entities correspond to 
 them. They are not divinities presiding over certain de- 
 partments of nature as represented in the mythology of the 
 religions of the past, nor are they metaphysical essences 
 which somehow mysteriously underlie the phenomena of 
 nature. Nevertheless there is no one who would be pre- 
 pared to deny that there are certain somethings corre- 
 sponding to them in the actual world, and that these some- 
 things are the very factors which shape the world. These 
 somethings are not of a material nature, nor are they 
 energies; they are of a purely formal nature, they are re- 
 lations, shapes, arrangements of parts in one way or an- 
 other. Yet these purely formal arrangements are the es- 
 sential conditions of the world of material actuality which 
 determine new formations, and so we cannot say that in 
 every respect they are nonentities. 
 
 It is obvious that reality or thingishness and actuality, 
 which means that the material things act, that they do 
 something, that they move about, that there is an active 
 play of forces summarized under the term of energy, are 
 not the whole of existence. There is some additional fea- 
 ture which is non-material and has nothing to do with 
 energy. It is the shape, the interrelation, the form, the 
 direction, the arrangement in which either forces or mate- 
 rial particles are combined, and this interrelational some- 
 thing is the true factor that moulds the world and is the 
 reason why this enormous congeries of atoms is not a 
 chaos but a law-ordained cosmos. 
 
 We must not overlook the fact that in addition to form 
 there is another non-material element ensouling the world, 
 and this is that indescribable something which develops 
 into human consciousness. It is feeling, the peculiar char- 
 acteristic of which appears in awareness. For reasons 
 into which we need not enter here, we assume that the
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. IO3 
 
 whole world is aglow with a potentiality of feeling, which 
 in a philosophical term we may call subjectivity. Subjectiv- 
 ity emerges from purely physical conditions and finally de- 
 velops in the course of a long evolution into the thinking 
 subject. But even this psychic element of subjectivity 
 would have remained forever a scintillating chaos of sub- 
 conscious feelings if its elements had not been arranged 
 into an orderly whole according to the laws of pure form. 
 It is the orderly interrelation of elementary subjectivity 
 which in a nervous system makes feeling possible; it is 
 further the proper classification of feelings of the same 
 form which renders feelings representative; and finally it 
 produces reason in the natural course of the evolution of 
 mentality. 
 
 The significance of interrelations, of the mode or ar- 
 rangement, of form, has been strangely overlooked in 
 philosophy, while it has produced in minds of a mystic 
 turn fantastic views as to the nature of spirit, soul and 
 God. Opponents of mysticism have always been inclined 
 to deny the existence of anything spiritual. They try to do 
 without believing in spirit, soul, or God, and certainly they 
 are right in denying the mythology attached to these no- 
 tions. Nevertheless the facts remain, and the facts which 
 produce these notions are explicable by the significance of 
 relations and forms, and though the purely formal laws 
 as laws have no objective existence, there are purely formal 
 relations which are of utmost importance, and though they 
 are not real in the literal sense of reality, though they are 
 not thingish, they are not for that reason negligible quan- 
 tities, for they are the most essential feature of all exist- 
 ence. In fact all comprehension, all cognition, all intel- 
 lectual activity becomes possible only through them. When 
 we speak of reality and actuality, we refer merely to state- 
 ments of fact. These names reality and actuality, in other 
 words, matter and energy conta*" nothing that can be
 
 IO4 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 understood or would become in any way an object of com- 
 prehension. All comprehension consists in tracing trans- 
 formations of matter or the changes of the forms of energy. 
 Matter and energy simply represent the "that" of exist- 
 ence, not the why or the wherefore. 
 
 Accordingly we come to the conclusion that there are 
 objective correlates of our subjective thoughts, of univer- 
 sals, of the laws of nature, and also of the unities of parts 
 which combine into things. Though they are neither con- 
 crete objects nor metaphysical essences, they possess an 
 objective significance. They are traceable in the uniformities 
 of nature and the laws in which we summarize these uni- 
 formities are true and reliable descriptions of definite fea- 
 tures of the constitution of the world. We call these de- 
 scriptions, these laws of nature, these generalized state- 
 ments of fact, truths, and the instinctive reverence which 
 men at large have for these truths is well grounded. 
 
 THE ONENESS OF ALL TRUTHS. 
 
 Experience has taught us to look upon all truths as 
 one great system of more or less general uniformities, 
 which are co-, sub- and super-ordinated in such a way 
 that all of them complement one another and that the 
 more general truths comprise and thereby explain the 
 more particular ones, while the latter are specifications of 
 the former. At any rate we expect that no two truths shall 
 contradict one another. They form contrasts but never 
 come in conflict with each other. The more they stand in 
 contrast the more they are supplementary. This leads to 
 the assumption of the unison, the harmoniousness, the 
 consistency, of all truths. To state the case from the oppo- 
 site point of view, we assume a priori that there cannot be 
 any contradiction in truth, and so we try to harmonize all 
 contrasts that might occur in the field of our observation. 
 
 The a priori assumption of the unity of all truth which
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. IO5 
 
 finally abuts in the theory of the oneness and consistency 
 of all existence, called monism, is as a principle of thinking 
 ultimately based in the systematic unity of our mind. The 
 human mind has been built up during the course of its de- 
 velopment as a collection of uniformities and these uniform- 
 ities have classified themselves in proper order according 
 to their sameness, similarity and kinship, so that the whole 
 constitutes a system, and this system represents the proto- 
 type of logic. The rules of logic have been deduced from 
 it, and in this sense the human mind is predestined to pro- 
 duce in its further development certain ideas which such 
 philosophers as Leibnitz call "innate." 
 
 The human mind has reached that point of mental de- 
 velopment in which a sentient being can designate by name 
 the several co-, sub- and superordinated classes and become 
 conscious of their interrelation. The animal mind cannot 
 do so and yet it acts instinctively as if it were possessed 
 of logic. The reason is that its composite memory images 
 are logically arranged and operate like a living machine in 
 a perfectly logical order. Through the instrumentality 
 of language this interrelation can be objectified in terms 
 of abstract thought and presented in systematic form. This 
 system of interrelations becomes a conscious faculty of 
 thought, called reason, which is used as a method for an 
 orderly arrangement of ideas. In its highest perfection 
 the application of this method is called science. 
 
 Reason enables man to see in every single occurrence 
 an instance of a general rule, and if general rules describe 
 real uniformities, if they possess correlates in the objective 
 world, we call them truths. 
 
 We understand now that the domain of truth and the 
 realm of the mind are coextensive, and mind is practically 
 nothing but the embodiment of the most common truths 
 of the world order, the logic of which in its systematized 
 form we call reason.
 
 IO6 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 
 
 We will here forestall a common error frequently com- 
 mitted by beginners and would-be philosophers, which is 
 this, that the most general truths ought to contain the key 
 to all the riddles of the world. In a certain sense this is true 
 enough because an important part of explanation consists 
 in subsuming a certain set of experiences under its proper 
 caption, but all explanations presuppose also a knowledge 
 of the reason why in specific cases a general rule will pro- 
 duce specific results. The power of generalization is the 
 first development of mentality, the power of discrimination 
 is its more subtle and also more difficult correlate. Those 
 who praise a man for his power of generalization, forget 
 that the savage, as well as the superficial investigator, is 
 great in generalizing all things, but that he is weak in 
 making the necessary discriminations. In fact, wrong gen- 
 eralizations are a common source of many errors, and no 
 scientist can attain distinction unless he is keen in dis- 
 crimination. 
 
 Truths are discovered, they are not invented. Though 
 truths belong to the mind and exist only in the mind in 
 the thinking subject, they have an objective significance 
 and describe conditions which obtain somewhere or some- 
 how independent of the mind. 
 
 When we say truths are discovered we mean that they 
 cannot be different, and it is not in our power to shape them 
 as we please. They are predetermined and this again im- 
 plies that in some form or other they exist as potentialities. 
 At the same time the conditions which are formulated in the 
 laws of nature are potent factors of reality; they are the 
 prototypes of our truths and we call them "verities." While 
 the verities in their totality as the sum total of the deter- 
 minants of the world order correspond to God the Creator 
 or God the Father in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, 
 a perfect system of all the truths would correspond to God 
 the Son, truths being incarnations of the verities. In addi-
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. 1 07 
 
 tion to the contrast between verities and truths, there is a 
 middle ground composed of those ideas which tend to set 
 the world in harmony with the cosmic order and these are 
 called ideals. These ideals in so far as they pursue the 
 right tendency represent the third person of the Trinity, 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Truths are subjective statements, but the reason why 
 they are truths and deserve this high name is their agree- 
 ment with their objective correlates, and it is noteworthy 
 that these objective correlates are not concrete things but 
 features of things, relations, proportions of interdepen- 
 dence, and other items or events determined by definite 
 causes such as can be subsumed under general formulas. 
 These objective correlates of truth are not concrete things, 
 nor divinities, nor metaphysical essences ; the formulas are 
 mere generalizations, and what corresponds to them are 
 generalities of existence which however are not nonentities. 
 They are not material, not concrete, they are interrelations 
 and thus belong to the domain of pure forms. A compre- 
 hension of them transforms sentient creatures from the 
 state of brute animals into rational beings, and the objec- 
 tive counterparts, though mere interrelations of the mate- 
 rial universe, constitute the factors which determine its de- 
 velopment and mould the inert mass of material existence 
 into that grand law-ordained cosmos as which we com- 
 prehend the universe. 
 
 The formulas which correctly describe the uniformities 
 that obtain in the universe, are truths, and the same term 
 is sometimes also applied to their objective correlates; but 
 for the sake of clearness we here distinguish between the 
 two and have called the latter "verities." 
 
 Pragmatism denies the existence of verities. It does 
 not believe in consistency and repudiates the unity of truth. 
 It knows only truths in the plural and these truths have
 
 IO8 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 no objective significance; they are shifting and without 
 stability. 
 
 The better we know the uniformities of nature, of so- 
 cial interrelations and of all the phases of life, the more 
 profoundly conversant do we become with the constitution 
 of the universe, or in other words, the more we know of 
 truth the farther does our soul extend and the deeper does 
 it fathom the world. Truths are the subjective reflection 
 of the verities that sustain the universe. The more we 
 know of truth, the higher shall we rise in the course of evo- 
 lution, the better adapted shall we be to the conditions of 
 life, the more powerful shall we become, the higher shall 
 be our dignity and our worth, and the nearer shall we be 
 unto God, for what is God but that systematic unison of 
 all the correlates of truth? God is the oneness of all the 
 verities of existence. 
 
 In the same way as uniformities are not mere subjective 
 notions, not mere names, but designate definite conditions 
 in the objective world, the things \vhich we meet with in 
 experience are not mere conglomerations of parts. True 
 things, by which we here mean objects of experience which 
 are rightly conceived as unities are not arbitrarily so named 
 and are not of a purely subjective nature. The unity of 
 the thing in our conception corresponds to a unity of its 
 parts in the objective world. It is true that what we call 
 things are bundles of sensations, and we can analyze things 
 into their constituent parts, but the bond of union is of 
 deep significance. An engine is not the sum total of its 
 parts, but the arrangement of its parts in such an inter- 
 relation that it will do work, and so we must grant that 
 combinations, groupings, forms, interrelations produce de- 
 finite and actual effects. 
 
 And what is the test that an aggregate of parts con- 
 stitutes a true unity, a thing worthy of the name ? A true 
 thing must not be a mere addition of its parts, not a mere
 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH. IO9 
 
 summation of its elements, not a mechanical mixture of its 
 ingredients, but a combination into a systematic whole 
 which possesses an individuality of its own; and the test 
 is that a thing which is not a mere quantitative aggregate 
 but constitutes a higher configuration into something new 
 is qualitatively different from its parts. 
 
 To look upon formations, the relational factors, or the 
 purely formal aspect of things as nonentities, because they 
 are not material items is a misconception of the paramount 
 significance of form. I not only grant, I even insist most 
 emphatically that there are no "things-in-themselves," no 
 unknown or unknowable metaphysical magnitudes behind 
 the world of experience, but for all that I recognize the 
 objective significance of things, the efficiency of formations, 
 of natural laws, of uniformities, and also the importance 
 of the idea of unity, the highest realizations of which are 
 found in organisms, plants, animals and above all in human 
 personalities.
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 ' I "RUTH has been on trial. The very backbone of truth, 
 J. its consistency, the unison of all truths, has been 
 doubted and even denied. The belief in the stability of 
 truth, in its persistence and eternality, has been denounced 
 as a superstition. 
 
 So far truth has guided us safely from the beginning 
 of mentality ; it has endowed man with reason, it has cre- 
 ated the sciences, inspired the inventor's imagination and 
 is still leading mankind onward on the path of progress, 
 but it has grown old-fashioned, and the new generation 
 has become tired of it. The old truth is the living water 
 which nourishes, sustains and quickens every fiber of our 
 mental constitution, but this generation is thirsty for inno- 
 vations. They are sick of the monotony of a truth that is 
 true to itself; they hanker for a truth that is variegated, 
 fickle, multi-significant. So they leave this venerable ideal 
 and look upon it as an idol. It no longer fits into the pro- 
 gram of the "new thought" movement, and pragmatism 
 replaces it by a more elastic kind of truth which can change 
 with the fashions and makes it possible that we need no 
 longer trouble about inconsistencies; for what is true to 
 one need no longer be true to others, and the truth of to-day 
 may be the real now, and yet it may become the error of 
 to-morrow. The new conception of truth flatly contradicts 
 the old rigorous and inconvenient notion according to 
 which no two truths can be contradictory. The pluralistic
 
 CONCLUSION. Ill 
 
 truth is more accommodating, for it lets all contradictions 
 pass and dispenses with the exacting demands of the old 
 ideal of consistency. 
 
 This new truth conception is a fad that has its day but 
 will pass by, for truth, the old time-worn and time-honored 
 ideal of truth as being one and eternal, will sooner or later 
 assert itself again. We cannot live without truth, and the 
 new truth is a pseudo-truth that cannot help us. Those 
 who resent truth's sternness and stability prefer to conceive 
 truth as an errant light which points in one direction to- 
 day and in another to-morrow. This truth is a will-o'-the- 
 wisp which does not throw light on the path of progress 
 but entices its followers to wend their way into the quag- 
 mire of opinions and opinionated subjectivism. 
 
 In the meantime the truth continues to encompass us, 
 for tf uly all our mental life lives by the grace of truth, and 
 in it every creature that thinks, lives and moves and has 
 its being. 
 
 Truth, most wonderful presence in the life of man, thou 
 encompassest our every throb of thought. Thou art God 
 incarnate in our soul. Without thee spirituality would 
 never have risen into being, the light of cognition would 
 not shine, and chaotic darkness would prevail. Without 
 thee this world would be a congeries of dull matter and a 
 play of blind forces void of meaning and void of purpose. 
 
 How ineffably great art thou, O Truth, and yet thou 
 hidest even in things trivial. The senses can not find 
 thee, for thou art not made of matter, nor dost thou consist 
 of force. Thou residest in the meaning of fleeting sensa- 
 tions, and thy significance is a mere relation, a description 
 of the uniformities of nature. And yet thou alone pos- 
 sessest dignity, thou alone art worthy to be called divine, 
 and thou art the son of that All-One whom thou revealest, 
 that One in All who sways motes and stars and moulds the 
 destinies of all the worlds.
 
 112 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Thou needest no shrines and no altars and thou de- 
 mandest no doxologies. There is no worship that pleaseth 
 thee, except the worship without ritual, a surrender of 
 error, of falsehood, of lies. He is thy true devotee who re- 
 ceiveth thee in his soul and inviteth thy presence to bless 
 him. 
 
 The ideal of truth may remain neglected or misunder- 
 stood for some time, but its light will not be darkened for- 
 ever. We need not fear for truth, because truth will take 
 care of itself. The cause of truth is God's cause, for truth 
 reflects and reveals the eternal, and the eternal is God.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 
 
 A GERMAN CRITIC OF PRAGMATISM * 
 
 TUDWIG Stein of Berne, editor of the Archiv fur systematische 
 JL_^ Philosophic, publishes a criticism of pragmatism in a recent num- 
 ber of his periodical (XIV, Part II). His summary of the history of 
 the word will be interesting both to pragmatists and to people in 
 general who are interested in pragmatism, for he points out that 
 pragmatism is not even a "new name for old ways of thinking, 
 but that both the pragmatic method and the name in its most modern 
 sense are ancient." He says (pp. 143-5) ' 
 
 "The expressions pragma 1 and pragmateia 2 occur in Plato's 
 dialogue Cratylos, but especially in the logical writings of Aristotle 
 (see the Aristotelian Index of Bonitz) as frequently as they are 
 rare in post-Aristotelian, particularly in the pre-Socratic, philosophy. 
 The meaning of the word pragma varies between 'thing/ 'object' and 
 'reality' ____ 
 
 "According to Aristotle the linguistic phonetic symbol 3 bears 
 the same relation to the concept 4 as the name 5 bears to the object. 8 
 In this case the word pragma means the concrete individual object. 
 Aristotle shows perfectly the distinction between figures and phonetic 
 symbols (De soph, clench., cap. I, p. i65a, 7). He says that we can 
 never cognize things (pragma}, but we only utilize names as sym- 
 bols of things. Therefore we erroneously confuse the name and 
 the thing it stands for in that when performing calculations as in 
 the cipher code we substitute the name for the thing. In the logic 
 of Aristotle the object, pragma, plays an important role in opposition 
 to the name, onoma. The Aristotelian Index of Bonitz enumerates 
 dozens of passages under the catch-words pragma, pragmateia, and 
 pragmateuesthai. 1 Once even the expression pragmatologein* ap- 
 
 * Republished from The Monist, Jan., 1909. 
 
 1 irpa.ypa. * wpaynareia. * ffijuelov. *v6ijfta 
 
 Vpcry/uaretfeotfat.
 
 1 14 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 pears (1439/1? 20). The opposition between pragma and onotna seems 
 to have been familiar in Socratic circles presumably even as early 
 as in the time of the Sophists ..... 
 
 "However, with Aristotle we find the expression pragma used 
 also in the very same meaning which Peirce and James assign to the 
 word to-day. Aristotle sometimes understands by it the real em- 
 pirical fact in opposition to that which is merely thought, that is to 
 say, pure thought-entities (entia rationis). In his logical writings 
 and in the Metaphysics Aristotle distinguishes repeatedly between 
 the ideal 9 and the real." 10 
 
 On page 148 Professor Stein criticises James's etymology of 
 the term praxis 11 as "at least one-sided." He goes on to say: 
 
 "This is the definition given by the greatest leader of the 
 Stoics, Chrysippus, according to Laertius Diogenes (VII, 94) : good 
 is that which is morally useful, and evil is that which is morally 
 harmful. The question of the telos 12 is the central point of their 
 ethics. Every good, we read, (loc. cit. VII, 98) is profitable. 13 We 
 call that profitable which is of use to us. 14 Since Aristotle had 
 made the statement that in nature there is nothing useless and 
 nothing happens in vain, 16 the Stoics caricature this utilitarian prin- 
 ciple to the point of absolute folly. In Chrysippus utility degen- 
 erates to a farce. According to Cicero (De Natura Deorum 11, 13, 
 37), everything exists in the world only for the sake of the gods 
 and man : the horse for riding, the ox for plowing, the dog for hunt- 
 ing and watching. The gradation of creatures is equally utilitarian 
 with a view toward the benefit of the human race which comprises 
 the center of the universe, as the human community itself is derived 
 and founded for purely utilitarian ends (Cicero, De Finibus, III, 20, 
 67). And so accordingly the real founder of pragmatism, Peirce, 
 refers to the connection of his ideas with those of the Stoics. 
 
 "In Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, II, 
 323, under the catch-word "Pragmatism" the originators of the 
 term, Peirce and James, give their position. Etymologically the 
 following derivation is given: 'Pragmatism (Gr. pragmatikos, 19 
 versed in affairs).' This derivation as shown above is historically 
 untenable. Only pragma and pragmateia are customary terms, not 
 pragmatikos. Then, too, pragma in Plato and Aristotle never means 
 'versed in affairs,' that is to say, versatile, skillful, intelligent, ex- 
 
 diKvoia. ** vp&ffuiffi. u rpats.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 115 
 
 perienced ; but first of all it means an object or thing in opposition 
 to a name or phonetic symbol. In post-Aristotelian philosophy 
 indeed the expression pragma or pragmateia disappears from use. 
 In the Doxographi Graeci of H. Diels this expression occurs in only 
 half a dozen passages in all. The later the word pragma is used 
 the more the emphasis is laid upon the practical meaning which has 
 been pushed to the foreground by Peirce and James, and in general 
 the post-Aristotelian philosophy shifts the center of gravity from 
 theory to practice, from logic and physics to ethics. The good is 
 no longer referred to the true but the true is referred to the good. 
 And this is the kernel of the pragmatism of Peirce and James. 
 
 PRAGMATISM, A TELEOLOGICAL VIEW. 
 
 "Consequences are the decisive epistemological viewpoint of 
 Peirce and James. Exactly as we have recognized an ethics of 
 consequence ever since the first utilitarians, the Cyrenaics or hedon- 
 ists, that is to say, the ethics of utility, later so called by Ben- 
 tham and Mill, there lies in pragmatism an attempt to formulate a 
 logic of consequence. Let James's definition be placed side by side 
 with that above given by Peirce (Peirce has repeated his definition 
 in Baldwin's Dictionary s. v. 'Pragmatism'). Pragmatism is, ac- 
 cording to James, 'the doctrine that the whole "meaning" of the 
 conception expresses itself in practical consequences' (the italics are 
 mine), consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recom- 
 mended or in that of experience to be expected, if the conception is 
 true 
 
 "The expression 'pragmatic' had a historical sound long before 
 Peirce used it. The 'pragmatic sanction' of Charles VI established 
 the Austrian succession according to the requirements of utility in 
 the interest of principles which served the public welfare, and 
 even in German usage an intelligent foresighted and able person 
 is called a pragmatic fellow (ein pragmatischer Kopf) without any 
 evil secondary meaning. Moreover, the 'pragmatic method' has 
 been naturalized in historiography much longer than Peirce and 
 James imagine. The 'Text Book of the Historical Method' by Ernst 
 Bernheim devotes an entire section to the instructive pragmatic 
 method of history (Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, p. 17 ff.). 
 Bernheim defines the essence of pragmatic historiography as fol- 
 lows: 'At this stage matter does not appear desirable for its own 
 sake alone, but on account of definite practical applications; man 
 must learn something for practical purposes from events of the
 
 1 16 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 past.' The first conclusive representative of the pragmatic stand- 
 point is Thucydides. Polybius introduced the term 'pragmatic his- 
 tory' 17 (Hist. I, cap. 2). The mistakes of the pragmatic method 
 of historiography are subjectivity and a tendency against objectivity. 
 And these also are the reefs along which the philosophical prag- 
 matism of a James or Schiller must steer carefully, as we will show 
 later ---- 
 
 "Where Peirce has picked up the word 'pragmatism,' whether 
 in Kant or in Aristotle, he himself is not aware. The expression 
 apparently was in the air. Peirce himself informs us 18 that thirty 
 years previously in his above mentioned publication he had set in 
 motion the subject although not the word of pragmatism. He had 
 only used this expression in oral conversation until James, who was 
 not acquainted with him when he wrote The Will to Believe, had 
 appropriated it and put his stamp upon it as a philosophical term. 
 In my book Leibniz und Spinoza (Berlin, Reimer, 1890) I have 
 made the statement that Leibnitz had the same experience with his 
 term 'monad.' It is true he met occasionally with the term in Plato, 
 but it was not until his intercourse with the younger van Helmont at 
 the court of Queen Sophia Charlotte, that he definitely appropriated 
 and set in circulation this term whose meaning had been heightened 
 by van Helmont. However, not only did Peirce happen upon the 
 expression 'pragmatism' as a designation of his theory of activity 
 but simultaneously, although quite independently, it was coined by 
 the French thinker Maurice Blondel, the advocate of a 'philosophy 
 of action.' Andre Lalande in his treatise 'Pragmatism and Prag- 
 maticism' (Revue Philosophique, 1906, p. 123) relates how Blondel 
 had answered his question about the discovery of the term prag- 
 matism as follows: 'I proposed the name of pragmatism to myself 
 in the year 1888, and I am conscious of having invented it as I never 
 before had met with the term, etc.' In his work 'Action' he ana- 
 lysed the difference between praxis, pragma and poiesis, 19 and de- 
 cided upon the expression pragmatism at a time when Peirce had 
 used it only in oral discourse. This duplication of the incident is not 
 surprising, especially since this designation was made obvious by the 
 pragmatic historiography then in vogue. Yet as early as the year 
 1867 Conrad Herrmann wrote a 'History of Philosophy Treated 
 
 Iffropla 
 M "What Pragmatism Is," Monist, April, 1905.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 117 
 
 Pragmatically.' 20 In this Herrmann expresses his opinion on the 
 subject of the pragmatic method in the science of the history of 
 philosophy, that the impression of the pragmatic seemed to him 
 the most suitable for his style of historical representation (Preface, 
 p. vii) : 'The expression of the pragmatic indicates in and for itself 
 only the simple real or properly actual in things, and it apparently 
 coincides with the concept of a merely narrative or purely empirical 
 presentation of history' (he. cit., p. viii). In this connection Herr- 
 mann sets himself in conscious opposition to the speculative method 
 of Hegel (p. 463 ff.) : 'Pragmatism is the only true scientific prin- 
 ciple for the treatment of historical material. The essense of all 
 historical pragmatism is to eliminate chance from history and to 
 place in its stead causative necessity. The pragmatic method should 
 have the individual data to combine in a whole system. Pragmatic 
 historiography should not work with principles but with facts.' In 
 a special essay 'The Pragmatic Sequence in the History of Philos- 
 ophy/ Conrad Herrmann had previously laid down his program 
 according to which all historical pragmatism 'should have a definite 
 practical point.' Exactly this 'practical point' James has evidently 
 adopted. He did not need to give a 'new name' to 'old methods,' 
 especially the methods which arose under Thucydides and those 
 theorists among the sophists who advocated the right of might, 
 but the name itself has had a historical ring since the time of Poly- 
 bius and a philosophical ring ever since Plato and Aristotle." 
 
 According to Stein the trend of pragmatism is a teleological 
 view of the world in contrast to the aeteological view of science 
 now commonly accepted by naturalists. Says Stein (p. 156) : 
 
 "The kernel of the pragmatic method consists in referring the 
 logical to the teleological. Every method of classifying a thing, 
 says James (The Will to Believe, p. 76) is only a method of apply- 
 ing it to some particular purpose. Concepts and classes are teleo- 
 logical instruments." 
 
 UTILITY AS A CRITERION OF TRUTH. 
 
 
 
 Professor Stein says on page 146, that pragmatism is prac- 
 tically neither more nor less than a theory of truth. It proposes 
 a new criterion of truth which gives life and color to this philosoph- 
 ical movement that is spreading with lightning speed. He says: 
 
 "This criterion of truth which is found in pragmatism the 
 
 " Geschichte der Philosophie in pragntatischer Behandlung. Leipsic, Flei- 
 scher.
 
 Il8 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 utility of cognition, its suitability, its efficiency or power to work 
 C. S. Peirce himself has formulated clearly and tersely in a later 
 essay ('What Pragmatism Is/ Monist, April 1905, p. 171): 'Con- 
 sider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings 
 you conceive the object of your conception to have; then your con- 
 ception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the ob- 
 ject.' Some years earlier Georg Simmel, whom James indeed claims 
 as a typical pragmatist (with incomparably greater right moreover 
 than R. Eucken whose theory of activity follows Fichte much more 
 closely than Mills and Spencer) in the first volume of the Archiv 
 fur systematische Philosophie (1895) found a much terser wording 
 without even knowing the name pragmatism or having in mind this 
 tendency which even then lay potentially in embryo. The treatise, 
 Ueber eine Beziehung der Selektionstheorie zur Erkenntnistheorie, 
 concludes with the following words which might be placed as a 
 motto for pragmatism : 'The utility of cognition produces at the 
 same time the objects of cognition' (p. 45). 
 
 "Simmel sees in the utility of cognition the primary factor 
 which matures certain methods of procedure so that 'originally cog- 
 nition was not first called true and then useful, but first useful and 
 afterwards true.' This criterion of truth by its tendency towards 
 an act of selection receives from Simmel that biological bent which 
 has prevailed since the appearance in the field of Avenarius and 
 Mach. The thought is itself essentially Leibnitzian. Leibnitz con- 
 cedes true existence only to that which w>rks (quod agit}. In Eng- 
 land and America this criterion of truth has been given the epithet 
 'instrumental' in contrast to 'normative.' ' : 
 
 PROTAGORAS REDIVIVUS. 
 
 The tendency is in the air, but Professor James has made 
 himself the standard bearer of the movement. Stein says: 
 
 "At first pragmatists sailed under various flags. Those who 
 were of an especially logical turn, originally called themselves 'in- 
 tentional' or 'instrumental.' James was called a 'radical empiricist' 
 before he brought forward the word in the year 1898 in a lecture 
 before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the University 
 of California, and made a special application of it to religion. 
 (Cf. Pragmatism, p. 47). F. C. S. Schiller was called 'humanist' 
 before he joined James and adopted the designation 'pragmatism' 
 for his world-conception. And so summing up we can well say 
 that the same struggle which took place in the last decade in Ger-
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 
 
 many between psychologists and logicians the polemical pamphlet 
 of Melchior Palagyi gives the best account of the situation on the 
 other side of the water takes the form of a skirmish between prag- 
 matists and spiritualists or idealists, pur sang. Protagoras is the 
 model of the one party (Schiller professes to follow Protagoras 
 as perhaps also Laas and Mach), Plato that of the other. A new 
 wine in old bottles. The sentimentalism of the pragmatism of 
 James comes from Protagoras, but on the other hand he owes both 
 method and expression to Aristotle." 
 
 Whether Professor Stein is right in regarding pragmatism as 
 opposed to "spiritualism or idealism pur sang" is rather doubtful, 
 for we must remember that Professor James himself and many of 
 his adherents have vigorously defended some of the most disputed 
 facts of spiritualistic seances. It is well known that to the last Pro- 
 fessor James believed in the genuineness of occult phenomena and 
 communications from the dead to the living. 
 
 THE SUPREMACY OF THE WILL. 
 
 Pragmatism is a strange compound of many contradictory con- 
 ceptions and it is probable that Professor Stein systematizes it 
 more than the pragmatists themselves would approve. Pragmatism 
 is in a word sentimentalism, that is to say, it places all reality in 
 sentiment. This is done also by Mach in so far as Mach deems 
 sensations to be the ultimate realities. Yet for all that, James draws 
 other conclusions and incorporates in his conception of sentiment 
 many things which Mach would cut out as illusions. There is an 
 unmistakable kinship between Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and James 
 as pointed out by Professor Stein. He says: 
 
 "The kernel of the whole matter is the supremacy of the will, 
 practical reason as Kant would say, over thought. Therefore 
 James also is a much stricter voluntarist or activist than, say, 
 Wundt; he approaches more nearly the theory of the supremacy 
 of feeling over understanding as it was prevalent in the English 
 sentimentalist philosophy of the eighteenth century, and is to-day 
 in the psychological school of Th. Ribot in France and in the 
 'world-conception theory' of H. Gomperz in Vienna. The voluntarism 
 of Schopenhauer receives in James as well as in Ribot the Hamann- 
 Jacobi tendency which Goethe once expressed in the terse formula 
 'sentiment is everything' (Gefuhl ist alles}. Quite without justi- 
 fication James leads a passionate polemic against Herbert Spencer 
 in whom he sees his opposite pole with relation to the theory of
 
 I2O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 cognition, while Spencer in his latest works teaches entirely and 
 without reserve supremacy of feeling as much as James and Ribot. 
 Whoever reads Spencer's treatise 'Feelings versus Intellect' in his 
 last work Facts and Comments (1902) will find the following sen- 
 tences which appear literally in Duns Scotus, but which are no less 
 decisive than those of James: 'The chief component of mind is 
 feeling' (p. 25) ... .'emotions are the masters and intellect the 
 servant' (p. 30). That is the James-Ribot form of the voluntarism 
 of Schopenhauer. . . . 
 
 "The voluntarist James should take one step farther and enlist 
 himself in the ranks of the great voluntarists and energeticists from 
 the Scotists to Fichte's 'being springs from doing,' and Nietzsche's 
 'will for power.' In reality the question in pragmatism is nothing 
 else than a consistent development of the supremacy of practical 
 reason not in a sense of a Kant-Platonizing concept-realism but in 
 the style of that innate nominalism which has pervaded England 
 since Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and William Occam. For already 
 with these English nominalists, as is the case to-day with James, 
 an extreme voluntarism was combined with the supremacy of the 
 practical reason, an epistemological nominalism with an ethical in- 
 dividualism." 
 
 KANT'S OPINION OF PRAGMATISM. 
 
 Professor James who often has his fling at Kant may be sur- 
 prised to find that there is a great probability that the word prag- 
 matism is directly derived from Kant. It is interesting to read 
 what Professor Stein has to say: 
 
 "Kant is perhaps the innocent cause that the name pragmatism 
 has been taken up and has been made the small coin of daily philo- 
 sophical intercourse. In this connection I am thinking less about 
 the title of Kant's anthropology which Kant himself labeled 'prag- 
 matically considered' (in pragmatischer Hinsicht), than of Kant's 
 preface to this work in which the pragmatic is opposed to the 
 physiological: 'The physiological knowledge of man rests upon the 
 investigation of what nature makes of man ; the pragmatic, on that 
 which as a free agent he makes of himself or can and should make 
 of himself.' So according to Kant all rules of intelligence, for 
 instance, are pragmatic (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 
 p. 42, Rosenkranz ed.). Everything practical which serves human 
 welfare he calls pragmatic. 'The practical principle derived from the 
 hankering after happiness I call pragmatic' (Kritik der reinen Ver-
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 121 
 
 nunft, p. 611). Hence according to Kant, pragmatism would be a 
 rule of prudence or a utilitarian demand of merely accidental persua- 
 sive power. The distinctive mark of the useful and the universally 
 valid is derived from pragmatic cognition. It is only a belief, not 
 knowledge (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 623). And indeed the 
 question is not of a necessary but of an accidental belief. 'I call 
 such accidental beliefs which however lie at the bottom of the 
 actual employment of the means to certain actions, pragmatic be- 
 liefs' (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 628). Thus we may see that 
 according to Kant a pragmatic conception of truth such as James 
 and Schiller have to-day established, represents pretty well the first 
 
 step to the knowledge of truth 
 
 "The utilitarian is the undertone of the pragmatic, and exactly 
 this pragmatic utilitarian sous entendu is as great a discord to the 
 ear of the German idealist of Konigsberg as it is sweet harmony 
 flattering the ear of the 'smart' American. For Kant, utility is a 
 counter-argument to absolute moral worth, hence the pragmatically 
 useful method of observation or treatment is only of value in orien- 
 tating, as a card catalogue or alphabetical arrangement is to the 
 librarian, for these are always better as rules of wisdom than ab- 
 solute disorder. But such a pragmatic arrangement is in the most 
 favorable instance an artificial, even though ever so useful, classi- 
 fication of the schools, but not a classification made by nature. The 
 distinction between pragmatic classification and the accuracy of the 
 classification according to nature is according to Kant a fundamental 
 one (Werke, VI, 315) ; the classification of the schools has only 
 one purpose, namely to bring created things under their proper 
 title, the classification according to nature endeavors instead to bring 
 them under laws." 
 
 CONTRASTS RECONCILED. 
 
 Professor Stein's tendency to systematize appears in the fol- 
 lowing comment. He says: 
 
 "Heinrich von Stein in his 'Seven Books on the History of 
 Platonism' has produced the convincing proof that philosophical 
 thought has vibrated back and forth in constant rhythm for two 
 thousand years between Plato and Aristotle. This is true as well 
 of the twentieth century as of its predecessors. Half a century 
 ago Trendelenburg brought Aristotle again to our knowledge. The 
 neo-Kantianism under the leadership of Cohen on the other hand 
 helped Plato to victory. Just now Aristotle is again on top by the
 
 122 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 roundabout way via Leibnitz. Those thinkers who are interested 
 in biological considerations are to-day grouping themselves again 
 around Aristotle just as those who tend in a mathematically logical 
 direction cluster around Plato. In Germany this dissension appears 
 under the slogans, Psychologism against Logism, Vitalism against 
 Mechanicalism, and Positivism against Idealism. In America and 
 England it has coined the formula, Pragmatism against Transcen- 
 dentalism. Tout comme chez nous. The French maxim: plus que 
 qa change, plus c'est la meme chose is true of philosophical con- 
 troversies, schools, party designations, and catch words." 
 
 Professor Stein appears to go too far in characterizing the dif- 
 ferent philosophers as either Platonists or Aristotelians. It is true 
 that there is a contrast between a recognition of the facts upon 
 which our world-conception is based and the theories which furnish 
 the system of its construction. But if he would carefully compare 
 Plato and Aristotle he would find (as has been pointed out from time 
 to time) that Aristotle is a Platonist and Plato is an Aristotelian. 
 Though Aristotle has his fling at the Platonic ideas he practically 
 adopts the theory that there are eternal types, and though Plato is 
 an idealist who believes in the eternal ideas as the modes of things, 
 he does not deny that the phenomenal world is the actual world of 
 sense ; and the contrast in which these two systems have frequently 
 been placed is a contrast merely produced by more or less of em- 
 phasis laid upon two opposed (not contradictory) principles, and 
 the different systems in the history of philosophy are exactly char- 
 acterized by the way in which they combine the contrast and recog- 
 nize the truth of these principles. It is true, however, that Pro- 
 fessor James carries the principle of pragmatism to such an ex- 
 treme as to almost entirely obliterate the principle of systematic 
 thought, theory, logic, rationality, etc. Professor James is a roman- 
 ticizing philosopher in contrast to such stern and strict classical 
 thinkers as Kant and his school. Says Stein : "The type of thought 
 directly opposed to this logistic classicism is sentimental romanti- 
 cism. As the former longs for the peace of the conclusive answer 
 the latter seeks the eternal activity of restless questioning;" and 
 further down on page 172: "Pragmatism gathers together all those 
 tendencies of our age with its fevered philosophical excitement 
 which carry on a common war against the thing-in-itself, against 
 all metaphysics, against transcendentalism, idealism, in short against 
 that Platonizing Kantism which is most conspicuously represented 
 and most appreciatively supported by the Marburg school (Cohen
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 123 
 
 and Natorp), under the names Natural Philosophy, Energetics, 
 Psychologism, Positivism, Phenomenalism, Friesian Empiricism, 
 and Relativism." 
 
 Here the onesidedness of Professor Stein's classification ap- 
 pears most pronounced. From the point of view of my own philos- 
 ophy I would be at a loss in what manner to dispose of it. I am 
 decidedly opposed to the subjectivism of Professor James, I most 
 emphatically uphold the objective significance of truth, and yet I 
 reject the idea of the thing-in-itself and all metaphysics based upon 
 it. My solution of the problem 21 briefly stated runs thus : There are 
 not things-in-themselves but there are forms-in-themselves. Pro- 
 fessor Stein declares: 
 
 "For many years together with certain ones of my pupils I have 
 defended the thesis that Kant did not refute Hume. In my book 
 "The Social Optimism" (Der soziale Optimismus, Jena, Costenoble, 
 1905) I demonstrate that Hume is not a skeptic but the leader of 
 positivism and that Kant has not refuted him in any point. The case 
 is not yet at an end." 
 
 I have not seen Professor Stein's exposition of his views on 
 Kant and Hume, but I am inclined to believe that I would agree 
 with him. However, I trust that in the books referred to I have 
 pointed out the weak point of Kant's position ; but on the basis of 
 the Kantian conception of the contrast between matter and form, 
 the a posteriori and the a priori, sensation and pure Anschauung 
 with all that it involves, I hope to have answered Hume's question 
 and thus laid a foundation for a system in which the old contrasts 
 will find a just reconciliation. 
 
 PROFESSOR STEIN ON PRAGMATISM. 
 
 Here are some paragraphs of Professor Stein's critique of prag- 
 matism : 
 
 "A criticism of pragmatism must proceed from the inside out- 
 ward ; that is, from its own hypotheses, and not from the standpoint 
 of idealism, as Miinsterberg attempts. There are two different tem- 
 peraments as James has rightly said, but temperaments are not to 
 be opposed. The inscription, 'As I see it,' stands written upon every 
 temple, not only the pantheon of art but also the severe cathedral of 
 science. To see in one's own way can never be criticised. The 
 question is only whether a man has seen rightly from his own stand- 
 
 B For details see my criticism of Kant in my little book Kant's Prolegom- 
 ena ; and also my exposition of the problem in my Surd of Metaphysics in the 
 chapter "Are There Things-in-Themselves ?"
 
 124 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 point, and right here is the starting-point of our own objection to 
 pragmatism .... 
 
 "In place of the two criteria of truth represented by Plato 
 (Aristotle too) and Kant, namely necessity and universal validity, 
 we have here the hedonistic utilitarian criteria of truth, individual 
 utility and general practicability. The true and the good agree 
 with each other; this is the demand of the biologic-teleological 
 foundation of logic as pragmatism states it. In addition, it is true, 
 to earlier tendencies of thought, but still with a strongly emphasized 
 personal note. 
 
 "Against this biological logic a series of considerations arise in 
 the meantime even under the foundation of the pragmatic point of 
 departure wherefore I expressly affirm that I will not repeat the 
 arguments which Husserl in his fundamental 'Logical Investigations' 
 and Miinsterberg in his 'Philosophy of Values' (Philosophic der 
 Werte, Leipsic, Barth, 1908) have arranged in imposing conclusive- 
 ness against all psychologism. I do not propose to refer here to even 
 the purely polemical literature of the English, French and Italians 
 against pragmatism. 22 It is much more important for me to con- 
 sider the difficulties of thought which in spite of my sympathetic 
 position towards the fundamental demands of pragmatism I can 
 not suppress. If Messrs. James and Schiller will take the trouble 
 to look through my 'The End of the Century' (Wende des Jahr- 
 hunderts, Tubingen, Mohr, 1899), 'The Sense of Existence' (Der 
 Sinn des Daseins, ibid., 1904) and 'The Social Optimism' (Der so- 
 ziale Optimismus, Jena, Costenoble, 1905), they will discover now 
 and again almost verbal correspondences in that which I call evolu- 
 tionary criticism and the optimism of energetics. In case James 
 and Schiller would attempt to claim me as well as Wilhelm Jerusa- 
 lem in the ranks of pragmatism, I shall have to point out my opin- 
 ions against methods and results .... 
 
 "Pragmatism with its genetic theory of truth is only new in that 
 it discloses itself as logical evolution. Truth is placed in the stream 
 of practical development. As once the followers of the Heraclitean 
 Cratylos, the teacher of Plato to whom he had dedicated his dialogue 
 of the same name, are jokingly called the 'flowing ones,' 23 prag- 
 matists recognize only one developing truth which will gradually 
 approach the absolute truth or its ideal heights." 
 
 ** Among the last G. Vailati is of a special importance. See "De quelques 
 caracteres du mouvement philosophique contemporain en Italic," Revue de 
 mois, 1907. 
 
 * of 'pfovTft, i. e., those that are in a constant flux.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 125 
 
 Professor Stein takes the underlying principles of pragmatism 
 and systematizes them in spite of Professor James. The latter may 
 not take the consequences but Professor Stein seems to argue that if 
 pragmatism were consistent Professor James ought to hold the views 
 to be derived from its maxims. We doubt very much whether Pro- 
 fessor James would be prepared to regard the ego as " a mere prac- 
 tical unit for a preliminary provisional consideration" (p. 182). 
 Stein says : 
 
 "Mach's definition of the ego as unity of purpose and James's 
 theory of concepts or classes as teleological instruments, arise from 
 the common fundamental conviction that all spiritual life is teleo- 
 logical. The teleological unity of the ego according to Mach rests 
 upon an unanalysed constant. The ego is accordingly a practical 
 unit for a preliminary provisional consideration. The same is the 
 case with concepts of substance, being, doing, matter, spirit. They 
 are abbreviated symbols for the purpose of an easier orientation in 
 the surrounding world. All science thus shrinks into one impres- 
 sion as all deduction according to Mill is only an abbreviation and 
 inverted induction, a memorandum for thought- 
 
 "Here we have the proton pseudos as well of pragmatism as 
 of Hume's positivism and all related tendencies. Quite apart from 
 the fact that the biological method which James and his school 
 would apply to logic is already shattered on the fact that biology 
 itself is still to-day in the condition of fermentation and insecurity 
 and accordingly possesses no suitability for a foundation of the most 
 certain of all sciences, formal logic, pragmatism takes the same 
 course which Hume was not able to escape. Hume refers substance 
 and causality to habits of thought and laws of association ; but how 
 have laws of association found entrance into the human brain ? Why 
 have all men and animals the same laws of association by contiguity 
 or innate similarity? Hume concludes the validity of the laws of 
 association by means of the laws of association already in effect .... 
 
 "It is quite clear, however, that pragmatism too has it a priori, 
 that is the telos, and if we jest about the logism of Kant, that in 
 spite of us man comes into the world with a completed table of 
 categories, so let us not forget to consider the beam in our own 
 eye. We are all a priori sinners. Or, does it matter so much if man 
 comes into the world according to Kant with a table of categories, 
 according to Hume with completed laws of association, according 
 to Avenarius and Mach with an automatically functioning economy
 
 126 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 of thought, and finally according to James and Schiller with an 
 apparatus of utility and selection like an innate scale of values? 
 Let us first of all be honest with ourselves. Pragmatism accom- 
 plishes nothing but to set up a teleology of consciousness in the place 
 of a mechanics of consciousness such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Hartley, 
 Priestley, Hume, the naturalists, materialists, and psychologists of 
 association have offered us." 
 
 CRITICS OF PRAGMATISM REBUKED. 1 
 
 Pragmatism is still agitating the philosophical world, and Prof. 
 William James fought the good fight dealing blows right and left. 
 There is a change only in so far as pragmatism does not seem to 
 spread further, and its ingenious leader began more and more to as- 
 sume the defensive. His main weapon consisted in the declaration 
 that his antagonists had misunderstood him. They are accused of 
 distorting his views into silly absurdities which he did not mean to 
 say, and they are put down with such phrases as, "this is the usual 
 slander" (p. 274). 
 
 In my criticisms I have always been careful to quote the mas- 
 ter's ipsissima verba, and so I feel that his complaint is not applicable 
 in my case. 
 
 The latest book of Professor James bears the title The Mean- 
 ing of Truth, but the author does not betray the secret in its pages. 
 He talks about truth but nowhere solves the problem of its meaning, 
 and his statements are by no means always consistent. He resem- 
 bles in this respect a dear old German friend of mine who always 
 had the last word and was never at a loss to give an answer. When 
 once his own authority was quoted against him and he seemed hope- 
 lessly vanquished he calmly said, Ich bin nicht immer meiner Mei- 
 nung, "I am not always of my own opinion." 
 
 But pragmatism is so subtile that no one appears to be able to 
 appreciate it unless he enters into its spirit with enthusiasm. Pro- 
 fessor James says (pp. 183-184) : 
 
 "The pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to have escaped atten- 
 tion hitherto, but even so subtile, it would seem, that when openly broached 
 now, dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to apprehend it, and deem the prag- 
 matist to be treating of something wholly different." 
 
 The difficulty of understanding pragmatism is greatly increased 
 to outsiders, to intellectualists as they are called, to rationalists, to 
 
 1 A review of The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism, by William 
 James, New York: Longmans Green & Co. Price $1.25 net. Republished 
 from The Monist, Jan., 1910.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 127 
 
 monists, and to the whole crowd of anti-pragmatists, by the brilliant 
 dicta of Professor James, who in his zeal sometimes makes state- 
 ments which he does not mean and which he offers only as an olive 
 branch to please antagonists or to gain their good will. Professor 
 James says in the preface: 
 
 "One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of 
 making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their 'feeling good' to us, 
 and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse for this charge, by 
 the unguarded language in which, in the book Pragmatism, I spoke of the 
 truth of the belief of certain philosophers in the absolute. Explaining why 
 I do not believe in the absolute myself (page 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 this as a conciliatory olive- 
 branch to my enemies. But they, as is only too common with such offerings, 
 trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver. I had counted 
 too much on their good will oh for the rarity of Christian charity under the 
 sun ! Oh for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also !" 
 
 Professor James complains about "the rarity of Christian char- 
 ity" and "the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence." But is he 
 not guilty of the same fault when he misconstrues what other 
 thinkers have said before him ; when he censures them in sweeping 
 assertions for mistakes of which only some of them are guilty; 
 when for instance he declares (p. 192) that "throughout the his- 
 tory of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as 
 absolutely discontinuous entities" (p. 136) ; while we know that 
 almost every philosopher has considered the two as correlates? If 
 our pragmatists were more familiar with the history of philosophy 
 they would probably not boast so loudly of the originality of the 
 movement, the leading ideas of which are old errors. 
 
 We do not doubt that Professor James has been frequently 
 misunderstood, and he confesses himself that he did not always 
 mean what he said, but it appears that the main reason that he is 
 so much misunderstood is his own carelessness. On page 272 Pro- 
 fessor James says with reference to the criticism of Professor 
 Bertrand Russell: 
 
 "When, for instance, we say that a true proposition is one the conse- 
 quences of believing which are good, he assumes us to mean that any one 
 who believes a proposition to be true must first have made out clearly that 
 its consequences are good, and that his belief must primarily be in that fact, 
 an obvious absurdity, for that fact is the deliverance of a new proposition, 
 quite different from the first one and is, moreover, a fact usually very hard 
 to verify, it being 'far easier/ as Mr. Russell justly says, 'to settle the plain 
 question of fact: "Have popes always been infallible?" than to settle the
 
 128 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 question whether the effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole 
 good.' We affirm nothing as silly as Mr. Russell supposes." 
 
 I am glad to know that Professor James does not mean to 
 make the pragmatic result of a belief the test of its truth; but I 
 can not help thinking that his explanations of the meaning of prag- 
 matism go pretty far to justify Professor Russell in thinking so. 
 
 SCIENCE SUPERSEDED. 
 
 When I refuse to accept pragmatism I may be under a mis- 
 apprehension ; but if words mean what they say, Professor James 
 believes that science is not possible, or at least that what is called 
 science is not reliable, that new fangled theories have replaced the 
 old orthodox conceptions, that Euclid is antiquated because Bolyai 
 and Lobatchevsky have excogitated other geometrical systems, and 
 that truth and its exponent science have neither stability nor ob- 
 jective significance. We may misunderstand Professor James, but 
 this is what he says on page 57: 
 
 "As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its being 
 to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought about in the older 
 motions of scientific truth. 'God geometrizes/ it used to be said; and it was 
 believed that Euclid's elements literally reproduced his geometrizing. There 
 is an eternal and unchangeable 'reason' ; and its voice was supposed to re- 
 verberate in Barbara and Celarent. So also of the 'laws of nature,' physical 
 and chemical, so of natural history classifications all were supposed to be 
 exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the struc- 
 ture of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables 
 us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that 
 of a university professor, it was thought Up to about 1850 almost every one 
 believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite 
 code of non-human realities." 
 
 Now we deny that geometricians ever believed that Euclid's 
 Elements "literally reproduced God's geometrizing" ; or, what means 
 the same, that geometry is a direct description of objective space- 
 conditions. All mathematical propositions are purely mental con- 
 structions by the aid of which we can calculate the relations that 
 obtain in space, or other conditions, proportions, probabilities, etc., 
 and mutatis mutandis the same is true of logical syllogisms and of 
 the laws of nature. None of them are copies or duplicates, or arche- 
 types, but they are formulas by which we comprehend reality and 
 which serve us to adjust our conduct. Here Professor James is 
 guilty of an obvious misunderstanding of the import of science, 
 and he misconstrues the meaning of former thinkers.
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 129 
 
 While to some extent the pragmatist fights windmills which he 
 takes for giant errors, he takes new fads seriously or exaggerates 
 the importance of new theories, making out that they upset and 
 antiquate all previous science. Professor James continues: 2 
 
 "The enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has 
 well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective 
 kind of thing than another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, 
 so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one 
 of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion 
 that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal tran- 
 script has dawned upon us." 
 
 The subjectivity of geometry is also insisted upon on pp. 83 ff. 
 On page 85 we read a sentence which reminds us of Kant. Here 
 Professor James says: "The whole fabric of the a priori sciences 
 can thus be treated as a man-made product" ; though Kant would say 
 that space is "ideal," which means belonging to the domain of ideas, 
 and we would prefer to say, that the a priori is "mental or a mind- 
 made product." How ideal or purely mental constructions can 
 possess objective values I have set forth in my book on Kant's Pro- 
 legomena. 
 
 But in the pragmatist conception everything dwindles down to 
 "purely human habits" (p. 29). 
 
 A genuine scientific truth is a formula which describes the 
 essential features of a group of facts. A scientific theory is a 
 tentative explanation of facts. Everybody knows that theories and 
 hypotheses are preliminary and we must always be prepared to sur- 
 render them. No scientist will regard the change of a theory as a 
 "breakdown" of the notions of scientific truth, be they old or new, 
 but while theories change, truths remain forever. Those features 
 of facts which remain, the "uniformities of nature" as Clifford 
 called them, those eternalities of existence which make science pos- 
 sible, are not subject to change. They are the raison d'etre on the 
 one hand of the cosmic order, and on the other hand of man's 
 rationality. 
 
 OFTEN WRONG BUT NEVER DULL. 
 
 Professor James calls his new book "The Meaning of Truth," 
 but the reader, with the exception of his most ardent admirers, will 
 not know more about what truth in pragmatism means after having 
 read these latest explanations. Professor James even admits that 
 the very "name 'pragmatism' with its suggestions of action, has been
 
 I3O TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 an unfortunate choice" (p. 184), and I at any rate must confess 
 that I am more bewildered than helped. Professor James himself 
 says (p. 215) : 
 
 "As I look back over what I have written, much of it gives me a queer 
 impression, as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that readers 
 might well laugh at my pomposity. It may be, however, that concreteness as 
 radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole originality of pragmatism, the 
 whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with con- 
 creteness, and returns and ends with it." 
 
 Other philosophers too have proposed to begin with concrete- 
 ness and to end with concreteness, but the worth of a philosophy 
 consists in the method of dealing with the concreteness of existence ; 
 yet this portion is missing in pragmatism. 
 
 Professor James overestimates the significance of sentiment and 
 underrates the importance of the intellect. His world-conception 
 might be characterized as a philosophy of mood, of temper, of feel- 
 ing, of subjectivity, in rebellion against the rigid demands of in- 
 tellect, of science, of consistency of system. He dislikes theory and 
 system, prefers pluralism to monism, clings to the concrete, and ab- 
 hors the abstract. Such is the poet's and artist's temperament, 
 which is desirable in literature, in lyric effusions, in paintings, espe- 
 cially in Stimmungsbildern, but out of place in science and in a 
 scientific philosophy. Such temperamental expressions are perfectly 
 legitimate, and we enjoy the writings of Professor James as such, 
 but we must demur when he parades his subjectivism as philosophy, 
 indeed as the one philosophy to the exclusion of an objective or a 
 scientific philosophy. 
 
 Here is a sample of pragmatic epistemology : 
 
 "A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or hit, 
 they discharge themselves ins Blaue hinein. If, however, something starts up 
 opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit and know. 
 
 "But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the critics 
 look on and see a real q [quality] and a feeling of q ; and because the two re- 
 semble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what right have we 
 to say this until we know that the feeling of q means to stand for or represent 
 just that same other q? Suppose, instead of one q, a number of real q's in 
 the field. If the gun shoots and hits, we can easily see which one of them it 
 hits. But how can we distinguish which one the feeling knows? It knows 
 the one it stands for. But which one does it stand for? It declares no in- 
 tention in this respect. It merely resembles; it resembles all indifferently; 
 and resembling, per se, is not necessarily representing or standing-for at all. 
 Eggs resemble each other, but do not on that account represent, stand for, 
 or know each other. And if you say this is because neither of them is a
 
 AN APPENDIX ON PRAGMATISM. 
 
 feeling, then imagine the world to consist of nothing but toothaches, which 
 are feelings, feelings resembling each other exactly, would they know each 
 other the better for all that?" 
 
 Rambling but witty, full of misconceptions but entertaining, 
 and disposing of the problem with a joke, such is the style of the 
 leader of the pragmatic movement. 
 
 The book talks about truth, but never and nowhere does it clinch 
 the problem. We grant that it combats many errors, although we 
 must add that frequently what it combats are but straw men of the 
 author's own making. But whatever errors pragmatism may be 
 guilty of, Professor James was a man of great vigor and ingenuity. 
 Though we would say that Professor James made serious blunders 
 and was sometimes unfair to his antagonists, though he misconstrued 
 the philosophies of the past, though he lacked clearness of thought, 
 the first requisite for a philosopher, his writings possess a charm 
 that is unrivaled. He may have been wrong in all his contentions, 
 but he was never dull.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Absolute in truth, 27. 
 
 Abstraction, Man rules nature through 
 the power of, 67-68. 
 
 Abstractions significant, 40. 
 
 Actuality and reality, 103. 
 
 Adaptation and right thinking, 10. 
 
 Admirers of W. James, 129. 
 
 After-images are true sensations, 99. 
 
 Agreement, between atheist and the- 
 ist, 35 ; of critics regarding James's 
 pragmatism, 53, 114, 115; of opin- 
 ion regarding the nature of truth, 
 96; of truths, the ideal of science, 
 
 12. 
 
 Allegory and truth, 35. 
 
 American, The "smart," 121. 
 
 Anecdote of inconsistency, An, 126. 
 
 Anschauungen, and sensation, 123; and 
 truth, 92 ; of Kant, 19. 
 
 Answer, Peace of the conclusive, 122. 
 
 Apocrypha, Truth in O. T., 86. 
 
 Approximation and the progress of 
 science, 29. 
 
 A priori, and truth, 125 ; in the Kant- 
 ian sense, 74. 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 90, 96. 
 
 Archetypes, Mathematical formulas 
 not, 128. 
 
 Artist temperament of W. James, 130. 
 
 Aristotle, and Euclid, 30; and the 
 definition of truth, 88; contrasted 
 with Plato, 122. 
 
 Astronomy, and the personal equa- 
 tion, 49; Pragmatic attitude in, 41, 
 42. 
 
 Atheist and theist, Ground for agree- 
 ment between, 35. 
 
 Augustine, St., Truth and existence 
 according to, 89. 
 
 Avenarius, 125. 
 
 Averroes, 90. 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 120. 
 
 Bayle, Pierre, and the doctrine of 
 twofold truth, 91. 
 
 "Beliefs, as rules for action," an ex- 
 planation but not a principle, 5; 
 framed for a practical intent, 35. 
 
 Bentham, 6. 
 
 Birth of truth, 98. 
 
 Bismarck's pragmatic politics, 5. 
 
 Blondel, Maurice, 116. 
 
 Boodin, John E., 40. 
 
 Business interests and pragmatism, 47. 
 
 Cash value of ideas, 8; of truth, 9. 
 
 Categories fulminated and categories 
 forming, 36. 
 
 Causation, an aspect of conservation 
 of matter and energy, 71 ; and the 
 metaphysical entity behind phenom- 
 ena, 70. 
 
 Cause, a motion, 71. 
 
 Chance (Tyche), Doctrine of, 36. 
 
 Change, All things, 2. 
 
 Charvakas, the materialist school of 
 India, 89. 
 
 Chinese character for truth, 83, 84. 
 
 Christianity's doctrine of truth, 89. 
 
 Clifford, 129. 
 
 Cognition and the scientific method, 
 95 ; Stoic's emphasis of the theory 
 of, 88. 
 
 Comet, Pragmatism like a, 44. 
 
 Conflict between scientific and relig- 
 ious truth, 90. 
 
 Consciousness, 102 ; Teleology vs. the 
 mechanics of, 126. 
 
 Consequences, the viewpoints of prag- 
 matists, 115. 
 
 Conservation of energy and matter, 
 Causation an aspect of, 71. 
 
 Consistency, Man's hankering for, 22 ; 
 not required in philosophy (Bood- 
 in), 40; produces harmony, i. e., 
 lawdom, 75. 
 
 Constitution of the world complete 
 from all eternity, 16. 
 
 Conviction, the truth of the pre-scien- 
 tific man, 48. 
 
 Coordination of facts and their re- 
 presentations, II. 
 
 Copernicus, Ptolemy and, 28. 
 
 Correlates, Subject and object as, 127. 
 
 Correspondence between ideas and 
 facts, 39.
 
 134 
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Corridor of theories, Pragmatism a, 
 
 27. 
 Critics agree in misinterpreting Wm. 
 
 James's pragmatism, 53; 114, 115. 
 Curved reason and two-dimensional 
 
 time, 15. 
 
 Cynic's Calendar, 7. 
 Cyrenaics or hedonists, 115. 
 
 Data of truth furnished by the senses, 
 
 60-6 1. 
 "Denouncers" of pragmatism rebuked, 
 
 55- 
 
 Description, Law of causation not re- 
 placed by, 70. 
 
 Development of science, Failures in- 
 cidental to, not part of science, 66 ; 
 no less subject to law than the 
 growth of nature, 66. 
 
 Domain of truth, includes the noetic 
 and the teleological, 48; Place of 
 sense impressions in, 96. 
 
 "Dooley on Philosophy," 61-62. 
 
 Doubt and the "fixation of belief," 58. 
 
 Dungeons and fagots, The drastic 
 arguments of, 61. 
 
 Ego as "a practical unit for prelim- 
 inary consideration," 125. 
 
 Enthusiasm a prerequisite for modern 
 pragmatism, 126. 
 
 Epicurus, 88, 89. 
 
 Epistemology, i. e., kenlore, 88. 
 
 Error, a failure to attain the truth, 99 ; 
 and windmills, 129. 
 
 Esoteric and exoteric truth, 90. 
 
 Etymology of the word truth, 78 ff. 
 
 Eucken, R., 118. 
 
 Euclid and Aristotle, 30; not anti- 
 quated by modern science, 128. 
 
 Eudoxus, 28. 
 
 Evidence by accumulated details is 
 not truth, 74. 
 
 Exactness is not pedantry, 43. 
 
 Expedient, Truth as an, 28. 
 
 Experience protests against errors, 92. 
 
 Facts, are real and their representa- 
 tions are true, 1 1 ; particular, and 
 truths universal, 61 ; with ideas, 
 Correspondence of, 39. 
 
 "Fad" philosophy, 43. 
 
 Failures incidental to the development 
 of science are not part of science 
 itself, 66. 
 
 Faith often replaces logic, 50. 
 
 "Feeling, The chief component of 
 mind is," (Duns Scotus), 120. 
 
 "Fixation of belief," 58. 
 
 "Flowing ones," The, 124. 
 
 Form, Philosophy of, 74 f. 
 
 Formal science, Key to nature in, 73. 
 
 Forms-in-themselves, 123. 
 
 Fraud and error in awe of truth, 93. 
 
 Fulminated categories, 36. 
 
 Gefuhl ist A lies, 38. 
 
 Germany and the conflict in philos- 
 ophy, 122. 
 
 General and special truths, 93. 
 
 Genetic psychology and personality, 49. 
 
 Geometry, Subjectivity of, 129. 
 
 Gesetzmassigkeit, i. e., lawdom, 75. 
 
 God and geometry, 128; as creator, 
 106; can be defined in terms of ex- 
 perience, 35; Gauge of man to be 
 found in, I ; the oneness of all the 
 verities of existence, 108. 
 
 Good and evil, Stoic definition of, 114. 
 
 Harmony of all truths predetermined. 
 
 12 ; produced by consistency, 75. 
 Hebert, Marcel, 53. 
 Hedonists, 115. 
 Heraclitus, 87. 
 Herrmann, Conrad, 116. 
 Historiography, Pragmatic, 4. 
 Horizon, Intellectual, 44. 
 Humanity the product of reason, 19. 
 Hume, 75, 92, 125. 
 
 Ideal, of philosophy, to trace the unity 
 of our world-conception, 66 ; of sci- 
 ence, the ultimate agreement of all 
 truths, 12. 
 
 Ideals, Efficiency of, i ; guardian an- 
 gels, 2. 
 
 Ideas, and facts, Correspondence be- 
 tween, 39; in use compared to 
 money in circulation, 9. 
 
 Idiosyncrasies and the "will to be- 
 lieve," 23. 
 
 Incarnation of the deity, The ideal 
 man an, 2. 
 
 Inconsistency, Anecdote of, 126; in 
 definition, 53 ; not detrimental in 
 philosophy (Boodin), 40. 
 
 "Innate" ideas, 105. 
 
 Inspiration and the personal equa- 
 tion, 43. 
 
 Instability of natural law, Theory of 
 the, 36. 
 
 Intellect, a revelation of God, 52; 
 and the personal equation, 48; Su- 
 premacy of, 52. 
 
 Intellectual, horizon, 44; struggles 
 not quibbles, 35. 
 
 Inventions not happy coincidences, 51. 
 
 James, William, 5, 42 ff . ; accepts the 
 consequences of his own definition, 
 7; Admirers of, 129; an empiricist, 
 26; and mystical phenomena, 20, 
 119; apologizes for title of book,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 135 
 
 The Will to Believe, 23; artist 
 temperament of, 130 ; as a pluralist, 
 58; Attractive personality and 
 charm of, 44-45 ; averse to argu- 
 ment, 34-35 ; Brilliant dicta of, 127 ; 
 Critics agree in misinterpreting 
 pragmatism of, 53, 114, 115; his 
 definitions of truth, 54, 68; his 
 vagaries fascinating to the young 
 generation, 42 ; Literary style of, 13 ; 
 Naturalism and, 32; often wrong 
 but never dull, 129; paints with a 
 full brush, 31; Spiritualism of, 32; 
 Tribute to, 130. 
 
 Kant not antiquated by pragmatism, 
 37, 49, 92, 120. 
 
 Kelvin's interview with a reporter, 
 Lord, 69. 
 
 Kenlore, new term for epistemology 
 or theory of cognition, 88. 
 
 Kepler, 30. 
 
 Kernel of pragmatic method, 115, 117. 
 
 Key to, nature in the formal sciences, 
 73 ; riddles of the world, 106. 
 
 Kirchhoff's use of the word "descrip- 
 tion," 70. 
 
 Language, Origin of, 84. 
 
 Lateran Council and the twofold 
 truth, 92. 
 
 Lawdom, the condition which makes 
 truth possible, 100; the harmony 
 produced by consistency, 75. 
 
 Laws of nature, not blind, 32; proto- 
 types of our truths, 106; systematic 
 descriptions of groups of facts, 39. 
 
 Leibnitz, 105 ; concedes true existence 
 only to that which works, 118; his 
 use of the term "monad," 116. 
 
 Lies, considered pragmatically, 56-57; 
 Useful, 7. 
 
 Logic, analogous to perception, 97; 
 most certain of all sciences, 125 ; 
 often replaced by faith, 50; Plural- 
 istic, 15; vs. temperament, 24! 
 
 Loose method of philosophizing, Dan- 
 gers of a, 42. 
 
 Ma'at, the goddess of truth and right, 
 81-83. 
 
 Mach, Ernst, 70, 125. 
 
 Maimonides, 90. 
 
 Man an incarnation of the deity, The 
 ideal, 2. 
 
 Marburg School, The, 123. 
 
 Materialism and spiritualism, 31. 
 
 Materialist school of India, Charva- 
 kas, 89. 
 
 Mathematical formulas not arche- 
 types, 128. 
 
 Matter, a problem not ripe for solu- 
 tion, 68, 70; and energy represent 
 the "that" of existence, not the 
 why and wherefore, 104; Man's 
 soul not molded by, 32; now con- 
 sidered as subject to origin and 
 destruction, Ponderable, 71 ; or God 
 a supererogatory discussion, 34. 
 
 Maywald, M. 90. 
 
 Mechanical necessity the foundation 
 of truth, 100. 
 
 Mechanics of consciousness, Teleology 
 vs. the, 126. 
 
 Memory and truth, 97. 
 
 Mendel jeff series, The, 72. 
 
 Mental constructions have pragmatic 
 value, 17, 18; mistakes, Sense illu- 
 sions are, 99-100. 
 
 Merz, John Theodor, 94. 
 
 Metageometry, Space conception of, 
 15. See also "Non-Euclidean ge- 
 ometries." 
 
 Metaphysical essence, 102. 
 
 Metaphysics and causation, 70-71. 
 
 Methodology, 51 ; Classical and mod- 
 ern, 95. 
 
 Microcosm, Man a, i. 
 
 Mill, J. S., 125. 
 
 Mind, a proof of the cosmic system, 
 loo ; and truth, 96 ; Consistency and 
 the human, 15 ; embodiment of the 
 world-order, 105; Origin of, II. 
 
 Misconstructions and false criticism, 
 127-128. 
 
 Monad, Leibnitz's use of the term, 
 lid 
 
 Monism, and the principle of oneness, 
 14; and the unity of all truths, 104- 
 105. 
 
 Moods, Legitimate place of, 41. 
 
 Moral holidays and the inconsisten- 
 cies of pragmatism, 22. 
 
 Motion, Cause a, 71 ; Point of refer- 
 ence the first essential condition for 
 describing a, 72. 
 
 Multiple personality, 53. 
 
 Munsterberg, Hugo, 124. 
 
 Mysticism and the purely formal, 103 ; 
 Love of facts and, 19 ff. 
 
 Naturalism, W. James and, 32. 
 
 Nature's key in the formal sciences, 
 73 ; laws not blind, 32 ; laws proto- 
 types of our truths, 106; laws sys- 
 tematic descriptions of groups of 
 facts, 39. 
 
 Necessity and universal validity, 124. 
 
 New truth is pseudo truth, iio-m. 
 
 Newton on the ultimate constitution 
 of matter, 69. 
 
 Nietzsche, R, 93-94.
 
 136 
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 Noetic domain of truth, No separate 
 
 48. 
 Non-Euclidean geometries, 30. See 
 
 also "Metageometry." 
 
 Objective significance of truth, II ff. 
 
 Objectivity of science, 51. 
 
 Occam, William, 120. 
 
 Occult phenomena believed in by W. 
 James, 119. 
 
 Old truths and their wider interpre- 
 tations, 30. 
 
 One and the many, The, 13. 
 
 Oneness of all truths, 104. 
 
 Order not the cause but the product 
 of evolution (Peirce), 36. 
 
 Palagyi, Melchior, 119. 
 
 Paradoxes of pragmatism, 21. 
 
 Parmenides, Plato greatly influenced 
 by, 87. 
 
 Pathological reasoning, 47. 
 
 Peace of the conclusive answer, 122. 
 
 Peirce, Benjamin, 37. 
 
 Peirce, Charles S., 5 ; A suggestion 
 for, 15 ; the real founder of prag- 
 matism, 114; Tychism of, 36. 
 
 Personal equation, a vitiating factor 
 in a consideration of truth, 50, 51 ; 
 and astronomy, 49; and intellect, 
 48; and "plastic truth," 26-27; In- 
 accuracy of the, 46, 47. 
 
 Personality, Disintegrated, 49, 53; 
 Genetic psychology and, 49. 
 
 Philosophy, as a science not deter- 
 mined by the personal equation, 26 ; 
 Ideal of, to trace the unity of our 
 world conception, 66; not the sub- 
 jective expression of idiosyncrasies, 
 41 ; of tolerance, 40 ; tested by its 
 practical application, 10. 
 
 Piper, Mrs., 43. 
 
 Plasticity in astronomy, 41 ; in phi- 
 losophy, 40; of truth, 27. 
 
 Plato, 87; and Aristotle, 122. 
 
 Plotinus, 87. 
 
 Pluralistic view of science, 65. 
 
 Poetic not always the exact, The, 37. 
 
 Poincare, Henri, 72. 
 
 Politics, Pragmatic, 4-5. 
 
 Polybius, 116. 
 
 Pope's infallibility and pragmatism, 
 The, 127. 
 
 Pragmatic, All philosophies are, 10; 
 aspect of philosophy its most im- 
 portant part, 64; epistemology, 
 Sample of, 130; History of the 
 word, 4; method, a card catalogue, 
 121, method, Kernel of, 115, 117. 
 
 Pragmaticism and pragmatism, 36. 
 
 Pragmatism, a psychological method 
 rather than a new philosophy, 63; 
 
 an artistic movement, 43 ; and the 
 Inquisition, 7; and utilitarianism, 
 6; applied to time and space, 18; 
 as a philosophical movement, 4; 
 Critics of, 23; date when stamped 
 as a philosophical term, 116; de- 
 fined by W. James, 5 ; denies veri- 
 ties (objectivity of truth), 107; 
 History of the word and the method, 
 113; in business interests, 47; in the 
 religious field, 8 ; introduced into 
 philosophy by C. S. Peirce in 1878, 
 5 ; its denouncers rebuked, 55 ; its 
 test of truth and place in religion, 
 33; new wine in old bottles, 119; on 
 the defensive, 126; Pathological 
 element in, 25 ; Peirce the real 
 founder of, 114; Pre-scientific, 48; 
 Prophecies of , 44; pugnacious 
 towards its critics, 37. 
 
 Predetermined, Solutions of scientific 
 problems are, n. 
 
 Pre-scientific, age of culture, Char- 
 acteristics of the, 50; man's idea of 
 truth, 48. 
 
 Prince, Dr. Morton, 49. 
 
 Problems, Only one right solution of 
 scientific, 11. 
 
 Promise, Spiritualism the doctrine of, 
 
 34- 
 
 Prophecy of pragmatism, The, 44. 
 
 Protagoras redivivus, 118. 
 
 Psychic phenomena, The attractive 
 vagueness of, 43 ; believed in by 
 James, 119. 
 
 Psychology, Genetic, 49. 
 
 Ptolemy and truth, 28. 
 
 Pugnacious pragmatism, 37. 
 
 Purely formal, i.e., reason, 60; Norms 
 of, the backbone of system in sci- 
 ence, 14, 67; Mysticism and, 103. 
 
 Quibbling and confusion of thought, 
 73; vs. argument, 29, 35. 
 
 Radium and the final dissolubility of 
 atoms, 72. 
 
 Rationality first expressed in the idea 
 of God, 75. 
 
 Real and true, n. 
 
 Reality, and actuality, 103; Ready- 
 made, 17. 
 
 Reason, a unity, 14, 16 ; Humanity the 
 product of, 19. 
 
 Reference, Points of, 72 ff. 
 
 Reformation and pragmatism, The, 7. 
 
 Religion, an instinctive formulation of 
 a trust in the world-order, 75; 
 Place of pragmatism in, 33. 
 
 Revelation of truth, Special, 90. 
 
 Riddles of the world, Key to, 106.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 137 
 
 Rock of ages, 65 ff. ; in that the truth 
 of yesterday will be truth to-mor- 
 row, 28 ; in world-order founded on 
 philosophy of form, 75. 
 
 Romantic temperament introduced 
 into theology by W. James, 32. 
 
 Rothschild and pragmatic methods in 
 finance, 56-57. 
 
 Russell, Bertrand, 127. 
 
 Schiller, F. C. R., 59; as a humanist, 
 118. 
 
 Schopenhauer, A., 92; Four kinds of 
 truth according to, 93. 
 
 Science, a consistent principle of ar- 
 ranging facts in related order, 65 ; 
 Heroes of, 95 ; Ideal of, the agree- 
 ment of truths, 12; not an aggre- 
 gate of mere probabilities but a 
 method of determining truth, 68; 
 not impossible because the masses 
 are unscientific, 51 ; objectivity of, 
 51; Pluralistic view of, 65; super- 
 seded, 128; Truth the basis of, 7. 
 
 Scotus, Duns, 120. 
 
 Sensation and pure Anschauung, 123. 
 
 Sensations as ultimate realities 
 (Mach), 119. 
 
 Sense impressions, analogous to log- 
 ical syllogisms, 97; Place of, in the 
 domain of truth, 96. 
 
 "Sentiment, is everything," 119; Sig- 
 nificance of, 130. 
 
 Simmel, Georg, 118. 
 
 Sophists, Philosophy of the, 44. 
 
 Spasms, Thought-, 10. 
 
 Speech is representative, 85. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 72. 
 
 Spinoza, 92. 
 
 Spiritual origin of force, B. Peirce's 
 theory of the, 37. 
 
 Spiritualism of W. James, 32. 
 
 Spirituality impossible without truth, 
 in. 
 
 Stability of truth, 73. 
 
 Stein, Ludwig, 113, 123-124. 
 
 Stoics on truth and the theory of 
 cognition, 88; their definition of 
 good and evil, 114. 
 
 "Straw men" in philosophy, 39. 
 
 Subject and object as correlates, 127. 
 
 Subjective, conception of truth, 54; 
 element, Elimination of the, 49. 
 
 Subjectivity develops from purely 
 physical conditions into the think- 
 ing subject, 103; of geometry, 129. 
 
 Syllogisms, and sensations as criteria 
 of truth, 88; and sense perceptions, 
 
 97- 
 
 Symbols for orientation, 125. 
 System is the backbone of science, 74. 
 
 Tausch, Edwin, 49. 
 
 Teleological, in truth, The, 48; unity 
 of ego, 125; view of pragmatism, 
 US- 
 
 Teleology vs. the mechanics of con- 
 sciousness, 126. 
 
 Temperament vs. logical argument, 
 24, 25. 
 
 Terminology in philosophy, 51. 
 
 Theology and truth, 90-91. 
 
 Theory, Truth and fact in, 70. 
 
 Things-in-themselves, 92, 109. 
 
 Thucydides, 116. 
 
 Time and space, 17 f. 
 
 Tolerance in philosophy, 40. 
 
 Transformation, Law of, 71. 
 
 Trendelenburg, A., 121. 
 
 Trinity, Verities, truths and ideals 
 constitute an analogy to the theo- 
 logical, 106, 107. 
 
 Truth, a formulation of the essential 
 features of a set of facts, 61 ; and 
 allegory, 35 ; and Anschauung, 92 ; 
 and existence, Difference between, 
 96 ; and the a priori, 125 ; as an ex- 
 pedient, 28; Cash value of, not de- 
 termined by activity, 8, 10; Chris- 
 tianity's doctrine of, 89; defined, 
 85 ; defined by James, 54 ; Doctrine 
 of the twofold, 89, 91 ; Domain of, 
 includes noetic and teleological, 48; 
 Egyptian emblems of, 81 ff. ; Ety- 
 mology of the word, 78; Evidence 
 is not, 74; exists only in thought, 
 96 ; in the singular and in the plural, 
 13 ; its ideal the solution of every 
 scientific problem, 1 1 ; its predeter- 
 mined character in the agreement 
 between idea and reality, n; man's 
 guide and safeguard, 3 ; Mechanical 
 necessity the foundation of, 100; 
 Nature and function of, according 
 to modern scientists, 94; never in- 
 ert, 39 ; not affected by failures and 
 breakdowns in theories, 66, 129 ; 
 not of the senses but of the mind, 
 61 ; not tested by logic or psychol- 
 ogy, 12 ; offspring of the One and 
 All, in; Plasticity of, 27; Prag- 
 matic conception of, 5 ; reality, 1 1 ; 
 reflects and reveals the eternal, 112; 
 Stability of, 73 ; the eternal and the 
 transient, 2; the most significant 
 presence in the world, 12; Utility 
 as criterion of, 117; Variability of, 
 28; Verifiable, the basis of science, 
 
 Truths, are objective correlates of 
 subjective thoughts, 104; are uni- 
 versal, facts particular, 61 ; Gen- 
 eral and special, 93; may contrast 
 but never contradict each other,
 
 138 
 
 TRUTH ON TRIAL. 
 
 104; of to-day never the falsehoods 
 of to-morrow, 30; Oneness of all, 
 104. 
 
 Twins, Truth and mind, 98. 
 
 Twofold truth, 89, 91. 
 
 Tychism, Charles S. Peirce's, 36. 
 
 Ueberweg, 97. 
 
 "Uniformities of Nature," (Clifford), 
 129. 
 
 Unity, is qualitatively different from 
 its parts, 109 ; not a mere aggregate, 
 108; not a thing but a relation of 
 parts, I ; of our world conception, 
 Ideal of philosophy to trace, 66; of 
 reason and of the world, 15. 
 
 Universals, Truths are, 61 ; Two con- 
 tradictory views of the nature of, 
 
 IOI-IO2. 
 
 Universe, Mind of the, 15 f. 
 
 Utilitarianism, No true principle in, 6. 
 
 Verities, as events (James), 8; as 
 eternal truths, 13 ; correspond to 
 first person of the Trinity, 106. 
 
 Warren, Mrs. Fiske, 65. 
 
 Waterloo, 56. 
 
 Will, Supremacy of the, 119. 
 
 Will to believe, Idiosyncrasies and 
 the, 23 ; James apologizes for the 
 title of his book, 23 ; less influential 
 in determining religious conviction, 
 48. 
 
 Windmills and giant errors, 129. 
 
 Words, spoken symbols of things and 
 of abstractions, 67-68. 
 
 World-stuff, Primordial, 72. 
 
 Your truth, vs. my truth, 51.
 
 A 000 341 043 8 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY