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 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
Bv THE Same Author 
 
 "THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF'* 
 
 New York. The Macmillan Company. 1907 
 
WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES BISSETT PRATT, Ph.D. 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 IN WILLIAMS COLLEGE 
 
 NjiD gorfs 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1909 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
H> 
 
 'Ho 
 
 
 Copyright, 1909, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1909. Reprinted 
 June, 1909. 
 
 J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
JOHN EDWARD RUSSELL 
 
 THE KEENEST AND KINDLIEST CRITIC OF PRAGMATISM 
 * 
 
 THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED 
 
 IN GRATEFUL AND SINCERE AFFECTION 
 
PREFACE 
 
 During the spring of 1908 I received an 
 invitation from Mr. Stephen F, Weston to 
 give a course of six lectures the following 
 summer at the Glenmore Summer School, 
 and to choose my own subject. Unfortu- 
 nately for the school, as it turned out, I 
 decided to make use of the opportunity to 
 say certain things about pragmatism that 
 had long been stirring in my soul; and 
 " Pragmatism, A Critique," was, accordingly, 
 advertised in the circular of the school as 
 the subject of my lectures. I say my choice 
 was unfortunate for the school, for when, 
 after a twenty-mile drive into the heart of 
 the Adirondacks, I reached Glenmore, I 
 found that the patrons of the school had to 
 a man (and almost to a woman) postponed 
 their arrival to the following week, and it 
 looked as if Mr. Weston and myself would 
 
Vlll PREFACE 
 
 constitute the bulk of the audience. By the 
 help of the neighbors, however, we managed 
 to corral several philosophers who were 
 known to be at large in the mountains, and 
 several lovers of philosophy, who by their 
 kindly interest and helpful suggestions more 
 than made up for the paucity of their num- 
 bers. The purpose of the publication of this 
 book is, therefore, to show those who did not 
 go to Glenmore last summer (and this in- 
 cludes a fairly large portion of the human 
 race) how much they missed. 
 
 The criticisms of my friends at Glenmore 
 proved decidedly valuable, and the following 
 pages have, therefore, been somewhat recast 
 since I gave the lectures; yet it has seemed 
 advisable to retain the lecture form as best 
 adapted to somewhat popular and informal 
 exposition. For though I have nowhere 
 allowed the desire for simplicity and popu- 
 larity to interfere with thoroughness of treat- 
 ment, and though I have used technical 
 language where exactness demanded it, my 
 aim has been throughout to give an exposi- 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 tion and critique of pragmatism which the 
 general reader could follow without too 
 much effort. I cannot flatter myself that 
 he will always find the following pages inter- 
 esting or easy, but if he really cares to know 
 about pragmatism and hence comes armed 
 with patience, he will, I hope, find them 
 clear. 
 
 Although the controversy over pragma- 
 tism has now been waging for several years, 
 and although the non-pragmatists have been 
 quite as numerous and as active as their 
 opponents, their contributions to the dis- 
 cussion have been confined almost entirely 
 to the technical periodicals, whereas the 
 pragmatist side has been presented to the 
 public in three or four books which have 
 commanded a fairly wide reading. Of course 
 the " public " never reads the technical 
 periodicals, and there is, therefore, a place 
 for a book which (while not presupposing any 
 prior knowledge of the subject) shall present, 
 with some attempt at comprehensiveness and 
 unity, the position of those who find them- 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 selves unable to accept the pragmatist view. 
 Two such books have appeared in France, 
 but there is as yet (so far as I am aware) no 
 book in English which has this aim. 
 
 It is, of course, with this aim that I have 
 written the following pages. It would be 
 disingenuous in me should I not frankly 
 declare war on pragmatism even in my 
 preface. But I hope my readers will do me 
 the justice to believe me when I say that 
 to criticise pragmatism has been only my 
 secondary object, my chief aim being to 
 understand it and to help others to do so. 
 When the movement first began I was an 
 enthusiastic pragmatist, and my enthusiasm 
 lasted until I came to understand clearly 
 what it really meant. And though I am 
 no longer one of its supporters, its charm is 
 still so strong upon me that L am eager to 
 see it completely developed and carefully 
 expressed, and the good seed which indu- 
 bitably is in it threshed out and separated 
 from the immense amount of chaff which 
 bears its name. Threshing only can save 
 
PREFACE XI 
 
 whatever of value there is in it ; and I hope 
 my pragmatist friends will at least see in 
 my book a sincere attempt to aid them in 
 our common task of "making our ideas 
 clear." 
 
 My thanks are due to the editors of the 
 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Sci- 
 entific Methods, for their courtesy in permit- 
 ting me to make use (in Lectures II and III) 
 of material taken from two articles of mine 
 which appeared in their Journal during the 
 years 1907 and 1908. And most of all I 
 wish to acknowledge with sincere gratitude 
 the invaluable and unfailing assistance, ad- 
 vice, and guidance which I have received 
 from Professor John E. Russell of Williams 
 College. It was at first his intention to 
 collaborate with me upon a book of this 
 nature, but lack of time prevented him from 
 carrying out his part of the plan, — to the 
 very considerable loss of the many who 
 would have read this book had he been its 
 principal author. But the loss has not been 
 absolute ; for those of my readers who have 
 
Xll PREFACE 
 
 followed the controversy over pragmatism 
 will recognize that very much of what is 
 best in this book is due to him. 
 
 WiiiiAMSTOwN, Mass., 
 Febiuaiy i, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Meaning and Method in Pragmatism . . . i 
 
 LECTURE II 
 The Ambiguity of Truth 47 
 
 LECTURE III 
 The Pragmatic View of the Truth Relation . 81 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 Pragmatism and Knowledge 133 
 
 LECTURE V 
 Pragmatism and Religion 173 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 The "Practical" Point of View . . . .211 
 
 Index 255 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 MEANING AND METHOD IN PRAGMATISM 
 
WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 LECTURE I 
 
 MEANING AND METHOD IN PRAGMATISM 
 
 I REMEMBER once hearing a professor of 
 " Real Property " in one of our leading law 
 schools discuss very learnedly and at con- 
 siderable length the question whether any 
 one in the United States really owned any 
 land. To put it in the professor's words, the 
 question was (if I remember aright) whether 
 the title to land was ever actually vested in 
 the individual or whether he was merely an 
 occupant, the real owner being the state. 
 On the one hand, the professor pointed 
 out, the individual could do what he liked 
 with his land, could deed it to whom he 
 pleased and dispose of it in any way that 
 suited him. But, on the other hand, there 
 was the power of eminent domain, the right 
 
 3 
 
4 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of the state to condemn the land and take it 
 from him, for a suitable consideration, at any- 
 time. This being the case, in whom is the 
 ownership really vested? 
 
 The conclusion to which most of us came, 
 as I remember it, was that this was one of 
 the mysteries of the law which the mind of 
 man could never fathom. Doubtless the 
 land belonged to some one ; in fact, it very 
 obviously belonged either to the individual 
 or to the state. But to which of these it 
 really belonged was a question which could 
 probably never be answered. 
 
 Now if there had been among us at the 
 time a pragmatist philosopher, he would prob- 
 ably have addressed us in some such words 
 as these : " My friends," he would have said, 
 "your difficulty is all of your own making. 
 You think you are puzzling over a very deep 
 problem ; but there is really no problem 
 here to puzzle over. What you take for 
 depth is in fact only the muddiness of your 
 own thought. For consider: What you 
 want to know is in whom the ownership of 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 5 
 
 the land is vested. That being the case, 
 your first question should be, What do we 
 mean by ownership? And the answer to 
 this is simple enough; namely, the right 
 to do this, that, and the other with the object 
 owned. Enumerate all the things that can 
 be done with land ; then the right to do just 
 these things is ownership. And once you 
 have enumerated these rights, you have ex- 
 hausted the meaning of the term. If owner- 
 ship means anything more than this, what is 
 it? You cannot say. Except in the con- 
 crete and practical sense I have defined, 
 '^ ownerships means just nothing at all, — it 
 is a mere term without content. Of course, 
 one's ownership may be more or less limited, 
 according as one has the right to do fewer 
 or more things with the object one 'owns.' 
 Hence, to return to your particular question, 
 the individual owns the land in the sense of 
 being able to dig in it, build on it, sell it, or 
 give it away, etc.; and the state owns it 
 in the sense of being able to take it from the 
 individual if it desires. And so your ques- 
 
6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 tion answers itself. In short, your insoluble 
 mystery is merely gratuitous mystification 
 of your own making. It seems a mystery 
 only because it is meaningless." 
 
 I have used this illustration, drawn from 
 a field at some distance from philosophy, 
 to show how the pragmatist may often 
 succeed in solving our problems for us by 
 simply demonstrating to us that they are 
 no problems at all. Don't seek to solve a 
 question, says pragmatism, until you know 
 what you mean by it. Think so far as 
 possible in concrete terms. Never let your- 
 self be hoodwinked and browbeaten by big 
 words and verbal abstractions. Remember 
 that the meaning of philosophical terms 
 may often be in inverse proportion to 
 their length. Words are but pragmatists' 
 counters; they do but reckon with them; 
 but they are the money of non-pragmatists. 
 Concerning every object of discussion ask 
 the question : What is it known as ? What 
 does it mean to me? For, as G. H. Lewes 
 has said, and as Aristotle said long before 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 7 
 
 him, a thing is what it does. All that it 
 can ever mean is just the difference that 
 it can make to some one. There is no 
 genuine difference that does not make a 
 difference. 
 
 Well, every pragmatist will tell you this 
 is pragmatism; and I trust all my hearers 
 are good pragmatists. It goes without say- 
 ing that I am one. Who, indeed, could 
 resist a doctrine so delightfully healthy, 
 clear-cut, simple, and helpful ? It has the 
 salt air of the sea in it and the ozone 
 of the mountains. With this philosophy 
 within one's grasp, who would choose to 
 be bound down in servile submission to 
 verbal abstractions, and to spend one's days 
 discussing problems that have no meaning? 
 Rather let us think clearly and to the point, 
 and sign an intellectual Declaration of 
 Independence from all unmeaning con- 
 cepts. It is not surprising that the new 
 philosophy is advancing victoriously over 
 the land, and that all sorts and conditions 
 of men are joining the procession. In the 
 
8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 glow of our loyalty we are willing to march 
 against any foe, under our banner, upon 
 whose ample folds we have written, " Away 
 with Logomachy and Meaningless Abstrac- 
 tions ! " 
 
 But alas ! where is the foe ? Who is it 
 that is championing logomachy and meaning- 
 less abstractions ? If belief in clear thought 
 and the other admirable things named above 
 be pragmatism, are we not all pragmatists? 
 — Indeed, we do not all practice what we 
 preach (not even all the leaders of pragma- 
 tism do that), but who would not give his 
 enthusiastic assent to the laudable doctrines 
 and admonitions set out above ? — And if 
 we are all pragmatists and there be no foe 
 to fight, the rather disconcerting question 
 presents itself why we should make such 
 a fuss about it. Unless pragmatism has 
 something more distinctive and original to 
 offer, is it really anything more than a 
 new and rather superfluous name for some 
 exceedingly old and common ways of think- 
 ing? 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 9 
 
 Of course pragmatism is more than this, 
 — otherwise it would resemble a Fourth 
 of July oration on " Liberty " in a New 
 England village, or a revival among the 
 sanctified. Pragmatism seeks and claims 
 to be strenuous, militant, — a plan of cam- 
 paign rather than a celebration or an ex- 
 perience meeting. So much of pragmatism 
 as I have described thus far is only its 
 spirit ; but it is in addition to this a definite 
 and technical doctrine or group of doc- 
 trines on certain fundamental philosophical 
 questions. " Pragmatism (according to Mr., 
 James) is a temper of mind, an attitude ; : 
 it is also a theory of the nature of ideas 
 and truth ; and finally it is a theory about 
 reality." ^ More specifically, it may be said 
 that pragmatism offers us a theory of mean- 
 ing, a theory of truth, and a theory of 
 knowledge; that it is trying to work out 
 a theory of reality; and that it is also a 
 general point of view or way of looking 
 
 » Professor Dewey in " What does Pragmatism mean by 
 Practical ?" Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, p. 85. 
 
lO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 at things, — a way that is in part peculiar 
 to pragmatists, in part adopted by them 
 from a larger tendency or attitude which 
 colors much of contemporary thought. I 
 shall take up each of these things in 
 turn in the following lectures, beginning 
 to-day with a consideration of the pragma- 
 tist doctrine of the nature of meaning and 
 of the method of dealing with philosophical 
 problems which pragmatism naturally de- 
 duces from that doctrine. 
 
 " Meaning " and " method " are, I confess, 
 not intrinsically interesting subjects. I wish 
 I had something more attractive to offer 
 you, but it really is not my fault. I might, 
 of course, give you just a general " point of 
 view " which would, perhaps, not be alto- 
 gether without interest; but I mean to do 
 no such thing. I mean to treat the techni- 
 cal doctrines of pragmatism in as exact a 
 fashion as I can — any other treatment of 
 them I should consider an insult to my audi- 
 ence. Pragmatism has been defined by its 
 founder as a way "to make our ideas clear"; 
 
MEANING AND METHOD II 
 
 hence its doctrines must themselves certainly 
 be clear and capable of exact formulation. 
 We should not be satisfied — and so far as 
 we are good pragmatists we cannot be sat- 
 isfied — with any loose definitions and any 
 vague tendencies and generalities. So long 
 as we allow ourselves to be soothed and 
 satisfied by them we shall be very far from 
 making our ideas clear. We must there- 
 fore do pragmatism the justice to take it 
 seriously, to sift the formulations of it given 
 by the leading pragmatists, and not to rest 
 satisfied till we see exactly what they mean. 
 Such a thorough-going examination of prag- 
 matic meaning and method may seem to 
 some of you at times dry, difficult, and per- 
 haps over-technical. But if you are really 
 consistent, sincere, and honest pragmatists 
 at heart, you will not hesitate at any diffi- 
 culty in the effort to make your ideas clear 
 and to free yourselves from the power of 
 mere words and phrases. Those, on the^ 
 other hand, who are pragmatists in name 
 only I am sure will stay behind, content with 
 
12 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 " words " and " tendencies," and will continue 
 to throw their caps in air, shouting, " Hurrah 
 for Pragmatism ! " without being over-curious 
 as to what it really is, or why they should 
 make such a noise about it. 
 
 Pragmatism may be regarded as the result 
 of two confluent, though not altogether con- 
 sistent, streams of tendency. The first, and 
 i probably the less influential, of these may be 
 ! traced back as far as Kant's doctrine of the 
 I primacy of the practical reason. We cannot, 
 said Kant, prove the reality of God, freedom, 
 immortality, and the moral law. But since 
 we are volitional, active, rational beings we 
 have both the right and the duty to postulate 
 the reality of these things and whatever else 
 may be essential to moral action. It is in- 
 deed possible that we are not free; but we 
 are bound to act as if we were free, and 
 since freedom is essential to morality, it is 
 our duty to believe in it. 
 
 Practically this same brave moral doctrine 
 was revived and reformulated in 1896 by 
 Professor James's "Will to Believe," — a 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 1 3 
 
 book that has stirred America as have few 
 philosophic works of our generation. In the 
 first essay of the volume (which gave its title 
 to the whole) Professor James points out that 
 faith is itself a force and often makes real 
 its own object ; and that when we are faced 
 with genuinely possible alternatives we have 
 a right to accept and believe that one whose 
 acceptance will contribute most to our moral 
 life. Here and elsewhere, moreover, James 
 shows that in morality and metaphysics and 
 religion, as well as in science, we are justi- 
 fied in testing the truth of a belief by its 
 usefulness. 
 
 The second and probably the more im- 
 portant source of pragmatism is the modern 
 scientific view of the meaning of h)^otheses. 
 Hypotheses, " natural laws," scientific gener- 
 alizations, etc., are, as most scientists now 
 maintain, merely short-hand expressions of 
 human experience. They are handy ways 
 of telling us what has happened or what we 
 may expect. They are not so much de- 
 scriptions of an outer and independent " na- 
 
14 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 ture " as ways of summarizing and explaining 
 our experience. Their whole meaning is ex- 
 hausted after they have told us (directly or 
 indirectly) how things act upon us and how 
 we react upon things. That I may be sure 
 not to misrepresent the modern logic of 
 science as pragmatism understands it, let 
 me make use of a sentence from Ostwald, 
 quoted with approval by Professor James in 
 his recent book. 
 
 " All realities influence our practice, and 
 that influence is their meaning for us. I am 
 accustomed to put questions to my classes in 
 this way: In what respects would the world 
 be different if this alternative or that were 
 true.? If I can find nothing that would be- 
 come different, then the alternative has no 
 sense." ^ 
 
 In a somewhat similar spirit Karl Pear- 
 son defines a law of science (or of " nature ") 
 as "a resume in mental shorthand, which 
 replaces for us a lengthy description of the 
 sequences among our sense impressions." * 
 
 1 Quoted by James in " Pragmatism," p. 48. 
 ' " Grammar of Science," p. 87. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 1 5 
 
 The scientist, in short, sees that his hypoth- ; 
 eses and laws ultimately get all their mean- 
 ing from our experience. And, moreover, he 
 no longer regards them purely as ends in 
 themselves; rather are they now his instru- 
 ments by the use of which human action may 
 profitably be guided. Hence he is less con- 
 cerned than were his predecessors with the ; 
 question whether his hypotheses are true; 
 what concerns him most is their usefulness.'. 
 His great question concerning any proposed 
 generalization is, Does it work? And this; 
 for two reasons: in the first place, because 
 its working is practically more important to 
 him than its merely theoretical truth; and 
 secondly, because the only test he has for its 
 truth is its successful working. Unless it 
 works, he has no reason to believe it true. 
 Moreover, as truth and usefulness are both 
 forms of value, the scientist who has no time 
 nor fondness for what he calls "logic chop- 
 ping" has a tendency to. identify the two, 
 without asking himself too curiously whether 
 his hypothesis is true because it is useful or 
 useful because it is true. 
 
1 6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 It was from this view of the nature of 
 scientific hypotheses that pragmatism, in the 
 'more technical sense, took its rise. The 
 name originated with Mr. C. S. Pierce, who 
 in 1878 pubHshed his epoch-making article 
 (for so it turned out to be) entitled " How to 
 make our Ideas Clear." ^ In this paper Mr. 
 Pierce laid down the thesis that the whole 
 meaning of any object consists in the habit 
 or reaction it establishes or induces (directly 
 or indirectly) in us. " Consider what effects 
 which might conceivably have practical bear- 
 ings we consider the object of our concep- 
 tion to have. Then our conception of these 
 effects is the whole of our conception of the 
 object.'"* The word "practical" Mr. Pierce 
 is here using in its strict and etymological 
 sense, as referring to action.* Thus we are 
 told that to develop the meaning of a 
 thought " we have simply to determine what 
 habit it induces, for what a thing means is 
 simply what habit it involves." * " There is 
 
 1 In the Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XII, pp. 286-302. 
 ' p. 293. ' From the Greek irpSyfia, action. * p. 292. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 1 7 
 
 no distinction of meaning so fine as to con- 
 sist in anything but a possible difference of 
 practice."^ Quite in line with this view of 
 the practical nature of meaning is Professor 
 Dewey's use of the word idea as synonymous 
 with " plan of action " or " intention to act in 
 a certain way." * 
 
 Now the assertion (if intended to be taken 
 literally) that all distinction of meaning con- 
 sists in a possible difference of practice cannot 
 be allowed to go unchallenged. It may be 
 true that most concepts and beliefs — or, if 
 you insist, that all concepts and beliefs — 
 result ultimately in action. From that it 
 does not follow that all their meaning con- 
 sists in such resulting action. Doubtless 
 much of their meaning does consist in that. — 
 My concept of an object is largely made up 
 of the way I should act in its presence. As 
 Royce has well said, I do not know the 
 meaning of "//o»" if I think it an animal I 
 might pat on the head, saying, " Nice little 
 
 1 p. 293. 
 
 s Cf., for instance, Mind, Vol. XVI, pp. 335-336, and 
 Jour, of Phil, Vol. V, p. 88, etc. 
 
l8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 lion." — But though this is true, there re- 
 mains always in our concepts and beliefs a 
 group of characteristics which are not to be 
 reduced to any reactions or habits of our 
 own. These may be of as many sorts as 
 there are kinds of experience or psychic 
 states in addition to action. Sensational and 
 emotional facts are of course the most obvi- 
 ous. The distinction between a red house 
 and a green house does not consist in a. dif- 
 ference of practice. Even granted there is a 
 difference in practice or "attitude" resulting, 
 that would not constitute the whole of the dis- 
 tinction. " Practice " surely cannot be taken 
 to mean the whole of experience. (If it were 
 so taken, Mr. Pierce's expressions about it 
 would become the most absurdly obvious 
 truisms.) But if it be not the whole of experi- 
 ence, there is no good reason for insisting that 
 it is the only type of experience which contrib- 
 utes anything toward the meaning of ideas. 
 
 This point is so obvious that I surely need 
 not labor it further. And I am made still 
 more confident that I may be relieved of this 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 19 
 
 ungrateful task by the fact that Professor 
 James long ago saw this weakness in Mr. 
 Pierce's formulation of pragmatism, and 
 therefore " transmogrified " it (as Pierce 
 puts it) and laid the foundations of his 
 own pragmatism in more inclusive terms. 
 In his famous California Address of Au- 
 gust 26, 1898, — which we might almost call 
 the birthday of pragmatism, — he says : — 
 
 " I think myself that it [the principle 
 
 of pragmatism] should be expressed more 
 
 broadly than Mr. Pierce expresses it. . . . I 
 
 should prefer to express Pierce's principle 
 
 iby saying that the effective meaning of 
 
 \any philosophic proposition can always be 
 
 jbrought down to some particular conse- 
 
 ^quence in our future practical experience, 
 
 whether active or passive; the point lying 
 
 rather in the fact that the experience must 
 
 be particular than in the fact that it must 
 
 be active." ^ This interpretation of the term 
 
 practical as meaning concrete and particular 
 
 rather than as referring to action, Pro- 
 
 ^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, p. 674. Italics mine. 
 
20 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 fessor James has consistently maintained 
 ever since/ 
 
 Taking this modified and enlarged state- 
 ment of the pragmatic view of meaning, 
 let us try to see exactly what it amounts to. 
 As I understand it, pragmatism aims by it 
 to do two things. First, it seeks to give 
 us a definite, exact, and technical doctrine 
 of the nature of meaning — to show us what 
 meaning consists in and, therefore, when it 
 is present and when absent. And, sec- 
 ondly, by means of this doctrine, it aims to 
 formulate for us a method of choosing our 
 problems, which shall eliminate for us a 
 number of meaningless questions and help 
 us to see what is worth discussing and what 
 is not. With these aims in view, let us now 
 examine some of the more carefully worded 
 statements of the pragmatic doctrine. 
 
 In Baldwin's " Dictionary of Philosophy," 
 Professor James defines pragmatism as 
 
 ^ Cf. his definition of pragmatism in Baldwin's Dictionary 
 and his artide, " The Pragmatic Account of Truth," in the 
 Phil. Rev. for January, 1908, especially p. 14. Also " Prag- 
 matism," Lecture II, passim. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 21 
 
 "the doctrine that the whole 'meaning' 
 of a conception expresses itself in practical 
 consequences, consequences either in the 
 shape of conduct to be recommended or 
 in that of experiences to be expected, if 
 the conception be true ; which conse- 
 quences would be different if it were 
 untrue, and must be different from the 
 consequences by which the meaning of 
 other conceptions is in turn expressed. 
 If a second conception should not appear 
 to have other consequences, then it must 
 really be only the first conception under a 
 different name." 
 
 The fundamental postulate of " imme- 
 diate empiricism " (a pseudonym for prag- 
 matism) is, according to Professor Dewey, 
 just this : " that things are what they are 
 experienced as being; or that to give a 
 just account of anything is to tell what 
 that thing is experienced to be." " The 
 real significance of this principle is that of 
 a method of philosophical analysis. If you 
 wish to find out what any philosophic term 
 
22 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 means, go to experience and see what it is 
 experienced as'' ^ 
 
 In the same spirit Papini writes : " The 
 meaning of theories consists uniquely in the 
 consequences which those who believe them 
 true may expect from them." * Dr. Schiller 
 puts it thus : " To say that a truth has 
 consequences and that what has none is 
 meaningless, means that it has a bearing 
 -upon some human interest. Its 'conse- 
 quences ' must be consequences to some 
 one for some purpose. If it is clearly 
 grasped that the 'truth' with which we 
 are concerned is truth for man and that 
 the 'consequences' are human too, it is 
 really superfluous to add either that the 
 consequences must be practical or that 
 they must be good."^ 
 
 Owing to a misunderstanding of some 
 of the pragmatists' statements, they have 
 
 J " The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," Jour, of 
 Phil., Vol. II, pp. 397 and 399. 
 
 ' " Introduzione a] Pragmatismo," Leonardo, February, 
 1907, p. 28. 
 
 » "Studies in Humanism," p. j. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 23 
 
 been accused of including among the 
 ' consequences ' that give meaning only 
 such as are practical in the ordinary 
 sense of the word, — bread and butter con- 
 sequences one might call them. Put in 
 this bald and sweeping way, this criticism 
 is based on a radical misunderstanding of 
 pragmatism. All the leading pragmatists 
 insist that among these ' practical conse- 
 quences ' they include such things as 
 logical consistency, intellectual satisfaction, 
 harmony of mental content, etc. James 
 has more than once made the statement 
 that to him practical means simply par- 
 ticular or concrete;'^ and Schiller has fre- 
 quently pointed out that what are commonly 
 called theoretical consequences are prac- 
 tical in his broad use of the word, and 
 that, in fact, " all consequences are prac- 
 tical sooner or later." ^ If all consequences 
 are practical sooner or later, it is at first, 
 indeed, a little hard to see why so much 
 
 1 a. Jour, of Phil., Vol. I, p. 674; Phil. Rev., Vol. XVII, 
 pp. 14 and I J. ^ " Studies in Humanism," p. 6. 
 
24 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 emphasis should be laid upon their being 
 practical, or why so much ado should be 
 made over the word; it would seem to be 
 something like a distinction without a dif- 
 ference, rather useless as a guide or tool, 
 and hence most unpragmatic. Moreover, 
 there are passages in which the pragmatists 
 seem to forget their own broad use of the 
 word practical, and to condemn certain 
 " intellectualistic " questions as unworthy 
 of discussion because far removed from 
 our "practical" needs. And it must also 
 be added that while the pragmatists usually 
 recognize the value of our theoretical in- 
 terests, they insist that in the last analysis 
 this value is entirely dependent on the 
 " practical " in the narrower sense of the 
 term, — that our intellectual activities get 
 all their worth ultimately from the fact 
 that they guide and influence the reaction 
 of the individual upon the environment. 
 This is what Dr. Schiller really has in 
 mind when he says, "all consequences are 
 ,,^/practical sooner or later." It would seem, 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 25 
 
 therefore, that the " bread and butter " criti- 
 cism is not altogether without foundation. 
 Of this, however, I hope to have more to say 
 at another time. For the present the impor-i 
 tant thing for us to note is the fact that prag 
 matism is not justly open to the charge 
 of completely disregarding our theoretic! 
 interests, — no matter how it may, later on, 
 interpret them. 
 
 And now let us come to closer quarters 
 with the pragmatic doctrine of meaning. 
 There are one or two points in it which 
 have never been clear to me, and which, so 
 far as I am aware, no pragmatist writer has 
 attempted to clear up. As these points are 
 vital to our problem, I must have more light 
 on them before I know whether I am a prag- 
 matist or not. So let us return for a moment 
 to our definitions. I repeat: According to 
 Professor James, "the meaning of any phil- 
 osophical proposition can always be brought 
 down to some particular consequence in 
 our future practical experience." According 
 to Dr. Schiller, the "consequences" must 
 
26 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 be " consequences to some onc,/or some pur- 
 pose." Now I ask (and it is an important 
 question), What does James mean by "our 
 experience " ? To whom does Schiller refer 
 by the words " some one " ? Obviously there 
 are three possible interpretations. The prag- 
 matist may mean, namely, that only that con- 
 cept or theory has meaning which makes a 
 ("practical") difference (i) to me, the individ- 
 ual, or (2) to all human beings of all times, or 
 (3) to all actual or possible rational or senti- 
 ent beings. If the pragmatist theory is to be of 
 any help to us whatever, we must know which 
 of these three positions it takes. In the lack, 
 therefore, of any authoritative statements 
 on this subject from the pragmatists, let us 
 examine each of these possible positions in 
 turn for ourselves. 
 
 The first position suggested above may, 
 I suppose, be dismissed at once. It is most 
 unlikely that any pragmatist will hold that 
 only that has any meaning which has con- 
 sequences in the shape of conduct or experi- 
 ences in his own individual life and -mind. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 27 
 
 For even if one should hold so preposterous 
 a position, he could scarcely give it out seri- 
 ously as a philosophic method. The ques- 
 tion whether there will be a railway to the 
 north pole five hundred years hence can cer- 
 tainly not be expressed in consequences to 
 me as an individual, " either in the shape of 
 conduct to be recommended or in that of 
 experiences to be expected." And yet the 
 question certainly has meaning, because its 
 consequences may be expressed in the con- 
 duct or experience of some one else. For 
 the same reason various questions of ancient 
 history have meaning, even for me. Nor can 
 we logically stop short of the whole human 
 race, in interpreting the meaning of " some 
 one." 
 
 But what justification have we for stop- 
 ping here .'' How can we logically disregard 
 the real or possible experiences or any real 
 or possible sentient beings ? Would there 
 be no meaning in saying that an ichthyo- 
 saurus, who perished ages before the birth of 
 the first man, suffered pain or perceived the 
 
28 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 light? Is there now no meaning in Mr. 
 Percival Lowell's assertion that there are 
 sentient and rational beings on Mars ? There 
 is, so far as I can see, not a single detail of 
 any human experience that would in any way 
 be different, whichever side of these ques- 
 tions you should take. And yet the ques- 
 tions certainly have a meaning, and have a 
 meaning to us, because they have conse- 
 quences in the conduct and experiences of 
 real or possible sentient beings ; namely, the 
 ichthyosaurus and the Martians. 
 
 The consequences which give meaning, 
 therefore, cannot be confined to the human 
 race, but must include all those which occur 
 in the experience of any sentient creatures. 
 If from this, however, we are tempted to con- 
 clude that there is nothing unique or original 
 in the doctrine of the pragmatist, he may 
 remind us that we have as yet failed to note 
 one of its most important characteristics. 
 The " consequences " which, according to 
 pragmatism, alone give meaning are " conse- 
 quences in OMT future practical experience." 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 29 
 
 It is not past nor present consequences, but 
 "conduct to be recommended" "experiences 
 to be expected',' that count in giving signifi- 
 cance to a proposition. A good deal is made, 
 first and last, in various pragmatic writings, 
 of this conception that it is only in the future 
 consequences that meaning resides, and it 
 will therefore be worth our while tb consider 
 it in some detail. This we can best do by 
 applying it to a concrete example.^ 
 
 The example I shall choose is the one 
 which appears most often in Professor 
 James's writings* as an illustration of the 
 pragmatist doctrine of meaning. " Imagine," 
 says Professor James, " the entire contents 
 of the world to be once for all irrevocably 
 given. Imagine it to end this very moment, 
 
 1 This same emphasis upon the future is implicit (as Pro- 
 fessor Montague has shown) in the pragmatic attempt to 
 make truth only a kind of goodness. 
 
 ^ It occurs both in the California Address and in " Prag- 
 matism " (from which I here quote it, p. 96), and we would 
 seem, therefore, to be justified in taking it as a typical illustra- 
 tion of pragmatic meaning — provided, of course, that we do 
 not raise against it the criticism forestalled by Professor James 
 himself in his "Pragmatic Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., 
 Vol. XVII, p. 5, note. 
 
30 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 and to have no future ; and then let a theist 
 and a materialist apply their rival explana- 
 tions to its history. The theist shows how 
 a God made it; and the materialist shows, 
 and we will suppose with equal success, how 
 it resulted from blind physical forces. Then 
 let the pragmatist be asked to choose be- 
 tween their theories. How can he apply 
 his test if the world is already completed .? 
 Concepts are things to come back into ex- 
 perience with, things to make us look for 
 differences. But by hypothesis there is to 
 be no more experience, and no possible dif- 
 ferences can be looked for. Both theories 
 have shown all their consequences, and by 
 the hypothesis we are adopting these are 
 identical. The pragmatist must conse- 
 quently say that the two theories, in spite 
 of their different-sounding names, mean ex- 
 actly the same thing, and that the dispute 
 is purely verbal."^ 
 
 The point of this illustration is, of course, 
 
 1 Professor James adds here a parenthetical sentence 
 which, if taken as in any sense limiting or modifying his illus- 
 tration, destroys the entire force of his argument. I have 
 therefore^omitted it. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 31 
 
 to show that it is only in y^«/«rtf consequences 
 that genuine meaning can reside. Now, in 
 the first place, it is important to note that, 
 with the pragmatist view, and under the sup- 
 posed conditions, — the end of the world, — 
 any question of past or present fact would 
 necessarily be unmeaning. The theistic- 
 materialistic controversy is not peculiar in 
 this respect. To say at the end of the world, 
 " Professor James wrote the book ' Pragma- 
 tism,' " and to say, " Mr. Bradley wrote it," 
 would mean exactly the same thing, since 
 the consequences are once for all what they 
 are, and no future consequences can be looked 
 for. That this must be true of all questions, 
 no matter how full of meaning they now 
 seem to us, follows necessarily from the very 
 nature of the case, once you admit the prag- 
 matic doctrine. For if all meanings can be 
 brought down to consequences " in our 
 future practical experience," and if, by hy- 
 pothesis, we have no future practical experi- 
 ence, it must follow, as the night the day, 
 that there can no longer be any meaning in 
 anything. 
 
32 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 And it must also be noted that this con- 
 clusion not only will, according to pragma- 
 tism, hold true at the end of the world for all 
 questions, but that, on the same principles, 
 it must also hold true of many questions 
 even now. To take a very commonplace 
 example : suppose three gentlemen discuss- 
 ing after dinner the age of the wine they 
 have been drinking. One of them says that 
 it is three years old, one that it is thirteen. 
 Reasons are given by both, but neither can 
 prove his point to the satisfaction of the 
 other. The dispute is referred to the third 
 gentleman, who happens to be a pragmatist. 
 How can he apply his test, since the wine, 
 having become once for all what it was, has 
 now been drunk, and the bottle is empty? 
 Both theories have shown all their con- 
 sequences, and these are identical. " The 
 pragmatist must consequently say that the 
 two theories, in spite of their different -sound- 
 ing names, mean exactly the same thing," 
 that to say the wine is three years old is only 
 another way of saying it is thirteen years old, 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 33 
 
 and that the dispute is purely verbal. In like 
 manner, the date of Sargon I, the authorship 
 of the Pentateuch, the question of the Greek 
 tactics at Salanais, all being without future 
 consequences to us, must be for the pragma- 
 tist absolutely meaningless. In short, from 
 history, geology, biology, astronomy, — from 
 every field of human thought, — come ques- 
 tions over which scholars are spending years 
 of research, yet which are certainly even 
 now fully as meaningless as the theistic- 
 materialistic controversy will be at the end 
 of time, and which therefore according to 
 the pragmatist doctrine are purely verbal 
 disputes.^ 
 
 The response may be made that the hy- 
 potheses and questions just referred to have 
 pragmatic consequences in the sense of fit- 
 ting in more or less well with our otherwise 
 
 1 By the above I do not, of course, mean that no pragma- 
 tist has a right to a past fact ; I simply wish to point out that 
 he has no right to one so long as he sticks to his assertion 
 that all meaning is confined to future consequences, and more 
 especially to the interpretation of this assertion exemplified 
 by James's illustration of the end of the world. 
 
34 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 grounded beliefs, and hence producing greater 
 or less mental harmony. But the answer to 
 this is, in the first place, that this can be the 
 case only on condition that these questions 
 and hypotheses already have meaning. Their 
 harmonizing with our other beliefs presup- 
 poses their meaning and does not produce 
 it, — hence their meaning does not consist 
 in these consequences. And in the second 
 place, if this answer of the pragmatist holds 
 of the questions I have suggested, it holds 
 equally well of the materialistic-theistic con- 
 troversy at the end of the world and of every 
 question which rationalistic philosophers are 
 to-day discussing. There is scarcely a ques- 
 tion seriously raised to-day by any school of 
 philosophy so " intellectualistic " that it is 
 lacking in consequences of intellectual har- 
 mony, hence not one which the pragmatist 
 formula, if thus broadly interpreted, would 
 rule out. 
 
 Pragmatism must choose between the 
 broad and the narrow interpretation of its 
 doctrine. If it chooses the latter, it must 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 35 
 
 maintain explicitly that only that has mean- 
 ing which (i) has consequences in the expe- 
 rience or conduct of us human beings, or (2) 
 has future consequences for some one, or (3) 
 has both. Some of the expressions used by 
 the pragmatists seem clearly to show that 
 they prefer the narrow interpretation. But, 
 as I think must now be clear to you all, this 
 position is untenable. For, to repeat, (i) 
 that obviously has meaning which has con- 
 sequences to any conceivable sentient crea- 
 ture. Though theism and materialism 
 should have identical consequences for me 
 and for all human beings, they certainly 
 have not for God (whether he be real or 
 hypothetical). It makes a difference to God 
 whether He exists or not, even if this be the 
 last moment of time. And there is no more 
 reason for ruling out God's experience or 
 that of the ichthyosaurus or the Martian, or 
 of Jupiter or Thor, than that of Adam or of 
 Sargon I. Surely I know what I mean 
 when I speak of the experiences of Betsy 
 Prig or Sairey Gamp or even those of the 
 
36 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 doubly mythological Mrs. Harris. Whatever 
 makes a difference to any conceivable sentient 
 creature has at least some meaning. And 
 (2) it is impossible to see why only future 
 consequences should count, and past ones 
 give no meaning. If the pragmatist is 
 unable to get any meaning out of past con- 
 sequences, or out of consequences to sen- 
 tient beings who are not human, that is his 
 misfortune. But as for the rest of us, we 
 know perfectly well what we mean when we 
 say Mars is inhabited, or the birds preceded 
 the mammals, quite aside from any conse- 
 quences, future or past, to human beings. 
 And in like manner, were this the last mo- 
 ment of time we should know perfectly well 
 what we meant by saying, The world is due 
 to an intelligent, self-conscious Being, or. 
 The world is due to the concourse of uncon- 
 scious atoms ; and we should know also that 
 these two meanings were altogether different. 
 It would seem, therefore, that pragmatism 
 is logically forced to adopt only the broadest 
 possible interpretation of its doctrine, an 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 37 
 
 interpretation which could be expressed as 
 follows: the meaning of any conception ex- 
 presses itself in the past, present, or future 
 conduct or experience of actual or possible 
 sentient creatures. And if this is the prag- 
 matist doctrine, it certainly is sound. But 
 the odd thing about it is that it exhibits 
 pragmatism as (so far forth) nothing but a 
 restatement of idealism. If this be prag- 
 matism, we shall soon find the subjectivists 
 and the pan-psychists joining the procession ; 
 yes, even the prophets of the Absolute will 
 be donning pragmatist colors and learning 
 war no more. The lion shall eat straw 
 like the ox ; and James and Royce, Dewey 
 and Lotze, Schiller and Bradley (!), shall lie 
 down together. Only the radical realists 
 shall be left out of the love feast. 
 
 I do not want to be understood as seeking 
 a cheap and easy victory over pragmatism, 
 nor as desiring to ridicule it. What I want 
 is genuinely to understand it. And I seri- 
 ously contend that pragmatism either must 
 take the untenable position of denying 
 
38 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 meaning where meaning obviously is, or else 
 must admit that there is nothing unique in 
 its doctrine. It either stands for an absurd- 
 ity or else, so far as I can see, it has contrib- 
 uted nothing of importance to the problem 
 in question and has merely repeated the gen- 
 eral view of idealism, which it might almost 
 as well have quoted (in somewhat different 
 words, to be sure, but in substance and with- 
 out all this ado) from any one of several 
 passages in "Appearance and Reality." 
 What shall we say, then, to these things ? 
 Is Bradley also among the pragmatists ? 
 
 If any pragmatist or pragmatist proselyte 
 has consented to follow me thus far, he will 
 probably say at this point. At least pragma- 
 tism offers a practical and useful method for 
 determining what philosophic questions are 
 really worth discussing, and by application of 
 this method we shall be enabled to elimi- 
 nate a large body of worthless and abstract 
 problems which are now lumbering up our 
 minds to no useful purpose. This method, he 
 would probably continue, might be summed 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 39 
 
 up in the rule never to discuss anything 
 unless it has some genuine human interest, 
 unless it makes a real difference to some one. 
 Now if by this rule pragmatism means, 
 once more, simply the maxim to avoid lo- 
 gomachy, we shall certainly say Amen to its 
 time-honored admonition. But if it means 
 something more than this, we must ask. 
 What is really meant? Truly we should 
 discuss only that which is worth discussing ; 
 but who is to determine what this is ? And 
 the point upon which we are here most in 
 need of enlightenment is this : Does prag- 
 matism include among its "genuine human 
 interests " the intellectual desire for knowl- 
 edge for its own sake ? If it does not, then 
 we must at least point out the fact that " in- 
 tellectualistic metaphysics " is not the only 
 thing tabooed. A large proportion of the 
 problems of higher mathematics, history,] 
 archaeology, astronomy, geology, literaryjf 
 criticism, etc., are as certainly vetoed and 
 forbidden. The courses in our universities 
 must be cut down by half. For in every 
 
40 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 field of scholarly inquiry there are innumer- 
 able questions which awaken no more " re- 
 sponsive active feelings " in " us practical 
 Americans " and call for no more " particu- 
 lar conduct of our own " than do the vari- 
 ous theological and metaphysical problems 
 against which the pragmatists inveigh. 
 The distance of the nearest fixed star, the 
 problems of the higher mathematics, the age 
 of the Rig Veda, awaken as little " sense of 
 reality " in most of us as do the various 
 " philosophic propositions that will never 
 make an appreciable difference to us in 
 action." One and all, they are open to the 
 same reproach of not " making any differ- 
 ence " to a living soul — except the differ- 
 ence which comes with the satisfaction of 
 knowing. But by what right, after all, shall 
 these things be declared not worth discuss- 
 ing? Surely every genuine question — 
 every question, that is, which has meaning 
 and is not logomachy — is worth solving to 
 him who wishes to solve it. If you, per- 
 sonally, are not interested in mathematics or 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 4 1 
 
 metaphysics, by all means steer clear of 
 them. But it is surely unworthy of the 
 broad, human, and empirical spirit that 
 characterizes all true pragmatists to attempt 
 to dogmatize as to what all men shall find 
 or ought to find interesting. 
 
 In fact, if the question be thus put, the 
 pragmatists might, perhaps, say that the 
 purely theoretic interest should be taken 
 into account and recognized as one of the 
 things that give problems their value. But 
 if this is the case, again I ask. What prob- 
 lem, then, is ruled out beyond mere verbal 
 disputes which all would rule out? How 
 does the pragmatist rule or method assist us 
 in choosing our problems ? Can the prag- 
 matist name us one single problem which 
 philosophers are discussing to-day which 
 should not, on his own showing, be recog- 
 nized as worth while ? Take, as a concrete 
 example, the most extreme case thinkable, 
 — or, letting the pragmatists choose for 
 us, consider the one Professor James has 
 selected as his favorite mark, — the " aseity " 
 
42 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of God.^ The choice was excellent for the 
 purpose, for it seems to interest but few, and 
 the name sounds remote and even absurd. 
 Yet there certainly have been many, and 
 still are some, who would genuinely like to 
 know whether there is a divine Being who 
 derives his existence from himself, or 
 whether everything in the universe, " God " 
 included, is bound on the weary wheel of 
 external derivation. And in spite of the 
 disrepute into which Scholasticism has 
 brought the subject, I think, on the whole, 
 nearly every one of us here would be more 
 genuinely interested in knowing about the 
 attributes of God than about the distances 
 between the fixed stars. Of course the dis- 
 cussion of these theological things is not reli- 
 gion. But to condemn all such discussion 
 because it is not this that "keeps religion 
 going" is like condemning astronomy be- 
 cause it does not give us light and heat. 
 
 1 Cf. James's California Addttss, /our. of PhU., Vol. I, pp. 
 680-681, and " Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 445- 
 446. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 43 
 
 And, to conclude, the whole matter may be 
 put in the form of a dilemma : If, on the one 
 hand, the various questions which pragma- 
 tism would taboo are of genuine intellectual 
 interest to any one, they are, on pragmatist 
 principles, worth his investigation and dis- 
 cussion. And if, on the other hand, they 
 are not of interest to any one, it would seem 
 hardly pragmatic to spend breath, ink, and 
 time in attempting to prevent their investi- 
 gation. 
 
 If, therefore, the intellectual desire to 
 know be admitted as a pragmatic interest, I 
 cannot see that pragmatism helps us one 
 whit in the selection of our problems, — un- 
 less, indeed, we are to take seriously the 
 implication sometimes given by certain 
 pragmatist writers ; namely, that only those 
 topics are worth discussing which are to 
 their taste. This, for instance, is the im- 
 pression one gets on reading Papini. The 
 pragmatist, he tells us, will "not concern 
 himself with a large part of the classical 
 problems of metaphysics (in particular with 
 
44 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 the universal and rational explanation of all 
 things), which are for him unreal problems 
 and devoid of meaning. . . . He will have 
 an antipathy for all forms of monism . . . 
 and for the ' reality ' of the ordinary man. . . . 
 For the pragmatist, no metaphysical hypoth- 
 esis is truer than another. He who feels the 
 need of having one may choose according to 
 his purposes and tastes."^ But in spite of 
 Papini, most pragmatists (including Papini 
 himself) have a metaphysic ; and certainly no 
 American or British pragmatist would take 
 seriously the suggestion one seems to get out 
 of the rather dogmatic article from which I 
 have just quoted — the suggestion, namely, 
 of an Index Expurgatorius, to be issued by 
 a pragmatic pope, proscribing all questions 
 which are not of interest to him. 
 
 It is disappointing indeed to come back 
 from our long search thus empty-handed. 
 But if we are to be honest with ourselves, I 
 think we must admit that pragmatism's 
 
 ^ " Introduzione al Pragmatismo," Leonardo, February, 
 1907, pp. 28-30. 
 
MEANING AND METHOD 45 
 
 much-vaunted method, if it is to save itself 
 from absurd dogmatism, really sifts down to 
 the following rather trifling rule : Never dis- 
 cuss a question which has absolutely no 
 interest and no meaning to any one. Prag- 
 matism's insistence upon the concrete and its 
 warnings against logomachy, I confess, are 
 admirable. And its view of meaning as de- 
 pendent on some ones experience seems 
 philosophically sound. But both of these 
 things are to be found in almost every school 
 of philosophy and are far too common to be 
 appropriated by any one group of thinkers 
 as their peculiar merit or message. And 
 when pragmatism attempts to go beyond 
 these somewhat commonplace precepts, it 
 lands in dogmatism and absurdity. 
 
 Meaning and method, however, are, after 
 all, but the beginning of pragmatism. Im- 
 portant as these are in judging it, its doc- 
 trine of truth is more vital still. It may be, 
 then, that here we shall find something both 
 unique and tenable, — a genuine and val- 
 uable contribution to philosophy and to 
 
46 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 clear thinking. But " truth " is a large and 
 perplexing question (as you will soon see to 
 your sorrow), and the consideration of it 
 must therefore be postponed to the next 
 lecture. 
 
LECTURE II 
 THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH"' 
 
 Pragmatism has been likened by one of 
 its foremost exponents to the corridor of a 
 hotel. It is a way of approach to a number 
 of diverse but related philosophic doctrines, 
 rather than itself a new philosophy. And 
 yet, in spite of the perfect intellectual free- 
 dom and non-conformity of the pragmatists, 
 all or nearly all of them would insist that 
 there are two or three important articles 
 of faith common to all pragmatist creeds ; 
 and that the most important of these is the 
 new meaning which pragmatism has given 
 to the word truth. This new theory of 
 truth is by far the most fundamental and 
 important doctrine yet proposed by the 
 new movement. It gives the point of view 
 
 1 Portions of this and the following lectures appeared in 
 
 the Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, pp. 320-324, and Vol. V, pp. 
 
 122-131. 
 
 E 49 
 
50 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 from which the pragmatist sees his world, 
 it is the center from which most of his 
 other doctrines take their start. It is, in 
 fact, even more like the corridor of a hotel 
 than pragmatism itself, — its doctrine of 
 meaning being the front steps. To get 
 at any of the other pragmatist doctrines 
 one must first of all pass these. The ques- 
 tion of truth, moreover, is even more impor- 
 tant than that of meaning, and is, in fact, the 
 most fundamental, the most crucial point 
 to be met with in the whole pragmatic prob- 
 lem, and a thorough understanding of it is 
 essential to all our subsequent studies. Prag- 
 matism stands or falls with its conception 
 of truth. 
 
 Before attempting an exposition of the 
 new meaning assigned to this word, how- 
 ever, it may be well to remind you (what 
 you undoubtedly know perfectly well) that 
 ever since Pilate's time the word truth 
 has been notoriously ambiguous. Stop 
 half a dozen men in the street and ask 
 them, What is truth ? and you will prob- 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 5 1 
 
 ably get as many different answers. The 
 number of ways in which the word truth 
 may be used seems, however, to be reducible 
 to three, and a clear understanding of these 
 and of the distinctions between them is 
 absolutely indispensable to any one who 
 would thoroughly comprehend pragmatism. 
 This lecture, therefore, will be devoted to 
 an attempt to clear up this rather difficult 
 subject, and to explain some of the different 
 meanings given to the word truth — our 
 exposition and criticism of the more techni- 
 cal pragmatist use of the word being re- 
 served for the next lecture. The subject, 
 I say, may prove difficult ; yet I trust it 
 will not be hopelessly so. For it is my 
 firm belief that the difficulties which it 
 usually presents are almost entirely due to 
 a neglect of the distinctions referred to, 
 and to a constant and unconscious confusion 
 between the different senses of the word 
 truth. 
 
 The three different ways in which the 
 word truth is commonly used are, then, the 
 
52 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 following : (i) as a synonym for " reality " ; 
 (2) as a synonym for known " fact " or 
 verified and accepted belief; (3) as the 
 relation or quality belonging to an " idea " 
 which makes it " true " — its irueness. We 
 shall now consider each of these in their 
 order. 
 
 The first of these uses is quite common 
 in popular speech. The word is thus em- 
 ployed as synonymous sometimes with the 
 whole of reality, more often with a part 
 only ; namely, that rather indefinite part 
 which in popular discourses is referred to 
 as Infinite, Eternal, Changeless, etc. Nor 
 is the identification of truth with reality 
 confined to popular speech; philosophers 
 of the Platonic and Hegelian type — the 
 absolutists in general — have often a ten- 
 dency in this direction. Truth is thus re- 
 garded as " objective," " systematic," inde- 
 pendent of our human thinking, and as 
 really another name for ultimate reality. 
 This general position is maintained, for in- 
 stance, by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Joachim. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 53 
 
 Thus in a recent article ^ Mr. Bradley tells 
 us that " Truth is the whole Universe realiz- 
 ing itself in one aspect." Truth and reality 
 must be identical, for were there any dif- 
 ference between them, truth would fall short 
 of reality and so fail to be true. Against 
 this view of truth pragmatism — using 
 especially the sword-like pen of Dr. Schiller, 
 — has done magnificent battle, and has, 
 in my opinion, come off with most of the 
 spoils of war. It has shown the confusion 
 which such a view brings into our termi- 
 nology, its lack of self-consistency, and the 
 almost inevitable skepticism consequent 
 upon it, owing to its " dehumanizing " of 
 truth. 
 
 In all this pragmatism is decidedly in the 
 right; for the philosophic identification of 
 truth with reality seems, to me at least, quite 
 untenable, and the popular use of the word 
 in this sense most unfortunate. Mr. Bradley 
 himself has shown that truth " in passing 
 over into reality" ceases to be mere truth 
 
 1 " On Truth and Copying," Mind, April, 1907. 
 
54 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 and that "truth at once is and is not reality." 
 In short, this kind of reasoning, so far from 
 what Professor Dewey calls the concrete 
 situation, is most unsatisfactory and inevita- 
 bly develops its own destructive "dialectic." 
 
 Nor is the popular use of " truth " in the 
 sense of reality any more satisfactory, al- 
 though not open to the same logical criti- 
 cisms. Its tendency toward vagueness, 
 rhetoric, and a capital T ought to be enough 
 to condemn it in the eyes of all those who 
 would think clearly. To use the mildest of 
 epithets, it is at least exceedingly unfortu- 
 nate, both because of its haziness and also 
 because the word truth is badly needed else- 
 where, — a remark which applies to both the 
 popular and the philosophic use of the word 
 referred to. The English language is none 
 too rich in clear-cut philosophic terms, and 
 it is most unwise and most conducive to 
 ambiguity to use up a good word like truth 
 on something for which we already have 
 another good word, namely reality. For, of 
 course, if "truth" is to mean everything, it 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 55 
 
 will end by meaning nothing. In its attack 
 upon the identification of truth with reality, 
 pragmatism has, therefore, done a genuine 
 service to the cause of clear thinking. 
 
 The second general meaning commonly 
 applied to the word truth is perfectly clear- 
 cut, definite, and justifiable — its identifica-' 
 tion, namely, with known fact, with the true 
 and more or less completely verified beliefs 
 that go to make up the mass of human 
 knowledge. That twice two is four, that the 
 earth revolves upon its axis, that virtue is its 
 own reward, — these we speak of as " truths." 
 In like manner, we speak of the various 
 " truths " of science or of the body of moral 
 and religious '' truths." Or we may go still 
 further, and, combining all the general and 
 important facts known to the race, we may 
 speak of this whole as truth, — or even, if 
 you like, as Truth. A capital letter is no 
 serious danger if you keep your eyes open. 
 Only we must remember that here as else- 
 where eternal vigilance is the price of safety; 
 and the history of philosophy shows many 
 
56 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 examples of the inherent human tendency 
 toward worship manifesting itself in an 
 apotheosis of this very capital T. Thus it 
 has come about that the human element in 
 all the truth we know has often been quite 
 lost from sight- Now it may very well be that 
 there is an Absolute or Divine Mind, and that 
 in that Mind there exist all manner of truths 
 which have in them no human element. It is 
 far from my purpose to decry monism or abso- 
 lutism. But certain it is that the only truths 
 we know or ever can know contain ipso facto 
 a human element, and that this element can- 
 not be lightly despised. It is in the pointing 
 out of just this fact, in the emphasis laid upon 
 just this human side of human truth, that the 
 chief merit of pragmatism or humanism lies. 
 It may indeed be seriously questioned whether 
 the " intellectualists " in their treatment of 
 truth have so completely left out of account 
 its human side as they are accused of doing. 
 I know of few who maintain the existence 
 of "truth with no one thinking it," which 
 pragmatists often refer to as the type of 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 57 
 
 truth of the intellectualists. There are, to 
 be sure, a few English thinkers who hold 
 to that doctrine. But I should certainly 
 challenge the assertion that this is the dis- 
 tinctive doctrine of the non-pragmatist and 
 the consequent implication that in attacking 
 it pragmatism has been quite original. As 
 a non-pragmatist I repudiate any such 
 doctrine. " Discarnate truth," truths which 
 no one, not even an Absolute, thinks, like 
 Platonic Ideas in an abstract empyrean, are 
 as little to the taste of most non-pragmatists 
 as to that of James, Schiller, and Dewey. 
 And we have only sincere admiration for the 
 brilliant exposition given by them of the 
 contributions which we men make to our 
 own truth. 
 
 In his admirable paper on " The Ambigu- 
 ity of Truth," Dr. Schiller makes a useful 
 distinction between those beliefs which have 
 not yet been vindicated and those which 
 have been proved true. " If not all that 
 claims truth is true, must we not distinguish 
 this initial claim from whatever procedure 
 
58 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 subsequently justifies or validates? Truth 
 therefore will become ambiguous. It will 
 mean primarily a claim which may or may 
 not turn out to be valid. It will mean, 
 secondarily, such a claim after it has been 
 tested and ratified, by processes which it be- 
 hooves us to examine. In the first sense, 
 as a claim, it will always have to be regarded 
 with suspicion. For we shall not know 
 whether it is really and fully true, and we 
 shall tend to reserve this honorable predicate 
 for what has victoriously sustained its 
 claim." ^ In other words, at least two things 
 are essential, according to the pragmatist, 
 for the definition of " a truth" in the full and 
 exact sense of the word : (i) it shall be a claim 
 which some one makes, a belief or judgment 
 which some one holds ; (2) it shall have been 
 validated and verified as true. A claim not 
 yet verified is not yet a truth, insists the prag- 
 matist. And, here though we might indeed 
 quarrel with him, we need not. There is of 
 course an obvious difference between a claim's 
 
 1 " Studies in Humanism," pp. 144-145. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 59 
 
 being true and its being known as true ; and 
 hence, if one cared to do so, one might very 
 consistently maintain that a true claim is " a 
 truth " even if not yet verified. Such an ob- 
 jection to the pragmatist's definition, however, 
 would be largely verbal, and upon questions 
 of terminology either side may well make 
 concessions. It makes but little difference 
 whether we call a claim which is true but 
 unverified " a truth " or merely a true claim. 
 And as it is my earnest desire not to be 
 hypercritical but to go with the pragmatist 
 just as far as possible, I shall agree to define 
 " a truth " as a true claim that has been 1 
 verified.^ 
 
 1 With this understanding of our terminology, therefore, 
 the non-pragmatist need not and does not insist on unverifi- 
 able truths, though he does insist that there may be and 
 doubtless are innumerable beliefs which are true though as 
 yet unverified or even unverifiable. The failure to grasp this 
 distinction is the cause of Dr. Schiller's caricature of the non- 
 pragmatist position. Cf. his review of Professor James's 
 book in Mind, Vol. XVI, p. 600. The non-pragmatist is not 
 driven to assert " unknowables " in any other sense than that 
 there doubtless are many things in heaven and earth that we 
 can never know — an assertion which, I suppose, pragmatism 
 would hardly deny. 
 
6o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 So much being agreed and understood, let 
 us now take a brief survey of the pragma- 
 tist's admirable description of the way our 
 truths originate and grow. In doing so, how- 
 ever, let me remind you of the importance 
 of keeping in mind constantly that here' 
 there is as yet no question of the true- 
 ness of a claim or belief. The distinction 
 between "a truth" and the trueness of that 
 truth must never be lost from sight. 
 
 A large part of the writings of the three 
 leading pragmatists is taken up with admir- 
 able psychological descriptions of "the making 
 of truth." For being part of the content of 
 our minds, our truths have a natural history, 
 and the general course of their development 
 may be clearly traced. Each truth which you 
 or I possess originates and grows within 
 a perfectly concrete situation and is due to 
 perfectly definite conditions. Our beliefs 
 are intellectual tools which serve us in more 
 or less useful ways. The process by which 
 they get themselves verified and thus cease 
 to be mere claims and become truths, the 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 6 1 
 
 application of these " truths," and the modi- 
 fications they undergo, — all this can be 
 traced within the stream of consciousness as 
 concrete psychic fact. If now we ask our- 
 selves how, more in detail, our claims are 
 verified and proved true, we find that, if the 
 answer must be given in a single phrase, the 
 best way to describe what happens is to say 
 that those claims are accepted as truths which 
 work, which are useful, which combine har- 
 moniously with our previously accepted 
 truths. By their fruits ye shall know them. 
 As we never can get outside of our own ex- 
 perience and compare our truths with any- 
 thing beyond them, the best if not the only 
 test left us by which we may separate the 
 sheep from the goats, the potential truths 
 from the invalid claims, is to see which of 
 several possible combinations of claims is the 
 most self -consistent and inclusive; or, if it be 
 a question of a single cl3.im, to observe how 
 well it works, how far it aids in harmoniz- 
 ing all our experience. Thus when a jury is 
 weighing the two possible views of the evi- 
 
62 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 dence presented respectively by the defense 
 and by the prosecution, what it is really 
 about is an endeavor to see which view is 
 most consistent with itself and which, at the 
 same time, is able to interpret and harmonize 
 the largest number of individual claims. Or 
 when a scientist is trying to decide whether 
 an hypothesis is true, his test is again the 
 question, How useful is it in harmonizing all 
 the accepted facts and leading the mind out 
 of its state of uncertainty to a feeling of in- 
 ner peace and intellectual satisfaction ? The 
 truth is that which works best, and that which 
 works best is the truth. 
 
 Successful working is therefore the tag or 
 ear-mark by which we distinguish the true 
 idea. But, as you doubtless perceive, this 
 only leads us to the more fundamental and 
 difficult question as to what we mean by the 
 idea's being true, the question of the nature 
 of the thing tagged or marked. For it is 
 clear enough that there is a difference be- 
 tween a thing and its tag, — between an 
 object and the sign which proves to us the 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 63 
 
 presence of that object. Although we have 
 been informed how to tell a true idea when 
 we happen upon one, we must still ask what 
 is meant by the truth of the idea, what it is 
 that the sign of it signifies. The distinction 
 between a thing and the evidence of it, be- 
 tween an object and its tag, is doubtless plain 
 as day to you all ; but as the distinction is an 
 extremely important one, and as it is often 
 overlooked, I shall, in good pragmatist fash- 
 ion, seek a concrete illustration of it from a 
 realm of practical life far removed from the 
 abstractions of philosophy. Let us, for ex- 
 ample, suppose that Mennen's face is, as he 
 says, upon every box of toilet powder made 
 by him. The presence of his face would, 
 then, be a good test by which to determine 
 whether in any given instance we have the 
 genuine article or not. But the important 
 thing about the powder, after all, is its own 
 nature and make-up rather than the pretty 
 picture associated with it ; and we should 
 hardly say that the contents of the box is 
 what it is because its cover bears the image 
 
64 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of Mennen's never-to-be-forgotten face. If a 
 pupil asks his teacher about a triangle, the 
 latter may refer him to page 52 of Loomis's 
 Geometry and page 63 of Wentworth's for a 
 diagram, and the pupil may learn to distin- 
 guish a triangle from a square in this way. 
 But even if the triangle were figured on no 
 other pages than these, one would not define 
 triangle as "the figure on pages 52 and 63," 
 nor give this as the meaning of the term. 
 In other words, the meaning or nature of a 
 material, a quality, a relation, is one thing; 
 the sign by which you make sure of its pres- 
 ence is another. And, in like manner (to 
 return to the question that immediately con- 
 cerns us), the ear-mark by which we have 
 now learned to tell a true idea from a false 
 one does not answer the further question, 
 what we mean by its being true. Doubtless 
 ideas are proved true by their consequences, 
 as the pragmatists say; but when we prove 
 them true, what are we proving ? What is it 
 that such a process of verification verifies? 
 A mere psychological description of what 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRITTH" 65 
 
 happens within our experience is obviously 
 here quite insufficient. And this brings us 
 to the third use of the word truth, the true- 
 ness of a belief. To put it Jersely, then, what 
 do we mean when we say that an idea is 
 true? 
 
 To this question there are certainly two 
 and possibly several quite distinct answers. 
 And it will throw light on the real meaning 
 of the answer which pragmatism gives if we 
 first consider the answer which pragmatism 
 rejects, — the interpretation, namely, given 
 by " common sense," or " intellectualism," or 
 " realism " (as you like). This interpretation 
 commonly goes under the name of the " cor- 
 respondence theory," and runs in brief some- 
 what as follows : The truth relation, or the 
 quality of trueness, is neither a part of our 
 thought or experience, nor a part of the other 
 reality to which our thought refers, but is 
 rather a relation between our thought and 
 its chosen object, between our idea or judg- 
 ment and the thing which it means. And 
 this relation is simply one of correspondence. 
 
66 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 A caricature of the theory frequently set up 
 by its opponents maintains that correspondence 
 must mean copying, and that the thought 
 which thus "copies" reality is a sort of pho- 
 tograph of the original ; that we \\3.y& pictures 
 of things in our heads, and that if the pic- 
 tures are good pictures we have truth. 
 
 Now the upholder of the correspondence 
 theory will agree with his critics that the 
 copy theory as thus described would deserve, 
 all the uncomplimentary epithets they are so 
 able in devising for it. Such a theory would 
 be both bad psychology and bad episte- 
 mology. For, in the first place, it is obvious 
 that the great majority of all those thoughts 
 which can be called either true or false are 
 not pictures ; and if they were, it is hard to 
 see how their simply being like external 
 things could make them true. A billiard 
 ball is not true, no matter how much it may 
 resemble another billiard ball. Two pains 
 are not true, though they be as like as two 
 peas. Whatever truth may be, it is at any 
 rate something more than chance resem- 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 67 
 
 blance. The knowing thought must mean 
 its object, must choose and adopt it, and once 
 it has done so no copying will be necessary. 
 
 The real common-sense theory, as I under- 
 stand it, may then be stated as follows: 
 " Truth," or the relation of " correspondence," 
 means, not copying, but merely this simple 
 thing, that the object of which one is thinking 
 is as one thinks it. Or, to put the same 
 thing in other words, the truth or trueness of 
 an idea is its conformity to fact. 
 
 It would seem, oddly enough, that this 
 very obvious and natural explanation of the 
 meaning of the truth relation is the one 
 thing in the universe which is capable of 
 bringing together the absolutist and the 
 pragmatist. Deadly enemies at every other 
 point, they stand manfully shoulder to 
 shoulder in attacking the correspondence 
 theory. Whatever else truth may mean, they 
 are agreed it shall not mean this. For Mr. 
 Bradley it is far too simple, and for Professor 
 James, apparently, it is not simple enough. 
 In commenting upon the formulation of the 
 
68 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 doctrine just given (that the object of which 
 one is thinking is as one thinks it), Professor 
 James finds the word " as " to be " anything 
 but simple." " What it most immediately 
 suggests," he continues, " is that the idea 
 should be like the object; but most of our 
 ideas, being abstract concepts, bear almost 
 no resemblance to their objects. ... I now 
 formally ask . . . what this ' as 'ness in itself 
 consists in — for it seems to me that it ought 
 to consist in something assignable and de- 
 scribable and not remain a pure mystery."^ 
 Paulsen has somewhere remarked that 
 " the absurd has this advantage in common 
 with truth, that it cannot be refuted." And 
 it might be added that the most ultimately 
 simple expression of the commonest fact has 
 this disadvantage in common with the self- 
 contradictory, that it cannot be explained. 
 As Dr. Ewer has pointed out in connection 
 with this very question of Professor James's, 
 " We recognize similar questions about in- 
 
 1" Professor Pratt on Truth," Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, 
 pp. 466-467. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 69 
 
 dubitable facts that have no answer : ' How 
 can a body move ? ' 'How can a body 
 exclude other bodies from the space it 
 occupies ? ' ' How can one event follow 
 another ? ' . . . To them no answers can 
 be given which do not contain the very 
 ideas of motion, temporal succession, etc., 
 that are under fire. Details and accessories 
 of the process may be elucidated, but the 
 essential character is implied throughout."^ 
 In short, it is the very simplicity of the re- 
 lation between our thought and the thing 
 of which we are thinking that makes it in- 
 capable of reduction to simpler terms. It 
 may be a " pure mystery " no doubt ; but if 
 so, then I ask in turn that something be 
 named me which is not a mystery. And 
 even if the nature of the case permitted my 
 accepting Professor James's challenge and 
 naming something else which " this 'as 'ness 
 in itself consists in," he could again ask the 
 same question concerning this new thing, 
 and so ad infinitum. 
 
 i«The Anti-realistic ' How?'" /'w- of PhU., Vol. IV, 
 p. 631. 
 
70 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 But though I cannot analyze an ulti- 
 mately simple relation into its parts and 
 tell what 'as'ness consists in, it will, I feel 
 sure, clear up the matter completely to the 
 non-pragmatic reader if I apply the corre- 
 spondence theory of truth to a concrete and 
 very commonplace example. John, let us 
 say, thinks Peter has a toothache ; the ob- 
 ject of John's thought is Peter's present 
 experience ; and as a fact Peter has a tooth- 
 ache. And John's thought is true, accord- 
 ing to the correspondence theory, because its 
 object is as he thinks it. That is what con- 
 stitutes it true, that is the meaning of its 
 trueness. And I confess it is impossible 
 for me to see how anything could be simpler 
 than this. To torture it into some sort of 
 mysterious and crude " copy theory," and to 
 insist upon further simplification and de- 
 mand what ' as 'ness consists in, seems to 
 me a manufacture of unnecessary difficulties. 
 At any rate, if this explanation of the mean- 
 ing of " true " be not simple and clear, I 
 despair of ever making anything clear to 
 philosophers. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 7 1 
 
 But lack of simplicity is not the only 
 charge brought against the correspondence 
 theory by pragmatism. Leaving this ques- 
 tion to Professor James, Dr. Schiller attacks 
 it in two other quarters. In the first place 
 he tells us that this view of truth " speedily 
 leads us to a hopeless impasse once the 
 question is raised — How are we to know 
 whether our ' truth ' ' corresponds ' or 
 ' agrees ' with its real object ? For to decide 
 this question must we not be able to com- 
 pare ' thought ' and ' reality,' and to contem- 
 plate each apart from the other ? This, 
 however, seems impossible. ' Thought ' and 
 'reality' cannot be got apart, and conse- 
 quently the doctrine of their ' correspond- 
 ence ' has in the end no meaning. We 
 are not aware of any reality except by its 
 representation in our ' thought ' and per 
 contra, the whole meaning of 'thought' re- 
 sides ultimately in its reference to * reality.' " ' 
 
 By the above, Dr. Schiller can hardly 
 mean simply that all reality is some form 
 
 1 " Humanism," pp. 45-46. 
 
72 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of experience, for there is, of course, nothing 
 to prevent two independent experiences — 
 my thought and my neighbor's experience, 
 for instance — from corresponding (in the 
 sense defined above). More probably Dr. 
 Schiller means that we can never get imme- 
 diately at any reality but our own thought 
 or experience, that we can never get outside 
 of our own minds, and that every part of 
 reality which is to be directly grasped by 
 us must become part of our own experience ; 
 and that, hence, we are not able to compare 
 and contemplate thought and reality apart 
 from each other. If I am right in this in- 
 terpretation, then by saying, " Thought and 
 reality cannot be got apart," he means that 
 we cannot get them apart. Certainly this 
 is far from proving that they cannot be apart 
 and correspond, and that the " doctrine of 
 their correspondence has in the end no 
 meaning r Its meaning is perfectly obvi- 
 ous — at least to every one whose eyes are 
 not afflicted with pragmatic cataracts. But, 
 to make it concrete, let us again take an ex- 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 73 
 
 ample. I am thinking, let us say, that my 
 friend B is in Constantinople. Let us say, 
 too, that though I am and remain without 
 any experience of Constantinople, my friend 
 B actually is there. Surely thought and 
 reality are here " apart " — though it remains 
 a fact that they cannot " be got apart," i.e. 
 by any individual human experience. Dr. 
 Schiller's argument would therefore seem to 
 prove nothing more than that if truth con- 
 sists in correspondence, it must transcend the 
 individual human mind — it must be a rela- 
 tion such that only one of its terms is in 
 the individual's experience ; which is exactly 
 what the upholders of the theory in question 
 have always maintained. 
 
 Dr. Schiller has, however, another objec- 
 tion to the doctrine of correspondence, — 
 namely, that if truth consists in this relation 
 we can never know whether in any given 
 case the correspondence holds or not ; we 
 shall never be able to tell whether a given 
 thought is true. 
 
 In answer to this an upholder of the old 
 
74 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 theory might well respond : " What of it ? 
 Suppose this so; would that make the na- 
 ture and meaning of truth as defined incon- 
 sistent or impossible ? " And here we come 
 upon a point of considerable importance — 
 the question, namely, whether my thought 
 can be true if I do not know it to be true. 
 On this the pragmatists seem to be divided. 
 Sometimes they admit that such a thought 
 would be true,^ sometimes they avoid the 
 issue,* and sometimes they flatly deny the 
 possibility.* This latter position seems to 
 rest upon a failure to distinguish between " a 
 truth," and the truth relation, the quality 
 of trueness or of being true. Granted that 
 a " claim " must be verified to become " a 
 truth," does it follow that there are no such 
 things as true though unverified claims ? 
 Surely the pragmatist would hesitate to call 
 all such claims false. And it is rather hard 
 to see how they could be neither true nor 
 false, though simple enough to understand 
 that (according to the useful though arbitrary 
 i^'.^. James. « ^.^. Schiller. '£'.^. Dewey and Schiller. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 75 
 
 definition) they are as yet neither " truths " 
 nor falsehoods. It is therefore one thing to 
 have a true idea or make a valid claim, and 
 quite another to know that the idea is true 
 or the claim valid. Hence Dr. Schiller's as- 
 sertion that we cannot find out whether our 
 thought is true is utterly irrelevant to the 
 question what we mean by its being true. 
 The test of truth is one thing ; the nature 
 or meaning of truth quite another. 
 
 But it is not the case that on the corre- 
 spondence theory we cannot tell whether a 
 thought is true- To be sure, the shadow of 
 a very theoretical doubt may always be left 
 us in all matters outside of our immediate 
 here and now. The proofs that my friend B 
 is in Constantinople may be false, I may be 
 dreaming, this may be a solipsistic world, 
 etc. But such a doubt is so exceedingly theo- 
 retical that it ought to have no terrors for 
 any man — least of all for a pragmatist. If. 
 however, his pragmatic conscience is still un- 
 accountably troubled by so purely theoretic 
 and academic a question, let him tell us how 
 
76 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 his theory of truth avoids the difficulty. 
 And to show that it is here no better off 
 than the much-reviled correspondence theory, 
 I need surely do no more than summon Pro- 
 fessor James as my witness. For in dealing 
 with this very question he writes, " If there is 
 to be truth, both realities and beliefs about 
 them must conspire to make it ; but whether 
 there ever is such a thing, or how any one 
 can be sure that his own beliefs possess it, 
 pragmatism never pretends to determine."^ 
 — The fact is, as a practical matter, much the 
 same tests of truth hold, no matter what your 
 theory. If you grant that it is at all possible 
 for me to prove that Boston is in Massachu- 
 setts, that Caesar lived before Napoleon, 
 that my friend B is in Constantinople, 
 then on the correspondence theory as well 
 as on any other I can know that my thought 
 is true. 
 
 This being the case, it is really hard to 
 see why pragmatism has rejected it. The 
 
 1 " The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol. 
 XVII, p. 8. 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" ']^ 
 
 correspondence view of truth is perfectly con- 
 sistent with the humanistic attitude toward 
 truth and the making of truth. It not only 
 admits but insists that our human thought 
 is indispensable to the truth relation, and that 
 without it such a relation could not exist. It 
 is essentially realistic (which ought to please 
 pragmatism, for pragmatism at least pretends 
 to be realistic), and it combines more natu- 
 rally and easily with empiricism than with 
 rationalism. And it is glad to admit that 
 the way our ideas " work " in the broad sense 
 is one of the most important tests of their 
 being true. In spite of all this, however, 
 the leading pragmatists, one and all, refuse 
 to accept the theory, considering it either 
 quite inadequate or flatly meaningless and 
 false. 
 
 This is a fact which I wish especially to 
 emphasize. One frequently gets the impres- 
 sion from the writings of the pragmatists 
 that all they have done is innocently to call 
 attention to an obvious characteristic of the 
 truth relation, which their opponents have 
 
78 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 thereupon unaccountably and wickedly de- 
 nied, and that the latter are, therefore, at 
 all points the aggressors. As a fact, the 
 exact opposite of this is the case. No one, 
 so far as I know, denies the usefulness of 
 truth nor the value of successful working as 
 verification of the true idea. And if the 
 pragmatists had been satisfied with pointing 
 this out and with their further (rather con- 
 fusing and unwarranted) endeavor to identify 
 the word " truth " with " successful working," 
 and had stopped there, no one would have 
 thought it worth while to dispute with them 
 over a matter which would obviously have 
 been one of terminology only. But they 
 have not stopped there; and the question at 
 issue is really one of fundamental importance 
 to clear thinking for the reason that the 
 pragmatists have not only appropriated the 
 word truth to their own meaning, but also 
 insist that the meaning which most other 
 philosophers have given to the word is no 
 meaning at all. It is they, therefore, rather 
 than the non-pragmatists, who are the real 
 
THE AMBIGUITY OF "TRUTH" 79 
 
 aggressors and who refuse, rather intoler- 
 antly, to recognize the existence of any other 
 relation or characteristic of a true idea besides 
 that which they themselves designate by the 
 word truth. In one of his latest contribu- 
 tions to the subject. Professor James says of 
 the correspondence theory: "Surely this is 
 not a counter-theory of truth to ours. It is 
 the renunciation of all articulate theory. It 
 is but a claim to the right to call certain 
 ideas true anyhow; and this is what I meant 
 by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us 
 no real alternative, and that our account is 
 literally the only positive theory extant." ^ 
 Unconditional surrender, in other words, is 
 the only terms pragmatism will offer its 
 opponents ; and the non-pragmatist, no mat- 
 ter how peaceable his disposition, is thus 
 forced to take up arms in very self-defense. 
 This categorical denial by the pragmatists 
 that there is any meaning in the correspond- 
 ence theory must be kept constantly in mind 
 
 1 Review of Hubert's " Le Pragmatisme," Jour, of Phil., 
 Vol. V, p. 692. 
 
8o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 in our attempt to understand the theory (or 
 theories?) of the truth relation which they 
 propose in its place. This, however, is a 
 large question, and we must postpone con- 
 sideration of it to the next lecture. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF THE TRUTH 
 RELATION 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF THE TRUTH 
 RELATION 
 
 No one can fully grasp the pragmatic 
 meaning of the truth relation without first 
 understanding the pragmatic view of the 
 nature of " a truth " or verified human claim 
 discussed in the last lecture. And the 
 reason is, as I shall try to show, that 
 the former grows out of the latter and is the 
 result of a complete confusion between the 
 two uses of the word truth. It is impossible 
 to read half a dozen pages of pragmatist 
 writing on this subject without coming upon 
 at least one, and usually many, instances of 
 utter failure to distinguish between " truth " 
 as known fact, or mental possession, and 
 "truth" as trueness or that quality or rela- 
 tion characterizing a true idea which makes 
 it true. I trust that by this time you all 
 
 83 
 
84 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 are clear on this distinction and appreciate 
 its importance. For it is from a failure to 
 make this distinction that pragmatism has 
 fallen into the pitiful and unnecessary diffi- 
 culties, inconsistencies, and impossible situa- 
 tions, which I shall try to point out. 
 
 There are several roads by which pragma- 
 tism seems to have moved from its position 
 on the nature of " a truth " to the meaning 
 it has given to the truth relation. Of these 
 I shall point out two. (i) We have noted 
 the emphasis placed by pragmatists upon 
 the concrete, psychological nature of our 
 human truths. These do not, they insist, 
 dwell apart in a Platonic realm ; they are all 
 of them concrete mental facts, they are of 
 such stuff as dreams and feelings and sensa- 
 tions are made of. To banish the abstract 
 from philosophy so far as possible and to sub- 
 stitute for it the individual concrete in the 
 interests of clear thinking has been one of 
 the great and excellent aims of pragmatism. 
 What more natural, therefore, than to use 
 the same concrete method in dealing with. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 85 
 
 the further question of the trueness of ideas ? 
 If truth in this sense be a relation, it must, 
 insists the pragmatist, be a concrete relation. 
 In fact, long before pragmatism was heard of 
 Professor James sought in his " Principles of 
 Psychology " to interpret every relation con- 
 cretely so far as possible/ This principle 
 applied to the truth relation makes it no 
 mere correspondence as defined above, but 
 rather the chain or succession of things or 
 events or experiences that are to be found 
 either between an idea and its object or 
 between a judgment and its vindication. 
 Not only, therefore, is " a truth " concrete ; 
 pragmatism insists that its trueness also shall 
 be a concrete thing or group of things. It is 
 this chain of intermediating things or experi- 
 ences that not only proves it true but also 
 makes it true, and constitutes its truth. The 
 truth relation is therefore not " saltatory " but 
 " ambulatory " * — it consists not in the mere 
 fact that our object is there as we think it, but 
 
 1 See especially Vol. I, pp. 243 ff- ; Vol. II, pp. 148 flf. 
 s « A Word more about Truth," Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, 
 pp. 396 f. 
 
86 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 in the actual experiential process of getting at 
 it or as near it as may be. " The links of ex- 
 perience sequent upon an idea, which mediate 
 between it and reality, form and, for the prag- 
 matist, indeed, are the concrete relation of 
 truth that may obtain between the idea and 
 that reality. They, he says, are all that we 
 mean when we speak of the idea ' pointing ' 
 to the reality, ' fitting ' it, ' corresponding ' 
 with it or ' agreeing ' with it, — they and 
 other similar mediating trains of verifica- 
 tion. Such mediating events make the idea 
 'true.' The idea itself, if it exists at all, is 
 also a concrete event ; so that pragmatism 
 insists that truth in the singular is only a 
 collective name for truths in the plural, 
 these consisting always of series of definite 
 events." ^ I shall not at this point offer any 
 criticism of this view that trueness is a collec- 
 tive name for concrete psychic truths, being 
 concerned here merely in pointing out this 
 first mode of transition from the latter to the 
 former. 
 
 1 " The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol 
 XVII, p. II. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 87 
 
 (2) Another road which has led the prag- 
 matist to the same result starts from the 
 view already dealt with that our "truths" 
 are made, that they begin as claims and are 
 verified within our experience, and that the 
 test of their verity is their working, their 
 consequences, their application. Now the 
 pragmatist contention that a claim must be 
 verified in order to become " a truth " is 
 neither novel nor open to any serious criti- 
 cism ; but the pragmatist takes it for granted 
 that once this is admitted it follows that the 
 claim is made true by being verified and that 
 its trueness consists in its verification. 
 Verification thereby ceases to be the pro- 
 cess of proving an idea to be true and 
 becomes the process of making it true. 
 " Truths are logical values," says Dr. Schil- 
 ler ; and he adds, " It directly follows from 
 this definition of truth that all 'truths' 
 must be verified to be properly true. . . . 
 To become really true it has to be tested, 
 and it is tested by being applied. . . . The 
 truth of an assertion depends upon its appli- 
 
88 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 cation. ... In short, truths must be used to 
 become true, and (in the end) to stay true." ^ 
 Just how "it directly follows" "that all 
 truths must be verified to be properly true " 
 may hot seem so obvious to us as it does to 
 Dr. Schiller ; for the premise to such a con- 
 clusion must evidently be that no belief can 
 be true unless it is known to be true, and 
 the logical consequence is, of course, that 
 there are no such things as true but unveri- 
 fied beliefs, and that before a belief is veri- 
 fied it is either false or else neither true nor 
 false. 
 
 Let me sum up this rather difficult point 
 in a few words. We all agree that verifica- 
 tion is essential to the making of a claim in- 
 to a truth; but the pragmatist draws from 
 this the conclusion that the truth {trueness) 
 of the claim depends on and consists in its 
 verification. This, I maintain, is a flagrant 
 case of using the word truth in two per- 
 fectly distinct senses as if it meant the same 
 thing both times and as if it had but one 
 
 1 " Studies in Humanism," pp. 7-9. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 89 
 
 meaning. It is a confusion between a 
 "truth" and "trueness," — a fallacy from 
 which flow, as will be seen, the most serious 
 consequences. 
 
 Or, to put the same thing in another 
 light, the claim being proved true by its 
 working, by its consequences, it is said to be 
 made true (notice, not made "a truth" but 
 made true) by these consequences. Its true- 
 ness thus consists in these consequences. 
 "The truth (validity) of a truth (claim)," 
 says Schiller, "is tested and established by 
 the value of its consequences,"* This sen- 
 tence is perfectly harmless, but the pragma- 
 tist does not stop here. From it he deduces 
 the rather amazing conclusion that since its 
 usefulness proves it true, its trueness con- 
 sists in its being useful. The test of truth 
 and the meaning of truth are thus com- 
 pletely identified. 
 
 So much for pragmatism's roads of ap- 
 proach to its final view of the truth relation. 
 And now, lest I should unwittingly misrep- 
 
 1 <' Steadies in Humanism," p. 160. 
 
90 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 resent that view, let the three great prag- 
 matists speak for it : — 
 
 Professor James: "Theoretical truth is 
 no relation between our mind and the arche- 
 typal reality. It falls within the mind, be- 
 ing the accord of some of its processes and 
 objects with other processes and objects."^ 
 ■' 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 •ven-ficaiion. 
 Its validity is the process of its vaMd-ation." ^ 
 " The truth of our beliefs consists in general 
 in their giving satisfaction." * " The links 
 of experience sequent upon an idea, which 
 mediate between it and a reality, form, and 
 for the pragmatist, indeed, are the concrete re- 
 lation of truth. . . . Such mediating events 
 make the idea true." * " The truth relation 
 is a definitely experienceable relation. . . . 
 The relation to its object that makes an idea 
 
 1 " Humanism and Truth once More,'' Mind, Vol. XIV, 
 p. 198. 2 "Pragmatism," p. 201. 
 
 »«Tlie Pragmatist Account of Truth," PMl. Rev., Vol. 
 XVII, p. s- ♦/&•</., p. II. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 91 
 
 true in any given instance is, we say, em- 
 bodied in intermediate details of reality 
 which lead towards the object, which vary 
 in every instance, and which in every in- 
 stance can be concretely traced. The chain 
 of workings which an idea sets up is the opin- 
 ion's truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, as the case 
 may be. . . . These ' workings ' differ in 
 every single instance, they never transcend 
 experience, they consist of particulars, men- 
 tal or sensible, and they admit of con- 
 crete description in every individual case. 
 Pragmatists are unable to see what you can 
 possibly mean by calling an idea true, unless 
 you mean that between it as a terminus a 
 quo in some one's mind and some particular 
 reality as a terminus ad quern, such concrete 
 workings do or may intervene. Their direc- 
 tion constitutes the idea's reference to that 
 reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its 
 adaptation thereto, and the two things to- 
 gether constitute the ' truth ' of the idea for 
 its possessor. " ^ 
 
 1 Hubert's " Le Pragmatisme," Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, 
 pp. 691-692. 
 
92 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 Dr. Schiller : Truth is " a function of our 
 intellectual activity or a manipulation of our 
 objects which turns out to be useful."^ 
 While some truths may be conceived as cor- 
 respondences or agreements, this is only 
 on condition " that these processes remain 
 strictly immanent in human knowing." 
 They are " valuable and serviceable cross- 
 references which obtain within our expe- 
 rience." ^ " All truths must be verified to be 
 properly true." ^ " If truth could win no 
 recognition, it would so far not work, and 
 so fail to be true." * 
 
 Professor Dewey : " Truth is an expe- 
 rienced^ relation of characteristic quality of 
 things, and it has no meaning outside of 
 such [experienced] relation." * " From this 
 [the pragmatic] point of view verification 
 and truth are two names for the same thing." 
 
 * " Humanism," p. 6l. 
 
 ^'''Mr. Bradley's Theory of Truth," Mind, Vol. XVI, 
 p. 404. ' " Studies in Humanism," p. 8. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 70. ^ Italics mine. 
 
 " "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge," Mind, Vol. 
 XV, p. 305. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW ^ OF TRUTH 93 
 
 As an illustration, Professor Dewey cites an 
 idea that a certain noise comes from a street 
 car ; this idea being investigated and verified 
 becomes true. Had it not been verified it 
 never would have been true, — even if as a 
 fact the noise had really come from the car. 
 To say that the idea was true before it was 
 verified is, he insists, either tautologous (" be- 
 ing just a restatement of the fact that the 
 idea has, as a matter of fact, worked success- 
 fully "), or else, in any other sense, it is sim- 
 ply false. Exactly speaking, the idea is not 
 true till it works out, for its working and its 
 truth are identical. " What the experimen- 
 talist means is that the effective working of 
 the idea and its truth are one and the same 
 thing — this working being neither the cause 
 nor the evidence of truth but its nature." ^ 
 
 To give a fair presentation of the prag- 
 matist view of truth, however, I must add 
 that throughout the writings of Professor 
 James — and more especially in what he 
 
 > " Reality and the Criterion of Truth for Ideas," Mind, 
 Vol. XVI, pp. 335-337- 
 
94 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 has published since the appearance of his 
 " Pragmatism " — there runs, parallel with 
 the view expressed above, a difEerent and 
 decidedly less radical description of the na- 
 ture of the truth relation.^ Thus verifiability 
 is often spoken of as being as good as veri- 
 fication. And in the Journal of Philosophy 
 for August 15, 1907, he writes, "Truth is 
 essentially a relation between two things, an 
 idea, on the one hand, and a reality outside 
 of the idea, on the other. This relation, like 
 all relations, has its fundamenium, namely 
 the matrix of experiential circumstance, psy- 
 chological as well as physical, in which the 
 correlated terms are found embedded. . . . 
 What constitutes the relation known as truth, 
 I now say, is just the existence in the empiri- 
 cal world of this fundamentum of circum- 
 stance surrounding object and idea and ready 
 
 ' I should add, however, that in his latest treatment of the 
 subject, namely in his review of Hubert's recent book on 
 Pragmatism, Professor James seems to have returned part 
 way to the more radical view, while still maintaining the 
 reality and independence of the object. See the Jour, of 
 Phil, for December 3, 1908. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 95 
 
 to be either short-circuited or traversed at 
 full length. So long as it exists and a satis- 
 factory passage through it between the object 
 and the idea is possible, that idea will both 
 be true, and will have been true of that 
 object, whether fully developed verification 
 has taken place or not. The nature and 
 place and affinities of the object, of course, 
 play as vital a part in making the particular 
 passage possible as do the nature and associ- 
 ative tendencies of the idea; so that the 
 notion that truth could fall altogether inside 
 of the thinker's experience and be something 
 purely psychological is absurd." And in a 
 more recent article,^ while still maintaining 
 that the truth relation must be a chain of 
 " concrete " links, he comes still closer to the 
 correspondence theory. " The pragmatizing 
 epistemologist posits a reality and a mind 
 with ideas. What now, he asks, can make 
 those ideas true of that reality? Ordinary 
 epistemology contents itself with the vague 
 
 1 « The Pragmatist Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol 
 XVII, pp. 1-17. 
 
96 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 statement that the ideas must 'correspond' 
 or ' agree ' ; the pragmatist insists upon being 
 more concrete and asks what such agreement 
 may mean in detail. He finds first that the 
 ideas must point to or lead towards that 
 reality and no other, and then that the point- 
 ings and leadings must yield satisfaction as 
 their result." " The pragmatist calls satisfac- 
 tions indispensable for truth-building, but ex- 
 pressly calls them insufficient unless reality 
 be also incidentally led to. If the reality he 
 assumed were canceled from his universe of 
 discourse, he would straightway give the 
 name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining 
 in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, 
 as for his critic, there can be no truth if there 
 is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so 
 much flat psychological surface unless some 
 mirrored matter gives them cognitive luster." 
 " Ideas are practically useful which we can 
 verify by the sum total of all their leadings, 
 and the reality of whose objects may thus be 
 considered established beyond doubt. That 
 these ideas should be true in advance of and 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 97 
 
 apart from their utility, that, in other words, 
 their objects should be really there, is the 
 very condition of their having that kind of 
 utility." And even in his " Pragmatism " 
 Professor James in one place writes, "When 
 new experiences lead to retrospective judg- 
 ments, using the past tense, what these judg- 
 ments utter was true, even though no past 
 thinker had been led there." ^ 
 
 How far Dr. Schiller goes with Professor 
 James in his modified view of truth, I am 
 unable to say. Professor James insists that 
 he and Schiller agree absolutely on the sub- 
 ject.** Yet it is certainly very difficult to find 
 in any of Dr. Schiller's writings anything 
 comparable in explicitness to the expressions 
 just quoted from Professor James. And Pro- 
 fessor Dewey certainly stands firmly on the 
 expressions quoted from him and remains 
 always consistently radical. 
 
 After listening to the quotations I have 
 just read you from the three leading prag- 
 
 1 p. 223. 
 
 ' See his review of Hubert's " Le Pragmatisme," in the 
 Jour, of Phil., Vol. V, pp. 693-694. 
 
98 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 matists, you may understand why the critics 
 of pragmatism have been so constantly — 
 and justly! — accused of misunderstanding 
 it. 
 
 And I am free to confess that it is beyond 
 my power to formulate, on the basis of what 
 the pragmatists have written, a single con- 
 sistent and harmonious pragmatic doctrine 
 concerning the nature of the truth relation. 
 The best I can do for pragmatism is to make 
 two doctrines of truth out of the expressions 
 quoted above ; and, indeed, it must be evident 
 to you all that we have here two quite dis- 
 tinct views — one radical and one somewhat 
 modified — as to the meaning of truth. The 
 former of these holds that truth is the pro- 
 cess of verification which goes on within 
 experience ; that it consists in the successful 
 working of the idea, in the concrete steps 
 within consciousness that lead from the 
 unverified claim to the full and satisfying 
 assurance of its " goodness." The modified 
 view, on the other hand, maintains that there 
 are two factors which go to make up the 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 99 
 
 trueness of an idea: namely, (i) the concrete 
 steps of its leading and the subjective satis- 
 factions resulting (as described by the radical 
 view); and also (2) the actual presence in 
 reality of the object which the idea means. 
 Let us note a little more in detail three of 
 the most important differences between these 
 two views. 
 
 (i) The most obvious difference is the 
 recognition found in the more moderate view 
 that it is indispensable for the trueness of an 
 idea that its object should really " be there." ^ 
 Truth thus ceases to be " wholly within our 
 experience," or "an experienced relation," 
 and becomes instead a relation which com- 
 pletely transcends (or may transcend) any 
 single finite experience. It is not merely 
 a " process " nor a felt " leading " from one 
 part of our experience to another. It is no 
 more psychical than physical in its nature. 
 It is a relation between an idea and a reality 
 
 1 Numerous expressions of the moderate pragmatist show 
 that by the object's being really " there " he means not only 
 that the object exists but that it exists independently of the 
 individual's experience, and (at times) outside of it. 
 
lOO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 which may be " beyond the direct experience 
 of the particular cognizer," ^ a relation which, 
 apparently, no one short of a Roycean Ab- 
 solute need ever experience. It must be 
 evident to all how completely this differs 
 from the radical view which takes no note 
 of any reality outside the individual's expe- 
 rience as essential to truth, and which 
 makes truth wholly a process within expe- 
 rience. And this brings us to the second 
 difference between the two theories. 
 
 (2) Since the modified view of truth rec- 
 ognizes an outer reality as relevant and es- 
 sential, it can and does maintain that an idea 
 may be true before it is verified, whereas the 
 radical view insists that truth consists in the 
 actual process of verification, and that, hence, 
 the idea is not true till so proved. Thus we 
 have here another case of flat contradiction. 
 Professor Dewey saying that the idea is not 
 true before verified, and Professor James say- 
 ing that it is. A less obvious but equally 
 
 1 Professor James in the Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 403, 
 note. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH lOI 
 
 important phase of this same disagreement 
 is the question of verifiability. Professor 
 Dewey and the left wing maintain, as has 
 been seen, that actual verification is essential 
 to truth ; Professor James and the right wing 
 maintain that verifiability is quite sufficient ; 
 while the center, under both Dr. Schiller and 
 Professor James, insists that after all there 
 isn't any real difference between the meanings 
 of these two words. Whether there is such a 
 difference or not, I must leave to your judg- 
 ment. For my own part, I had always sup- 
 posed there was the same difference as that 
 between mere possibility and the concrete 
 process of making the possibility an actuality; 
 and I had also thought that this was a real 
 difference. Columbus's idea that he could 
 cross the Atlantic was merely verifiable so 
 long as he stayed in Spain, and this its quality 
 of verifiability (which it already possessed 
 while he was still in Spain), had always seemed 
 to me quite a different thing from the concrete 
 steps of getting ships, manning them, hoist- 
 ing anchor and raising sail and all the other 
 
I02 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 links in the chain of actual verification. 
 And it must, I think, be evident to all who 
 are not pragmatists that it is one thing to say 
 the full process of verification is essential to 
 truth and a very different thing to say that 
 verifiability alone is essential. For verifia- 
 bility is not a process nor a succession of 
 events in time, it is not included within any 
 one's experience, but is a general condition 
 or set of conditions which transcends every 
 single finite experience. It is not a felt 
 "leading," it is not a "form of the good," nor 
 a "satisfactory working," nor any other ex- 
 perience or experience-process. It is, if you 
 like, the possibility of these, but it is not 
 these. It is a totality of relations which are 
 not, and will never be, within any finite ex- 
 perience. It is a present condition of the 
 idea, not something that " happens to " it. 
 It is not " made " ; it is already there. It is 
 immeasurably more harmonious with the 
 correspondence theory of truth than with 
 that of radical pragmatism. The harmony 
 which Dr. Schiller has brought about be- 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 103 
 
 tween verification and verifiability is of the 
 same sort that usually obtains between the 
 lion and the lamb when they lie down to- 
 gether. "It is," he tells us, "impossible to 
 separate verifiability from verification — the 
 potentiality does not exist apart from the ac- 
 tuality from which it is an ex post facto in- 
 ference. A claim to truth, therefore, can 
 only be regarded as verifiable on the strength 
 of past experiences of verifications, and a 
 ' verifiable ' truth which is never verified is 
 really unverifiable." ^ It would seem, thus, 
 that the reason why verification and verifia- 
 bility cannot be separated is the same that 
 makes it impossible to separate the lion and 
 the lamb after they have lain down together. 
 It is, therefore, obvious why Dr. Schiller in- 
 sists that there is no difference between the 
 two; to his pragmatic mind there really is 
 
 "^ "■MVaaa. 'Ra.'ao'i'" Jour, of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 493, note. 
 The non-pragmatist, of course, agrees with Schiller that a po- 
 tentiality cannot exist apart from an actuality, but he insists 
 that the actuality which makes an idea verifiable is not actual 
 verification, but the existing condition of relevant reality, the 
 nature of the &ct in question and the idea's conformity to 
 that &ct. 
 
I04 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 no such thing as verifiability, it having been 
 completely swallowed by verification. All 
 of which is new evidence of the great differ- 
 ence between the view that considers mere 
 verifiability without verification sufficient for 
 truth and that which insists that actual veri- 
 fication is essential. 
 
 (3) The third difference between the left 
 and right wings of pragmatism is hardly 
 more than a variant on the second, and yet 
 deserves especial notice. It is, namely, con- 
 cerned with the question of the " successful 
 working," or the " consequences," of an idea. 
 Radical pragmatism maintains that these not 
 only prove the idea true, but make it true and 
 constitute its truth. Modified pragmatism 
 denies the latter statement. Professor Dewey 
 says, " The effective working of the idea 
 and its truth are one and the same thing 
 — this working being neither the cause nor 
 the evidence of truth but its nature." Pro- 
 fessor James says, " That these ideas {i.e. 
 useful ideas) should be true in advance of 
 and apart from their utility, that, in other 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 105 
 
 words, their objects should be really there, 
 is the very condition of their having that 
 kind of utility." In other words, to put it 
 briefly, the left wing of pragmatism main- 
 tains that ideas are true because they are 
 useful ; the right wing maintains that they 
 are useful because they are true. 
 
 Let us now examine more in detail this 
 modified form of the pragmatic doctrine. 
 In the first place, it is obvious that this is 
 an attempt to steer a middle course between 
 radical pragmatism and the old correspond- 
 ence theory. It has sought for a combi- 
 nation of pragmatism and common sense as 
 a sort of golden mean. The result has 
 been, on the one hand, that it has avoided 
 some of the difficult positions of the radical 
 form ; but, on the other hand, it is question- 
 able whether it has not sought to reconcile 
 several things which are quite irreconcilable. 
 It would seem to be trying that notoriously 
 difficult feat of eating one's cake and keep- 
 ing it too. Thus it is hard to see how 
 " satisfactions " and the concrete " links of 
 
I06 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 experience " are " indispensable " to truth, if 
 at the same time an idea can be true in ad- 
 vance of and apart from these satisfactions 
 and links of experience. 
 
 The modified pragmatist view would 
 therefore seem to be open to two dififerent 
 interpretations, according to which of its 
 two seemingly inconsistent factors one 
 chooses to emphasize as the essential part 
 If one emphasizes the assertion that the 
 idea is true before it is verified, that its 
 truth consists just in the existence of the 
 relation between it and its object even if 
 this be " short-circuited," and that it is its 
 truth that makes it useful rather than its 
 usefulness that makes it true, it is indeed 
 no longer subject to criticism, because it 
 has simply turned into the old correspond- 
 ence theory under a new name. All that 
 was distinctive in it has evaporated, and all 
 that remains is the name " pragmatic " — 
 like the grin on the face of Alice's Cheshire 
 cat after the face of the cat had faded 
 away. But if, on the other hand, we choose 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 107 
 
 to say that the indispensability of the sat- 
 isfactions and of the concrete Hnks of ex- 
 perience forms the essential part of the 
 doctrine, then we shall have avoided the 
 frying pan, indeed, but only to fall danger- 
 ously near the fire. There will, of course, 
 still be this difference between moderate 
 and radical pragmatism : that for the former 
 the object must really " be there " and that 
 the satisfactions, etc., though indispensable, 
 will not -be sufficient. Yet, if these satis- 
 factions are really indispensable, a belief 
 which is verifiable but not yet verified is 
 not true. My idea that my friend is in 
 Constantinople will not be a true idea (even 
 if as a fact he is there) until I have actu- 
 ally gone through the links of concrete ex- 
 perience which verify it and actually have 
 the satisfactions which witness to its truth. 
 Truth and the test of truth will thus still 
 be largely confused; the proof of a propo- 
 sition will form at least a part of its true- 
 ness. This doctrine, therefore, though 
 -differing in some details from the radical 
 
I08 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 pragmatism of Professor Dewey, will still 
 be subject to most of the criticisms to which 
 the latter view (as Professor James himself, 
 apparently, sees perfectly well) is so manifest 
 a mark. Hence, modified pragmatism must 
 either return to the much-abused correspon- 
 dence theory or else accept most of the 
 absurd consequences to which radical prag- 
 matism will lead us. I see no way of avoiding 
 this dilemma. To stick to both interpreta- 
 tions and to use the word truth in " this large 
 loose way " is to contradict oneself. One can- 
 not long ride upon two horses going in op- 
 posite directions ; one must choose between 
 them — or fall between them. Here as else- 
 where it will ultimately prove impossible to 
 run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. 
 We come now at last to a closer examina- 
 tion of the more radical pragmatic view 
 of the truth relation. And to understand 
 it thoroughly we must first notice a cer- 
 tain peculiarity in the use of the important 
 word idea which will go far to explain 
 the rather startling conclusion as to the 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 109 
 
 nature of truth to which it comes. When 
 one first dips into the literature of pragma- 
 tism, one is somewhat mystified by recurrent 
 phrases such as " the efficient working of 
 an idea," " the idea's leading," etc. The 
 various uses of this phrase point, I think, 
 to an important difference in the intellectual- 
 istic and the pragmatic meaning of " idea " 
 in connection with the truth problem. To 
 the pragmatist the word idea means any 
 representative content that leads to action 
 or helps to bring order into a given situa- 
 tion. Hence Professor Dewey's synonym 
 for it — namely, "plan of action." Thus 
 the important thing about an idea to the 
 pragmatist is, not its present relation to its 
 object, but its influence upon conduct, its 
 motive power or guiding force. Starting 
 from the biological view of mind, the prag- 
 matist insists that the purpose of thought 
 is, not the acquisition of " truth," but the 
 useful reaction of the organism upon the 
 environment. Our " ideas " are thus essen- 
 tially tools by which to handle and to 
 
no WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 mold our experience. In short, they are 
 to the pragmatist, as I have said, not so 
 much beliefs or judgments as "plans of 
 action." From this it follows naturally and 
 almost inevitably that if the term truth is 
 to be applied to such " ideas," it cannot be 
 in the sense of " correspondence " as de- 
 fined above.^ As " a plan of action " is 
 not an assertion about something outside 
 our experience, but a way of grouping our 
 data or guiding our conduct, it cannot, of 
 course, be maintained that its "truth" depends 
 upon its relation to some outer reality. 
 One indeed may wonder that the word 
 truth should be applied to it at all, but once 
 so applied it is evident that there is nothing 
 for it to mean but usefulness and successful 
 action. A true idea in this sense is there- 
 fore one that works. This is especially 
 manifest in the case of the laws of science, 
 and I believe it was partly in this connection 
 that the pragmatic identification of truth with 
 usefulness first suggested itself. In so far as 
 
 1 See p. 67 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH III 
 
 a scientific law is a mere short-hand expres- 
 sion for our experience, a mere formula for 
 the condensed description of perceptions, its 
 truth may be said to consist in its work- 
 ing.^ In short, if an hj^othesis proves 
 itself a useful tool, it is forthwith called 
 true, — true, that is, for immediate practical 
 purposes, — and thus truth comes to be re- 
 garded as merely a "form of the good." 
 As an example. Professor Dewey speaks of 
 the invention of the telephone as a plan 
 of action or idea that worked itself out, i.e. 
 proved itself " true." And it is evident 
 that if the word true is to be applied to 
 inventions and similar plans of action at all, 
 their " truth " is indeed " wholly an affair 
 of making them true." 
 
 Before entering any criticism upon this 
 view we must first note, for the sake of 
 our own comprehension of the subject, the 
 
 1 A deeper reflection, however, will inevitably raise the 
 question why it works, and this can hardly be answered with- 
 out reference to an environing reality ; and thus we shall be 
 brought back to the stricter sense of truth and the correspond- 
 ence theory. 
 
112 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 decidedly different meaning given to "idea" 
 by the non-pragmatist. When the non- 
 pragmatist says an " idea " is true, he uses 
 the word to mean, not a plan of action, 
 but a judgment. To him an idea which 
 is not a judgment but is a mere image or 
 plan or formula may lead in what direction 
 it likes, it may be useful, successful, satis- 
 factory, or their opposites, it may have 
 any function you will, but it is not in the 
 category of things that can be either true 
 or false. In Bosanquet's words, " truth and 
 falsehood are coextensive with judgment." ^ 
 This being the case, the non-pragmatist 
 does not and cannot consider " true " a 
 predicate of the same kind as " benevolent " 
 or " luminous " or " good " (as the pragma- 
 tist suggests), nor can he identify " truth " (in 
 the sense of trueness) with a " function " or 
 " leading " or " process." 
 
 And now to return to the pragmatist 
 use of the word. Granted that, if the 
 term truth is to be applied to a plan 
 
 * " Logic," Vol. I, p. 72. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH II3 
 
 or purpose at all, it may as well mean 
 successful execution as anything else, is 
 not the use of the word in this connec- 
 tion, to say the least, unnatural and unnec- 
 essarily confusing? An invention may be 
 useful and may work and be successful, 
 my plan to go downtown may be wise and 
 good, but to call either of them true would 
 seem to be a step toward the invention of 
 a new language. 
 
 And in spite of the undoubted truth in 
 the biological view of mind, in spite of the 
 fact that all ideas in some sense work them- 
 selves out, it is not true that all " ideas," 
 judgments included, are merely plans of 
 action. A judgment has at least two differ- 
 ent aspects. From one point of view it is 
 indeed a motor idea which influences con- 
 duct and works itself out. From another 
 point of view it is an assertion about some 
 reality not itself, and between it and that 
 reality there is a relation which simply is not 
 to be identified with the results of the judg- 
 ment. This distinction between the two 
 
114 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 aspects of a judgment, or between judgments 
 and plans of action, seems to be quite 
 overlooked by thinkers of widely different 
 schools — e.g. by Professor Dewey, on the 
 one hand, and Professor Royce,^ on the other. 
 These writers often deal with the subject of 
 truth as if there were no distinction between 
 judgment and purpose. Thus Professor 
 Dewey tries to interpret judgments as plans 
 of action by saying " the agreement, corre- 
 spondence, is between purpose, plan, and its 
 own execution, fulfillment."^ But take any 
 ordinary judgment such as " The sun is shin- 
 ing," or " The Greeks defeated the Persians 
 
 1 Professor Moore has conclusively shown that if " idea " 
 be taken to mean purpose, as Royce insists it shall, then the 
 "truth" of an idea must be the fulfillment of the purpose 
 within our experience, and not (as Royce says) the " corre- 
 spondence between our ideas and their objects." To reach 
 any relation between an idea and a reality outside of one's 
 private stream of consciousness, Royce has practically to give 
 up the purposive function of ideas as their most essential 
 characteristic, and to speak of them as representative. See 
 " The World and the Individual," Lectures I, VII, and VIII, 
 and Moore's " Some Logical Aspects of Purpose," in " Studies 
 in Logical Theory," pp. 341-382. 
 
 " « The Control of Ideas by Facts," /<wr. of Phil, Vol. IV, 
 p. 202. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 15 
 
 at Salamis." Where, in this case, is the plan 
 and where the fulfillment ? Or take at ran- 
 dom any judgment from Professor Dewey's 
 writings — for example, this, " Reality as such 
 is an entire situation." How can this, at 
 least without much forced and unnatural in- 
 terpretation, be called "■apian of action'"} 
 To reduce all judgments to plans of action, 
 to add that plans of action are true because 
 they work, and to conclude that therefore 
 the truth of a judgment consists in its work- 
 ing is hardly a cogent syllogism. 
 
 We come now to our final evaluation of 
 the radical pragmatic view of the truth rela- 
 tion. For the radical pragmatist, truth is to 
 be identified with " the psychological or bio- 
 logical processes by which it is pursued and 
 attained." ^ " The effective working of the 
 idea and its truth are one and the sam^ 
 thing," for it is "an experienced relation.' 
 The truth of an idea is " an event, a process 
 the process, namely, of its verifying itself, iti 
 verification." 
 
 1 Professor Montague in the/twr. of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 100. 
 
Il6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 One here feels tempted to ask : If truth be 
 really identical with its proof, if it be nothing 
 but the process of its verification, or the pro- 
 cesses by which it is pursued and attained, 
 what is it that is proved and verified, what is 
 it that is pursued and attained? Are we 
 verifying verification and pursuing pursuit ? 
 This indeed sounds like logomachy, but it 
 really is not. For surely verification is veri- 
 fication of something. If you say it is the 
 verification of the idea^ just what do you 
 mean ? Certainly not the verification of the 
 idea as a mere psychical existent. It must 
 be, if it is anything at all, the verification of 
 the idea's trueness, the demonstration that 
 its claim is a rightful claim — is a rightful 
 claim, mind you, not will be rightful. Here, 
 let us say, is an assertion. As yet it is a 
 mere claim. But it claims to be true — i.e. 
 iit* claims that it is true. Now you verify it. 
 It thereby becomes " a truth," but what you 
 nave verified is that it was true already. 
 The very fact, therefore, that you verify pre- 
 supposes that the trueness of the assertion or 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH I17 
 
 claim is something prior to and independent 
 of its verification. The very use of the 
 words verification and proof presupposes 
 that truth is something distinct from any 
 process of proof. Thus, though pragmatism 
 may properly speak of successful and satis- 
 factory experiences, it is hard to see how it 
 can consistently use the term verification at 
 all. To me, at least, it would seem as easy to 
 lift oneself by one's boot straps as to compre- 
 hend how truth can consist in the process of 
 its own verification, or how it (or anything 
 else, for that matter) can be " the processes 
 by which it is pursued and attained." 
 
 And now, to make matters perfectly clear, 
 let us apply to this radical pragmatic mean- 
 ing of truth the same illustration which was 
 used in the preceding lecturd to bring out 
 the exact meaning of the correspondence 
 theory. Poor Peter, you will remember, has 
 a toothache, and John, who is thinking 
 about his friend, has an idea that Peter has 
 a toothache. As for the pragmatist the^ 
 truth of an idea means its "efficient work-i 
 
Il8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 ing," its " satisfactoriness, " " the process of 
 its verification," the truth of John's idea will 
 " consist in " its satisfactoriness to John, in 
 its efficient working, in its verifying itself. 
 If it works, if it harmonizes with John's later 
 experiences of Peter's actions, if it leads in a 
 direction that is worth while, it is true (a 
 statement to which, indeed, all might assent), 
 and its truth consists in this working, this 
 harmony, this verification process. John's 
 thought, the pragmatist insists, becomes true 
 only when it has worked out successfully, 
 only when his later experience confirms it 
 by being consistent with it, — for remember, 
 truth is not verifiability, but the process of 
 verification. "Truth happens to an idea. 
 // becomes true, is made true by events. " 
 At the time when John had the thought 
 about Peter the thought was neither true 
 nor false, for the process of verification had 
 not yet begun, nothing had as yet happened 
 to the idea. To be sure, Peter had a tooth- 
 ache, just as John thought, but, all the same, 
 John's thought was not true. It did not 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH II9 
 
 become true until several hours afterward, — 
 in fact, we may suppose, not until Peter, 
 having cured his toothache, told John about 
 it. The thought, " Peter has a toothache, " 
 thus, as it happens, turns out not to have 
 been true while Peter actually had the 
 toothache, and to have become true only 
 after he had ceased to have a toothache. It 
 became true only by being proved true, and 
 its truth consisted in the process of its proof. 
 One might, perhaps, be tempted to ask what 
 it was that was proved, and to say to the 
 pragmatist. Either the satisfactoriness, the 
 successful leading, is a proof of something 
 outside of John's immediate experience, 
 something by which his idea is to be judged 
 and justified (in which case truth ceases to 
 be a mere verification process and becomes 
 at least verifiability) ; or else it is merely 
 John's subjective feeling of satisfaction and 
 of successful leading and consistency, with no 
 reference to anything else to justify it, — in 
 which case it may indeed be pleasant and 
 " good, " but it is hard to see why it should 
 
I20 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 be called true. For suppose that at the 
 same time with John's thought, Tom thinks 
 Peter has not a toothache. Suppose that, 
 being a little stupid and perhaps a little hard 
 of hearing, he misinterprets John's actions 
 and expressions, and that later on he is as- 
 sured by some one equally misinformed that 
 Peter certainly had no toothache. His 
 thought thus works out, is successful, har- 
 monizes with his later experience, is to 
 him genuinely verified. The whole matter 
 ends here, and he drops the question com- 
 pletely, never investigating further. Were 
 the thoughts of both John and Tom true ? 
 Now it will not do to respond, " No ; 
 Tom's thought was not genuinely verified. 
 Only that thought was really verified and 
 therefore true which would have worked out 
 had both been investigated suflficiently. " 
 For what do you mean by "sufficiently''''} 
 Sufficiently for what ? To argue thus would 
 be to presuppose a criterion (apart from 
 the leading of the thought) to which 
 the thought must correspond if it is to 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 121 
 
 be true. If you distinguish between a 
 " genuine " verification and one that is only 
 subjectively satisfactory, you appeal to some 
 other criterion than the process of verifica- 
 tion — in other words, you go over to the non- 
 pragmatist's point of view. If, on the other 
 hand, you stick to your pragmatic criterion 
 and say that the truth of the thought con- 
 sists in its actual satisfactoriness, then the 
 question becomes pertinent: Were the 
 thoughts of both boys true? Obviously 
 they were, for both worked, both were satisfac- 
 tory, both were verified. Hence it was true 
 at the same time and in the same sense that 
 Peter had a toothache and that Peter had 
 not a toothache. Nor is there anything 
 surprising in this, if truth be nothing but a 
 particular kind of satisfactory experience. 
 The principle of contradiction has no mean- 
 ing and can no longer hold if truth be alto- 
 fther within one's experience. 
 To set the problem in another light, let 
 me put the following dilemma : Either there 
 is a real and relevant world outside of your 
 
122 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 private stream of consciousness, — it may be 
 a material world or one made up of other 
 selves, — or else there is no such world and 
 you need reckon only with your own private 
 experiences. If you admit that this outer 
 world exists and that you judge about the 
 things or persons in it, you must also admit 
 that the relation between these things or 
 persons and your judgments of them is a 
 fact which deserves to be recognized, and 
 that, in one sense at least, the validity of 
 your judgments depends on this relation. 
 You may call this relation truth or reserve 
 the term truth for something else, as you 
 like; but, aside from terminology, once you 
 recognize this relation and its bearing upon 
 your judgments, you have essentially ac- 
 cepted the non-pragmatist's position. On 
 the other hand, deny the existence of this 
 relation and its relevancy to your judgments, 
 and you either deny that there is any world 
 outside your own conscious experience, or 
 else you affirm that if such a world there 
 be, it is nothing and never can be anything 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 123 
 
 to you. And when you have done this, how 
 far are you from solipsism ? The non-prag- 
 matist might be willing to admit that if 
 this be a solipsistic world, " truth " might as 
 well mean " effective working " as anything 
 else.^ But if it be a world in which one 
 makes genuine references to outer realities 
 that never come within one's private stream 
 of consciousness, then the relation between 
 those realities and one's judgment about 
 them (a relation which from the nature of 
 the case one can never experience) is some- 
 thing which cannot be neglected, but must 
 be reckoned with, call it what you will.^ 
 
 '^ It is interesting to note in this connection that all Pro- 
 fessor Dewey's and Professor Moore's contributions to 
 " Studies in Logical Theory," as well as most of Professor 
 Dewey's more recent papers on truth and knowledge, could 
 perfectly well have been written from the standpoint of 
 solipsism — and, in fact, it is difficult to see how some of them 
 could have been written from any other. 
 
 ^ The dilemma just proposed I suggested some time ago 
 in theyi^ar. of Phil. (Vol. V, p. 131), and shortly afterward 
 Professor Dewey replied to it in the course of an article of his 
 in the same Journal (Vol. V, pp. 375-381). The gist of his 
 reply is the insistence that my dilemma holds only for those 
 who start with the " metaphysical " presupposition of a 
 " mind," on one side, and " objects," on the other side, external 
 
124 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 Before closing this lecture there is one 
 question which I should like to put to the 
 
 to it. The pragmatist makes no such presupposition, but is 
 dealing with the problem only from the " logical standpoint, 
 to which the solipsistic controversy is irrelevant ; — since a 
 logical inquiry is concerned only with inferential relations 
 among things, not with preconceptions about a lonely con- 
 sciousness, or soul, or self." 
 
 Professor Dewey then goes on to put the following, ques- 
 tions, which he considers the truly relevant ones in a logical 
 discussion (and which of course are expressed in such a way 
 as to indicate the pragmatist's answers) : " (i) Do ideas pre- 
 sent themselves except in situations which are doubtful and 
 inquired into.' . . . (2) Are the ' ideas ' anything else except 
 the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories tentatively 
 entertained during a suspended conclusion? (3) . . . Do 
 they serve to direct observation, colligate data, and guide 
 experimentation, or are they otiose? (4) If the ideas have 
 a function in directing the reflective process, does success in 
 performing the function have anything to do with the logical 
 worth or validity of the ideas? (5) And finally, does this 
 matter of validity have anything to do with the question of 
 truth ? Does ' truth ' mean something inherently different 
 from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment is itself 
 applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry?" 
 (pp. 378-379.) 
 
 To these questions I think the following answers may be 
 made: (1) The first question is largely one of terminology. 
 For the sake of the argument let us grant that " ideas " are to 
 be found only in situations that are doubtfiil. This is 
 certainly true of " ideas " in the sense Professor Dewey 
 attributes to the word. I cannot see that this makes outer 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 125 
 
 pragmatist, — a definite answer to which 
 might clear up some of the obscurities of 
 
 reference and correspondence any less essential to their 
 meaning. (2) The second question is much more important. 
 And here too let us accept the pragmatist's answer. " Ideas," 
 let us say, are nothing but " suggestions," " conjectures," 
 " hypotheses," " theories." But the question now arises, What 
 are "suggestions," "theories," and the like? Are not con- 
 jectures, hypotheses, and theories abottt something? Do they 
 not mean and refer to something not themselves, and is not 
 this object of theirs often a contemporaneously existing thing? 
 Is not a theory (when seriously maintained) a judgment that 
 something is thus-and-so? And if this be the case, is not 
 correspondence (in the sense I have defined) essential? If 
 correspondence be ruled out, is not the whole content and 
 significance of hypotheses and theories and the rest com- 
 pletely lost ? And does not Professor Dewey grant substan- 
 tially the whole non-pragmatist contention for correspondence 
 when he writes, " The logical idea is short for a certain judg- 
 ment about a thing. It states the way an object is judged to 
 be, the way we take it in the inference process, as distinct from 
 the way it actually may be." (p. 378.) (3) Certainly hypoth- 
 eses and theories " serve to direct observation, guide experi- 
 mentation," etc. But the prior and more important logical 
 question (which Professor Dewey omits) is this : How do they 
 do it? How comes it that they manage to succeed, that they 
 lead us in the right direction, while certain other hypotheses 
 fail? Theories, conjectures, etc., of course are instruments — 
 who denies it? But the fundamental question is how it is 
 possible for them to be instruments and what it is that makes 
 some successful guides and some unsuccessful. So far as I 
 can see the pragmatist has no answer to this. The non- 
 
126 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 the subject, namely this : Is pragmatism 
 true, and if so in what sense is it true? 
 
 And, first of all, is it true in the pragmatic 
 sense? This is certainly a question which 
 is very hard to answer. Since pragmatism 
 has worked satisfactorily to the pragmatist, 
 it evidently is true — to him. But with 
 equal certainty it is not true to the non- 
 
 pragmatist answer of course is that hypotheses succeed in 
 guiding experimentation in so far as they correspond to the 
 already existing reality which is their object and which they 
 mean. And this brings us to the fourth and fifth questions, 
 to which the non-pragmatist answer is, in short, that the 
 idea's success in performing its function is, no doubt, closely 
 related to its validity and truth, but that the pragmatist has 
 put the matter just the wrong way about, since it is the truth 
 of the idea that makes it successful, not its success that makes 
 it true. Its success is, if you like, the cause of our recognition 
 of its truth, but the idea would never have succeeded at all 
 had it not first been true. 
 
 The problem under discussion is indeed a logical one. 
 But for that very reason it must deal with something more 
 than "relations among things." It must consider also the 
 meaning of those things. It must go deeper than the mere 
 tracing out of what ideas do, as instruments, etc., in our ex- 
 perience. The previous question for logic is what these 
 hypotheses are and mean, and how they act. And I still be- 
 lieve it impossible to face these questions squarely without 
 accepting the one or the other horn of the dilemma proposed 
 above. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 27 
 
 pragmatist, for to him it is not satisfac- 
 tory — it has not been verified. It is in 
 exactly the position of any other unverified 
 claim, and I hope we need not remind the 
 pragmatist of his oft-repeated assertion that 
 an unverified claim is not yet true. Prag- 
 matism therefore (like so many other things 
 in the pragmatic world) is both true and 
 false at the same time. "And the best of 
 the joke is," as Plato would say, that inas- 
 much as the non-pragmatists (as yet at least) 
 far outnumber the pragmatists, it follows 
 that pragmatism is true in only a small mi- 
 nority of cases. Of course no one (not 
 even a humanist) would seriously start out 
 to determine the truth of a doctrine by 
 counting human heads ; and yet if it really 
 be the case that a doctrine is not true till 
 verified, and is made true by verification, it 
 would seem not altogether irrelevant to con- 
 sider the number of those who regard its 
 verification complete. 
 
 But it is evident that even if pragmatism 
 were true in the pragmatic sense, this would 
 
128 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 not satisfy the pragmatists. They believe 
 it is true in the non-pragmatic sense. Like 
 other rational beings, they are not satisfied 
 (except at times) with having their doctrine 
 accepted: they want to show that it ought 
 to be accepted. They believe it is true no 
 matter what people think, already true 
 whether verified or not. That is why they 
 are so eager to verify it. That is the very 
 presupposition of all their argument. They 
 insist, in other words, that the pragmatist 
 doctrine of truth is true in the non-prag- 
 matic sense — true on the correspondence 
 theory of truth. 
 
 But alas ! When they do that, they sur- 
 render the whole matter. To insist that a 
 doctrine must be verified in order to be true 
 and to add that this doctrine is true whether 
 verified or not, is as simple a manner as can 
 be found of contradicting oneself. Pragma- 
 tists, I am sure, will call this "logic-chopping " 
 — a simple and useful device when one has 
 been reduced to unavoidable self-contradic- 
 tion. But inasmuch as this is altogether 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 1 29 
 
 a matter of logic I fail to see the force of 
 the reproach. Inconsistency is the one great 
 sin in thinking, and the inconsistency just 
 pointed out runs through all the arguments 
 by which the pragmatist seeks to prove his 
 position. At every point he is — no doubt, 
 unconsciously — making use of the very con- 
 ception of truth which he is trying to refute ; 
 he is claiming for his doctrine the very kind 
 of truth which he says is no truth at all. 
 Consistently he should do the one or the 
 other of two things : either give up his doc- 
 trine of truth ; or else cease claiming that it 
 is true and that logically we ought to accept 
 it, and be content with enjoying it and pro- 
 claiming its satisfactoriness. 
 
 This latter is in fact the course which two 
 of the leading pragmatists, in moments of 
 insight, have actually taken. Speaking of 
 the pragmatists and their universe of dis- 
 course, Professor James says, "Whether 
 what they themselves say about that uni- 
 verse is objectively true, i.e. whether the 
 pragmatic theory of truth is true really, they 
 
130 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 cannot warrant, — they can only believe it."^ 
 And in a spirit of candor, to illustrate fur- 
 ther the fact that pragmatism is a mental 
 attitude rather than a logical position, he 
 compares it to general skepticism. This, he 
 says, " you can no more kill off by logic than 
 you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. 
 This is why it is so irritating. ... No more 
 can logic kill the pragmatist's behavior." 
 And I may say in passing that the history 
 of pragmatism amply confirms this assertion. 
 With equal consistency Dr. Schiller ad- 
 mits that "the pragmatic theory has to be 
 adopted before it can be verified," and that 
 therefore it would be absurd in pragmatism 
 to attempt to prove itself true to one who 
 had not first adopted it.^ It seems therefore 
 to be a case of credo ut intelligam. One must 
 not expect to be convinced of the pragmatic 
 truth by vain arguments ; one must taste and 
 
 1 " The Pragmatist's Account of Truth," Phil. Rev., Vol. 
 XVII, p. 16, note 2. 
 
 ^ See the instructive discussion between him and Pro- 
 fessor Russell on this subject, in the /our. of Phil., Vol. IV, 
 pp. 235-243 and 482-494. 
 
THE PRAGMATIC VIEW OF TRUTH 131 
 
 see that it is good. Nor are you to think 
 this is mere idle jesting; it is the logical 
 and inevitable outcome of the pragmatic 
 doctrine of truth. When this is fully realized 
 pragmatism may indeed still flourish — just 
 as " practical joking " and " obstinacy " and 
 " general skepticism " and unreasoning faith 
 still flourish ; but the consistent pragmatist 
 at least will then cease to argue and begin 
 rather to exhort ; and pragmatism will be 
 recognized as being primarily, not a serious 
 philosophical doctrine, but rather one of the 
 varieties of religious experience. 
 
 As I said at the beginning of this lecture, 
 the pragmatic doctrine of truth is the key- 
 stone to the whole edifice. And the in- 
 herent weakness in it which I have tried to 
 point out affects fatally the entire super- 
 structure. How it reappears in the prag- 
 matic doctrine of knowledge I shall try to 
 show in the following lecture. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Every one who has read with attention 
 the Fourth Book of Locke's famous Essay, 
 and has learned that knowledge is "noth- 
 ing but the perception of the connection 
 and agreement or disagreement and repug- 
 nancy of any of our ideas," must have 
 noted with surprise the fact that one of 
 the four kinds of agreement between our 
 ideas is what Locke calls " real existence." 
 " The fourth and last sort " (of agree- 
 ment), says he, "is that of actual and real 
 existence agreeing to any idea " — that is, 
 the agreement of something which "has 
 a real existence outside the mind," such as 
 " God," with our idea of it. It is hard, of^ 
 course, to see what " ideas " agree in this 
 fourth kind of knowledge, or how the agree- 
 ment of an idea with something outside the 
 
 "35 
 
136 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 mind can be classed under knowledge at 
 all if knowledge be "nothing but the per- 
 ception of the agreement of our ideas." 
 This inconsistency in Locke's theory of 
 knowledge has often been pointed out and 
 indeed is perfectly clear. But what con- 
 cerns us here is the fact that it seems to 
 be hereditary and has been handed down, 
 like the original sin of Adam or — what is 
 worse — like an "innate idea," to Locke's 
 lineal descendants, our friends the pragma- 
 tists. To make this clear, however, will 
 require an entire lecture; and we shall 
 therefore devote this hour to a considera- 
 tion of the pragmatic view of knowledge. 
 
 In considering pragmatism's doctrine of 
 truth, you will remember, we found it help- 
 ful to outline first of all the non-pragma- 
 tist's view, for by noting what the prag- 
 matist denied we were better able to 
 understand what he affirmed. The same 
 method will be of even more value here ; 
 hence before trying to get at the prag- 
 matic meaning of knowledge I shall take 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 37 
 
 up the view which pragmatism attacks. 
 This view has had many formulations, 
 but the one first suggested, by the great 
 " intellectualist," Plato, is perhaps as 
 satisfactory as any. It is found in the 
 Theeetetus and is in these words: Knowl- 
 edge is "true opinion accompanied with 
 reason." There is more substance in this 
 very brief definition than may appear on 
 the surface, and to make its meaning clear 
 it should be divided, like a preacher's text, 
 into firstly, secondly, and thirdly. Firstly, 
 then, knowledge is a certain kind of opin- 
 ion, i.e. it is a judgment or thought about 
 something. Secondly, it must be true. 
 And, thirdly, the individual who holds it 
 true must have sufficient reason for so 
 doing — he must be able to prove it true, 
 at least to himself. A word of further ex- 
 planation about each of these may not be 
 out of place. 
 
 Perhaps the most important, because the 
 most fundamental, of these three points is 
 the first. Opinion is about something, it 
 
138 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 means or points to something not itself, 
 and hence involves "transcendence." This 
 of course is a terrifying term, and the prag- 
 matist (who denies transcendence) makes 
 capital out of its terrors. Really, however, 
 there is nothing dreadful about this word, 
 — it is a very simple thing after all, — 
 though no doubt sufficiently mysterious to 
 ^ose who start out with the presupposi- 
 tion that it is impossible. It means simply 
 this : that when we " know " or " mean " 
 something, the object of our thought is not 
 our thought itself and may even be some- 
 thing completely outside of our experience, 
 past, present, or future. If any of you are 
 unfamiliar with the term and still think it 
 something very hard and "metaphysical," 
 and that it is too " abstract " to be accepted 
 by common sense, let me put you this ques- 
 tion and ask your answer: When you are 
 thinking of your neighbor's headache, do 
 you mean by that headache something in 
 your experience, or something out of your 
 experience but in his? If you mean the 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 39 
 
 latter, you are a believer in transcendence. 
 This belief, in fact, is very much older than 
 "Philosophy" and is one of the fundamen- 
 tal principles of common sense — as Pro- 
 fessor James himself would doubtless tell 
 you. It is, in short, simply the belief that 
 you can mean something which is entirely 
 outside of your own experience. 
 
 To be sure, if we take the view that 
 every content of consciousness, our know- 
 ing thought included, is merely so much 
 psychic stuff and nothing else, that it is 
 simply -felt, like ■ an abdominal pain, and 
 has no reference to anything outside itself, 
 then, of course, transcendence becomes a 
 mystery, because, in fact, meaning itself 
 becomes a mystery. And so the prag- 
 matist asks. How can a psychic state tran- 
 scend itself.'' How can it mean anything 
 but itself? — One might respond by the 
 question. How can time pass ? How can 
 a thing move.i* — There may be many an- 
 swers to questions such as these ; but the 
 simplest and certainly the most empirical 
 
I40 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 is just this : that as a fact things do 
 move, time does pass, and our thoughts 
 do mean things other than themselves. 
 Transcendence is merely one of those ul- 
 timately simple things which, just because 
 they are ultimate and simple elements of 
 experience, can never be explained further, 
 nor analyzed further, but must be merely 
 recognized and accepted. That it is in 
 one sense a mystery is of course perfectly 
 obvious : so is consciousness. But to 
 prove by this that it is impossible, and to 
 mystify ourselves over it, is simply gra- 
 tuitous mystification. The truth is, a cog- 
 nitive idea — a thought which means its 
 object — has another characteristic than 
 merely that of being felt — like a mos- 
 quito bite. It has that too, of course; it 
 is a genuine part of the stream of experi- 
 ence. But it is more than that. It means 
 something besides itself and, it may be, 
 something outside of the entire stream of 
 consciousness to which it belongs. And 
 to shut our eyes to this peculiarity of our 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE I41 
 
 thought in the interests of simpHfication 
 and " concreteness " is very unempirical, and 
 as poor psychology as it is epistemology. 
 
 So much for what is meant by saying 
 that knowledge is opinion. And now the 
 secondly and thirdly of our text from Plato 
 may be easily disposed of. The secondly, 
 in fact, — namely that the opinion must be 
 true, — has already been explained in my 
 two lectures on truth. But to be in posses- 
 sion of genuine knowledge we must have 
 something more than opinion which happens 
 to be true ; we must, according to the tra- 
 ditional philosophy, be also in possession of 
 reasons which prove the opinion to be true. 
 This is a subordinate point so far as our 
 present purposes are concerned and may be 
 shortly dismissed. In brief, it may be said 
 that whatever sort of proof any one — prag- 
 matist or non-pragmatist — believes in, and 
 has to furnish, is here relevant. Of course I 
 cannot get outside my own experience and 
 compare my idea with the outer reality — 
 your headache, let us say — which it means. 
 
142 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 This kind of proof is out of the question, 
 and quite as much so for pragmatists as for 
 others, as Professor James admits.^ But 
 there are other ways of proving — notably 
 the negative method of consistency, and the 
 Bcientific (or pragmatic) method of noting 
 results. Only the former method, to be 
 sure, gives absolute demonstration, and the 
 latter alone, even at its best, will not enable 
 us to prove the truth of our ideas any more 
 completely and absolutely than science can 
 prove that the sun will rise to-morrow, or 
 than history can prove that it rose yesterday, 
 or than pragmatism can refute solipsism (a 
 performance which is particularly "difficult 
 for pragmatism). We can seldom attain the 
 absolute kind of proof furnished by mathe- 
 matics. But so purely theoretical an ideal 
 of demonstration belongs rightly to an effete 
 rationalism, and the pragmatist is certainly 
 
 ^ Pragmatists " cannot do without the wider knower [who 
 should compare ideas with objects] any more than they can do 
 without the reaUty, if they want to prove a case of knowing. 
 . . . Whether what they themselves say about the whole uni- 
 verse is objectively true they cannot warrant — they can only 
 believe \V — Phil. Rev., Vol. XVII, p. i6, note 2. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE I43 
 
 le last man who should demand its realiza- 
 !on. In short, the transcendence-view of 
 nowledge is no more inconsistent with 
 roof than is any other. And with this 
 nough has been said for our present pur- 
 oses of exegesis, and I trust the text from 
 'lato is now sufficiently clear. 
 
 I have gone thus into detail with the 
 rdinary view of knowledge because it is 
 bis view which pragmatism denies. Our 
 ext aim must therefore be to get a clear 
 lOtion of the theory of knowledge set up by 
 he pragmatists as a substitute for the one re- 
 acted. The essential characteristic of this 
 iragmatic view is the attempt to avoid tran- 
 cendence (in the sense outlined above), and 
 present knowledge as a concrete expe- 
 ience process entirely within the conscious 
 ife of the individual. —""^^ 
 
 To be more explicit, knowledge is, in the 
 rords of Professor Dewey, "a doubt-inquiry- 
 .nswer experience." It arises when our 
 eality, our facts, are somehow unsatisfactory 
 ,nd self -discrepant, and it has a definite, prac- 
 
144 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 tical function, namely the reorganization 
 of our experience upon the basis of a plan of 
 action, which brings definite good results 
 and makes our experience harmonious and 
 satisfactory once more. Mere immediate ex- 
 perience is not knowledge ; to be knowledge 
 it must be in some ways disharmonious or 
 insufficient, it must point to or suggest some 
 sort of experience not itself. This further ex- 
 perience when it comes must bring harmony 
 into consciousness once more, which by ful- 
 filling the need of the preceding experience 
 shall abolish knowledge by substituting im- 
 mediacy. There are thus three stages in the 
 knowing process. The first is that of " doubt " 
 in which the facts of experience show them- 
 selves self-discrepant, disharmonious, and in 
 need of rearrangement or supplementation. 
 In the second stage — or that of " inquiry " 
 — an " idea " or " plan or action " or tenta- 
 tive arrangement of present and absent facts 
 is suggested and tried. Finally, in the third 
 stage this " plan " is found to work, and ex- 
 perience once more becomes harmonious 
 and is no longer cognitional. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 45 
 
 To illustrate by two examples of Professor 
 Dewey's: I hear a fearsome noise and am 
 frightened. I do not understand it. My 
 situation is self-discrepant. Therefore I set 
 out to solve the enigma. I make the hypoth- 
 esis that the cause of the noise is the 
 window curtain rattling in the wind. This 
 leads me to certain actions which result in 
 the verification of my hypothesis. My ex- 
 perience now is one of satisfaction rather 
 than of knowledge, but I am able to look 
 back at the second stage, where I formed 
 the hypothesis, and see that it was cogni- 
 tional. Or, I smell a sweet odor. I wonder 
 what it is. The odor thus ceases to be 
 merely an odor and becomes transformed 
 into a cognitional odor which means a rose. 
 This leads me to certain acts which result in 
 the full realization of the rose by all my 
 senses. In short, to sum up: "An experi- 
 ence is a knowledge if in its quale there is 
 an experienced distinction and connection 
 of two elements of the following sort: one 
 means or intends the presence of the other 
 
146 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 in the same fashion in which itself is already 
 present, while the other is that which, while 
 not present in the same fashion, must be- 
 come so present if the meaning or intention 
 of its companion or yoke fellow is to be ful- 
 filled through an operation it sets up." ^ 
 
 Professor James's view of knowledge, 
 though varying in some details from that 
 of Professor Dewey, is not essentially dif- 
 ferent. Especially in the attempt to avoid 
 transcendence and to make knowledge a 
 thoroughly " concrete " process that " lives 
 inside the tissue of experience," are the two 
 views at one. To use a distinction of Pro- 
 fessor James's, knowledge is not " saltatory " 
 but " ambulatory " — it is not a leap from 
 idea to object over an empty chasm, but 
 an experienced process of gradual transition 
 every step of which is felt. " Intervening 
 experiences are as indispensable foundations 
 for a concrete relation of cognition as in- 
 tervening space is for a relation of distance. 
 
 » Professor Dewey, « The Experimental Theory of Knowl- 
 edge," Mind, Vol. XV, p. 301. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 47 
 
 Cognition, whenever we take it concretely, 
 means determinate ambulation, through in- 
 termediaries, from a terminus a quo to or 
 toward a terminus ad quern. As the inter- 
 mediaries are other than the termini and 
 connected with them with the usual asso- 
 ciative bonds, there would appear to be 
 nothing especially unique about the process 
 of knowing. They fall wholly within ex- 
 perience ; and we need use, in describing 
 them, no other categories than those which 
 we employ in describing other natural pro- 
 cesses." ^ 
 
 In describing Professor James's view of 
 knowledge I can probably do no better than 
 continue to quote from his own lucid ex- 
 position, " Suppose me to be sitting here 
 in my library in Cambridge, at ten minutes 
 walk from ' Memorial Hall,' and to be 
 thinking truly of the latter object. My 
 mind may have before it only the name, 
 or it may have a clear image, or it may 
 
 1 "A Word more about Truth," Jour, of PhU., Vol. IV, 
 P- 399- 
 
148 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 have a very dim image of the hall, but 
 such intrinsic differences in the image make 
 no difference in its cognitive function. 
 Certain extrinsic phenomena, special ex- 
 periences of conjunction, are what impart 
 to the image its knowing office. ... If I 
 can lead you to the hall, and tell you of its 
 history and present uses ; if in its presence 
 I now feel my idea to be continued ; if the 
 associates of the image and of the felt hall 
 run parallel, so that each term of the one 
 context corresponds serially, as I walk, with 
 an answering term of the other ; why then 
 my soul was prophetic, and my idea must 
 be, and by common consent would be, 
 called cognizant of reality. That percept 
 was what it meant, for into it my idea has 
 passed by conjunctive experiences of same- 
 ness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is 
 there jar, but every later moment matches 
 and corroborates an earlier. 
 
 " In this matching and corroborating, 
 taken in no transcendental sense, but de- 
 noting definitely felt transitions, lies all 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 49 
 
 that the knowing of a percept by an idea 
 can possibly contain or, signify. Wherever 
 such transitions are felt, the first experience 
 knows the last one. Knowledge thus lives 
 inside the tissue of experience. It is made; 
 and made by relations that unroll themselves 
 in time. Whenever certain intermediaries 
 are given, such that, as they develop toward 
 their terminus, there is experience from 
 point to point of one direction followed, 
 and finally of one process fulfilled, the re- 
 sult is that their starting point thereby be- 
 comes a knower and their terminus an 
 object meant or known. That is all that 
 knowing (in the simple case considered) can 
 be known-as, that is the whole of its 
 nature put into experiential terms. When- 
 ever such is the sequence of our experiences, 
 we may freely say that we had the terminal 
 object ' in mind ' from the outset, although 
 at the outset nothing was there in us but a 
 flat piece of substantive experience like any 
 other, with no self-transcendency about it, 
 and no mystery save the mystery of coming 
 
150 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 into existence and of being followed by other 
 pieces of substantive experience, with con- 
 junctively transitional experiences between."^ 
 
 The prime characteristic of the pragmatic 
 view of knowledge is, as I have said, its 
 attempt to avoid transcendence. It is that 
 which makes it unique and distinguishes it 
 from other views. Before examining for 
 ourselves, however, the possibility of knowl- 
 edge without transcendence, I should point 
 out that each of the leading pragmatists 
 admits (at times at least) a kind of tran- 
 scendence. In this, however, they do not 
 seem to be entirely at one. Professor 
 Dewey points to a transcendence within 
 the individual's experience, while Professor 
 James goes farther and admits a reference 
 to things entirely outside of it. 
 
 In his admirably clear article, " The Ex- 
 perimental Theory of Knowledge," from 
 which I have already quoted. Professor 
 Dewey points out that a cognitional ex- 
 
 1 " A World of Pure Experience," Jour, of Phil., Vol. I, 
 PP- 539-540- 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 151 
 
 perience " is contemporaneously aware of 
 meaning something beyond itself." The 
 odor which knows the rose, for instance, 
 is not merely an odor, not merely "a flat 
 piece of substantive experience like any 
 other." If it were merely that, there would 
 be no question of knowledge, according to 
 Dewey. It must have the additional quality 
 of meaning or intending "something be- 
 yond itself." " The odor knows the rose ; 
 the rose is known by the odor; and the 
 import of each term is constituted by the 
 relationship in which it stands to the other." 
 Now in all this I, of course, agree. But 
 I should like to point out that this meaning 
 or intending of something beyond itself by 
 the cognitional experience does not consist 
 in and is not constituted by the subsequent 
 concrete steps of fulfillment. The cogni- 
 tional experience or idea already means or 
 intends the rose before the fulfilling expe- 
 riences come ; and should consciousness 
 suddenly cease or be turned into a new 
 direction and the fulfilling experiences never 
 
152 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 come, it would still be true that the idea 
 in question did really mean and intend the 
 rose. 
 
 But if a cognitive experience may thus 
 mean a fulfilling experience which has not 
 yet come and which possibly may never come, 
 why may it not equally well mean or intend 
 an experience which by the nature of the 
 case never can come ? I recognize that 
 Professor Dewey here admits only a refer- 
 ence from one part to another of the in- 
 dividual's experience ; but if the possibility 
 of such reference is thus once admitted, 
 why may not the individual's thought refer 
 to and mean something in some one else's 
 experience ? If it can mean or intend some- 
 thing beyond itself at all, it is hard to see 
 why this something must be one kind of 
 experience rather than another. And if 
 you grant this, the whole non-pragmatist 
 view of transcendence is admitted. 
 
 In some respects Professor James would 
 go even farther in his concessions than 
 Professor Dewey, for he frankly admits the 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 53 
 
 reference of our thoughts to things quite 
 without our own actual experience. " The 
 known," he tells us, may be " a possible ex- 
 perience, either of that subject or of another, 
 to which the said conjunctive transitions 
 would lead if sufficiently prolonged." ^ This, 
 however, in Professor James's view, does 
 not involve transcendence, apparently be- 
 cause experience in general is nowhere 
 transcended, because there are connecting 
 links of concrete experience actual or at 
 least possible between my thought and its 
 object ; and also because, as he maintains, 
 my thought's reference to its object con- 
 sists just in those actual or possible "con- 
 junctive transitional experiences." 
 
 For one, I confess it is hard for me to 
 see how this avoids transcendence. The 
 battle of Marathon, for instance, is cer- 
 tainly not a part of my experience, yet is 
 known by me; and the fact that there are 
 possible experiences between me and it and 
 
 » "A World of Pure Experience," Jour, of Phil., Vol. I, 
 p. 538. 
 
154 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 that if I were now 2400 years old I might 
 have witnessed the battle, does not make 
 it any the less true that my actual experi- 
 ence — and apparently all actual experience 
 — has to be transcended if I am to know 
 or to mean it. In fact, once it is admitted 
 that the idea's object may be within some 
 one else's experience, the whole transcend- 
 lence controversy would seem to be settled, 
 and the non-pragmatist position granted. 
 
 But this Professor James would not admit. 
 Knowledge, he insists, is ambulatory, not 
 saltatory. The meaning or reference of an 
 idea iS not a leap to its object but a con- 
 crete and experienced process. " Knowing 
 is made by the ambulation through the 
 intervening experiences."^ " If we believe, 
 with common sense, in so-called ' sensible ' 
 realities, the idea may not only lead us 
 toward its object, but may put the latter into 
 our very hand, make it our immediate sen- 
 sation. But if, as most reflective people 
 opine, sensible realities are not true realities, 
 
 '^Jour. of Phil., Vol. IV, p. 399. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 55 
 
 but only their appearances, our idea brings 
 us at least so far, puts us in touch with 
 reality's most authentic substitutes and 
 representatives." ^ They lead us as near to 
 the real object which we mean as we can 
 ever get; and there, of course, they stop. 
 The pity is that Professor James's explana- 
 tion stops there too, and hence fails to 
 touch upon the most important part of the 
 problem — the relation, namely, between 
 these last terms within our experience and 
 the outer objects of which these experi- 
 ences of ours are only "substitutes and 
 representatives." One feels like asking. Is 
 this relation ambulatory or saltatory ? If it 
 be ambulatory, who is it that ambulates ? 
 It is certainly not we, for we can get no 
 farther directly than to the "substitutes 
 and representatives," never to the " true 
 realities" which they mean. Or is it the 
 object that ambulates ? If knowledge be an 
 experience process, who experiences it .'' And 
 if the relation between the " true realities " 
 
 ^Jour. of Phil, Vol. IV, p. 398. 
 
156 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 and their " representatives " be a saltatory 
 relation, is not knowledge saltatory, and are 
 we not forced back to the non-pragmatist's 
 view outlined at the beginning of this 
 lecture ? 
 
 The truth seems to be that genuine tran- 
 scendence is unavoidable wherever the cogni- 
 tive idea — the knowing thought — means to 
 have for its object something besides itself. 
 And if this object be something within an- 
 other's life, then there must be a genuine 
 transcendence of the individual's entire expe- 
 rience — a leap from idea to object with no 
 felt transition — as, for example, when I think 
 oi your headache. There are no felt transi- 
 tions between our experiences. My con- 
 sciousness never runs into yours. Nor does 
 it solve the difficulties of this particular prob- 
 lem to point out, as Professor James does,^ 
 that our minds have space in common ; for 
 they remain apart none the less, and there is 
 no experience of transition between them. 
 In Professor James's own words : " Neither 
 
 '^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, pp. 565-568. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 157 
 
 contemporaneity nor proximity in space, nor 
 similarity of quality and content are able to 
 fuse thoughts together which are sundered 
 by this barrier of belonging to different per- 
 sonal minds. The breaches between such 
 thoughts are the most absolute breaches in 
 nature." ^ 
 
 In his " Psychology," Professor James has 
 rightly laid great emphasis on the difference 
 between a succession of experiences and an 
 experience of succession. Now the prag- 
 matist theory of knowledge requires both of 
 these. It must have an unbroken succession 
 of intermediating experiences, and it must 
 also have, with this, the experience of the 
 succession or transition. But in no case 
 where my object is something in your expe- 
 rience can either of these essentials be proved 
 to be present ; and one of them is certainly 
 absent. If there be a succession of interme- 
 diaries between my thought and your head- 
 ache — or between my thought and Nebu- 
 chadnezzar's headache — neither you nor I 
 
 1 " Psychology," p. 153. 
 
158 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 nor Nebuchadnezzar ever experiences the 
 succession. My experiences break off where 
 yours begin. This fact is of great impor- 
 tance, for it bars out the sense of transition 
 and fulfillment which forms so important an 
 element in the pragmatist description of 
 knowledge, — the sense of fulfillment due to 
 a continuous passage from the original idea 
 to the known object. If this comes at all 
 when I know your headache, it comes not 
 with the object but quite on my side of the 
 " epistemological gulf." The gulf is still 
 there to be transcended. 
 
 But let us examine a case in which the 
 object and the thought which means it. are 
 both within the same stream of experience — 
 the type of case best fitted to exemplify the 
 pragmatist view of knowledge and the easiest 
 for it to explain. And to make sure that 
 our example is orthodox, let us take the case 
 outlined by Professor James. Suppose, 
 then, I am sitting in Cambridge, at some 
 distance from Memorial Hall, and have 
 in my mind "nothing but a flat piece of 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 59 
 
 substantive experience with no self-transcend- 
 ency about it." This flat piece of substan- 
 tive experience is an image of Memorial 
 Hall. It is followed by a series of transi- 
 tional experiences, muscle and joint sensa- 
 tions, visual and auditory sensations, which 
 change and succeed each other rapidly, and 
 connected with them there is an experience 
 of one direction being followed. Finally, one 
 of these exfoliating experiences is the per- 
 cept of Memorial Hall, and with this percept 
 comes a sense of process fulfilled. This suc- 
 cession of experiences crowned by the sense 
 of fulfillment, says the pragmatist, is knowl- 
 edge. And now let me point out one peculi- 
 arity of this view. When the intermediaries 
 have been experienced and the process is ful- 
 filled — when, that is, we have got our per- 
 cept of Memorial Hall — " the result is,^' as 
 Professor James says, "that their starting 
 point thereby becomes a knower and their ter- 
 minus an object meant or known." ^ This, of 
 course, is an exact statement of the necessary 
 
 ^Jour. of Phil., Vol. I, p. S4o- 
 
l6o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 outcome of the doctrine. The italics are 
 mine, but they might as well have been in 
 the original. The idea of Memorial HaU, 
 which we called the knowing thought, and 
 which started the process going, does not 
 become a " knower " till long after it has 
 vanished and has been replaced by many 
 intermediaries and finally by the fulfilling 
 percept. In like manner, Memorial Hall was 
 never " known " nor even " meant " till then. 
 Hence the " knower " did not know nor mean 
 anything so long as it existed, but became a 
 knower only after it had ceased to exist alto- 
 gether; and in like manner Memorial Hall 
 was never known nor meant until the idea 
 which knew and meant it had altogether 
 vanished. 
 
 ^ Where, then, one naturally asks, does 
 knowledge come in ? Not at the terminus a 
 quo, for the idea has not yet become a 
 knower — its knowing, according to the 
 pragmatist, consists in the intermediaries 
 and the fulfilling experience. Not at the 
 terminus ad quern, for now there is no 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE l6l 
 
 longer a knower but merely a direct ex- 
 perience. Not in the intermediaries, for 
 with them we have neither knower nor ful- 
 fillment. Of course it may be said that 
 when at last I see Memorial Hall, the 
 original image of it returns, hence is present 
 as a knower. But this will not fit the the- 
 ory for several reasons. In the first place, as 
 every psychologist knows, the original image 
 cannot return ; one like it may come, but not 
 the same identical experience. And indeed, 
 if it be this reproduced idea, now present, that 
 is the real knower, why speak of the original 
 idea and the intermediaries at all.? Why 
 not simply describe your present experience t 
 Or, possibly, the pragmatist may say that 
 when the fulfilling experience has come, we 
 look back at the original idea and see that it 
 — what ? Knew the object 1 No, for it was 
 not yet a knower. Was true ? No, for 
 truth consists in the intermediating and ful- 
 filling experiences which at that time did 
 not yet exist. Shall we say that it resembled 
 or was like the percept of Memorial Hall.'' 
 
1 62 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 But no, for it may have been very unlike, 
 and even if it were very like the percept, this 
 way of putting things would be a reversion 
 to the " copy theory " in its crudest and most 
 unpragmatic form. Or shall we say simply 
 that it started the process going ? This un- 
 doubtedly would be true ; but what of it ? 
 Does it help us out at aU in seeing where 
 knowledge comes in ? The sensation of 
 hunger might have started me toward Memo- 
 rial Hall quite as well ; does the sensation of 
 hunger therefore "become a knower" when I 
 look at the Hall ? The truth is, when the 
 knowing thought which already means some- 
 thing not itself is replaced by " a flat piece of 
 substantive experience like any other," knowl- 
 edge must at once vanish away, and we shall 
 have left merely a succession of experiences 
 such as the proverbial polyp might enjoy. 
 To have a succession of experiences (or even 
 an experience of succession) is one thing ; to 
 know is quite another. 
 
 There is one more characteristic of the 
 pragmatist view of knowledge which should 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 63 
 
 be noted before we bring this lecture to a 
 close ; namely, its (perfectly consistent) re- 
 fusal to insist that knowledge must be true. 
 It does insist, of course, that knowledge 
 must be true in the pragmatic sense of being 
 satisfactory, etc. ; but, quite properly, it fails 
 to say anything about its being true in any 
 other sense. This is as it should be ; and 
 yet it forces one to ask some such question 
 as this : In knowledge do we really know ? 
 Take, for example. Professor Dewey's 
 illustration already used. I hear a fearsome 
 noise and am filled with fright ; then, look- 
 ing back on my experience and analyzing it, 
 I come to the conclusion that it was only the 
 noise of the window curtain. And to vary 
 the illustration a little at this point, let us 
 suppose that you too have been frightened 
 by the noise, but come to the conclusion that 
 it was due to a fluttering awning. And let 
 us add that you were right and that it really 
 was the awning (if the pragmatist will allow 
 us the use of such an expression), but that 
 I never come to know this and that the win- 
 
1 64 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 dow-curtain theory remains my final and (to 
 me) perfectly satisfactory solution of the 
 problem. Is this solution knowledge? Do 
 I know that the curtain was the cause of the 
 noise ? 
 
 Now if the pragmatist answers in the 
 negative, and maintains that this is not a 
 genuine case of knowledge, then it follows 
 that knowledge is not merely a process in 
 which a final opinion or " experience " is sub- 
 stituted for a former experience because 
 more satisfactory to the experiencer. It is 
 more than "an answering or telling experi- 
 ence in which an unquestioned thing re- 
 places a dubious thing." It must not merely 
 be an answering experience ; it must give the 
 true answer (" true " here being used in the 
 non-pragmatist sense). And it cannot then 
 be defined in terms of experience alone as 
 a "doubt-inquiry-answer experience." The 
 complete definition of knowledge must' in- 
 clude something which distinguishes the 
 true from the false, a reference to a reality 
 beyond the experience itself which makes it 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 165 
 
 true. It must be defined in terms not essen- 
 tially different from those of Plato — " true 
 opinion with reason." 
 
 But the pragmatist probably will take the 
 other course and deny that correspondence 
 to an outer reality is necessary. He will 
 identify knowledge with the psychological 
 process in the individual's experience leading 
 to the final solution of the problem and the 
 sense of satisfaction and fulfillment — the an- 
 swering experience which substitutes the 
 unquestioned thing for the dubious thing — 
 in short, with the " window-curtain theory " 
 of our illustration. He will say that if this 
 is in all respects satisfactory to me, it is for 
 me knowledge — quite aside from the ques- 
 tion whether it is " true " or not. Or, rather, 
 he will of course insist (if he be consistent) 
 that my theory is true since it satisfies me 
 and silences my doubt. It is true, that is, in 
 the pragmatic sense. 
 
 I am not altogether certain, however, that 
 the pragmatist will be willing to maintain 
 this position permanently. For it clearly 
 
1 66 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 has its difficulties, — difficulties which even 
 a pragmatist must eventually come to see. 
 If there were only one individual involved, 
 the difficulty might be glossed over; but 
 you will remember that, according to our ex- 
 ample, there were two of us concerned, and 
 that while I " knew " the cause of the noise 
 was the curtain, you " knew " it was the awn- 
 ing. Each of us now goes his way fully 
 persuaded in his own mind. The final ex- 
 perience of each has all the ear marks which 
 Dewey and James describe as belonging to 
 the final term in the knowledge process. 
 For, be it observed, there is not one thing 
 in the pragmatist description of knowledge 
 which would not apply perfectly well to a 
 case of mistaken opinion in which the indi- 
 vidual had and always retained a complete 
 sense of certainty. Here, in fact, is the cru- 
 cial point of the controversy — the prag- 
 ^matists insisting that knowledge can be 
 sufficiently described and defined without go- 
 ing beyond the experience of the knowing 
 mdividual ; the non-pragmatists maintaining 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 67 
 
 that a reference to something outside of his 
 experience is essential. And, in a sense, the 
 whole problem may be said to hinge on the 
 question of mistaken or false opinion. How 
 .will the pragmatist interpret this ? — For surely 
 e cannot deny that we are often mistaken 
 ven when we feel and continue to feel most 
 feure. — The question really is unavoidable : 
 When one is mistaken but satisfied, does he 
 know .'' Did you and I both know the cause 
 of the fearsome noise when we had contrary 
 opinions concerning it ? 
 
 The pragmatist cannot respond that he 
 means by knowledge only that opinion or 
 " experience " which works out ; for by hy- 
 pothesis both opinions work out, both are 
 satisfactory so far as investigated, so far as 
 " worked." And if he amends his statement 
 so as to say that he means by knowledge 
 only that opinion which would work if 
 carried out, then he is unconsciously sur- 
 rendering his whole case by smuggling in 
 the idea of a conditioning environment 
 which determines whether or not the " ex- 
 
1 68 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 perience " can work, and which cannot itself 
 be identified with the experience or any part 
 of it. He would be saying that after all it is 
 not the " satisfactoriness " of the experience 
 that makes it knowledge but rather the ex- 
 perience's right to be satisfactory, — a right 
 determined not by itself but by the nature 
 of the conditioning environment. And so he 
 would be back with us again in the " mys- 
 tery " of transcendence. 
 
 In short, it would seem that the pragmatist 
 is logically shut up to the one or the other 
 of two alternatives : either he must accept 
 transcendence in the old-fashioned sense, or 
 else he must maintain that there is no essen- 
 tial difference between true and false opinion 
 and that both are equally worthy of the name 
 knowledge, so long as each remains satisfac- 
 tory to its possessor. You cannot lift your- 
 ^•self by your boot straps ; nor give the length 
 of a river in terms of itself and with no ob- 
 jective unit ; nor distinguish knowledge from 
 error by mere description ^ of what happens 
 within one individual's experience. Unless 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 1 69 
 
 there be transcendence, there is no criterion 
 for judging between two opinions, except, of 
 course, the relative subjective satisfactoriness 
 of the two. And if contradictory opinions 
 may both be knowledge, provided they are 
 equally satisfactory to their possessors, then 
 each man is the measure of all things with a 
 vengeance, and it becomes the most blatant 
 sort of self-contradiction for the pragmatist 
 to try to prove his view to be knowledge and 
 ours error. — As I have said in another con- 
 nection, the thing for him to do is to feel — 
 and to exhort. 
 
 There is an old story, which many of you 
 may have heard, of a countryman going to 
 a circus and standing spellbound and in- 
 credulous before a dromedary with its many 
 humps and its impossible legs and neck. All 
 the other sight-seers passed out of the men- 
 agerie, but he still remained with his eyes 
 riveted on the beast. Finally, at the end of 
 half an hour, he drew himself together, with 
 the proud consciousness of the triumph of 
 reason over the senses, and exclaimed: 
 " Hell ! There ain't any such animal ! " 
 
I70 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 The attitude of our pragmatist friends 
 toward transcendence is not essentially dif- 
 ferent from that of the farmer toward the 
 dromedary. They cannot frame a judgment 
 about anything outside of themselves, they 
 cannot even claim the truth of their own 
 theory, without presupposing the thing they 
 deny. It is there, plainly, before their very 
 eyes. Yet they bravely maintain their 
 stand — like the farmer. And their reason 
 for so doing, moreover, seems to be essen- 
 tially the same as his. There couldn't be 
 any such animal as a dromedary because it 
 looked so different from the cow and the 
 pig and the other beasts of the farm. So 
 there can't be any such thing as tran- 
 scendence because it is so different from 
 the " concrete " experience processes studied 
 by psychology. Hence what passes for 
 transcendence must be explained away in 
 terms of experience " with no mystery 
 about it." To reduce all mental states to 
 their simplest terms is certainly one of 
 the proper aims of the student of psychol- 
 
PRAGMATISM AND KNOWLEDGE 171 
 
 ogy and epistemology, and, perhaps, it is not 
 surprising that the pragmatist seeks to re- 
 gard the cognitive idea which means its 
 object as " nothing but a flat piece of sub- 
 stantive experience " with no nonsense about 
 it. To interpret the knowing thought as be- 
 longing to the same general class as the 
 mosquito bite is doubtless a consummation 
 devoutly to be wished. But, unfortunately, 
 the knowing thought resists any such simpli- 
 fication. It means more than it is. If tran- 
 scendence is a mystery, it is at least a very 
 real mystery, and the attempt to ignore it or 
 to explain it away is bound to end in failure. 
 It is not true that everything is like every- 
 thing else. There are several things in this 
 world which are sui generis. One of these 
 things is the dromedary. Another is knowl- 
 edge. 
 
LECTURE V 
 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 
 
 Somehow or other pragmatism has got 
 itself pretty generally associated in the pub- 
 lic mind with religion. It seems to be the 
 common impression that at this critical mo- 
 ment in the warfare of religion with agnos- 
 ticism the pragmatists have come up to the 
 help of the Lord against the mighty, and 
 that, thanks to their new-forged and new- 
 fashioned weapons, victory is secure. It is 
 this belief, I suppose, which more than any- 
 thing else explains the wide and growing 
 popularity of the new philosophy. For, after 
 all, no other philosophical problems have so 
 great and so permanent a hold upon the in- 
 terests of the people at large as have those 
 that deal with religion. For this very rea- 
 son, moreover, no philosophical ideas deserve 
 and require more careful scrutiny than those 
 
 '75 
 
176 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 which affect the religious views of the com- 
 munity. Since, therefore, there is so con- 
 siderable a tendency to-day to throw one's 
 cap in air and shout, " The sword of the 
 Lord and of Pragmatism ! " it behooves all 
 those who have the interests of religion at 
 heart to look carefully into the question 
 whence pragmatism has gained its religious 
 reputation and how well it deserves it. What 
 is the nature and the temper of this newly 
 patented pragmatic sword, and is it so sure 
 a defense that we may with safety throw 
 aside for it our older weapons ? Just what 
 is it that pragmatism proves and how does 
 it prove it ? If we trust our religious beliefs 
 to its defense, just what surety have we that 
 they will be defended and that when we get 
 them back again they will still be recogniz- 
 able? When the question is put in this way, 
 the controversy over the meaning and valid- 
 ity of pragmatism ceases to be a merely 
 academic matter, and is seen to be fraught 
 with truly human and living interest. 
 
 Now in itself pragmatism is neither re- 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 77 
 
 ligious nor irreligious. It is essentially a 
 doctrine or group of kindred doctrines con- 
 cerning the nature of meaning, truth, and 
 knowledge. It is epistemological and logical 
 rather than metaphysical, theological, ethical, 
 or religious. Hence in completing our dis- 
 cussion of knowledge, truth, and meaning, I 
 have finished all that I shall have to say of 
 the fundamental principles of pragmatism. If 
 not over-scrupulous about consistency, it is 
 possible to hold any one of several different 
 views on metaphysics, religion, ethics, etc., 
 and still be a pragmatist, — and in fact on 
 many important metaphysical questions our 
 leading pragmatists hold very, divergent posi- 
 tions. While all this is true, however, it 
 must not be overlooked that one's episte- 
 mology is pretty sure to color or even 
 determine one's metaphysics, and therefore 
 to influence one's religious views — so far 
 as these are a matter of reasoning at all. 
 Whence two things follow. In the first 
 place, there is a certain family resemblance 
 between the metaphysical and religious 
 
178 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 views of most pragmatists, due not so much 
 to logic as to disposition ; to minds that hold 
 the pragmatic view of truth the same gen- 
 eral type of philosophic attitude seems to 
 be natural. And secondly, the fundamental 
 principles of pragmatic epistemology when 
 consistently applied to certain philosophical 
 and theological problems ought to determine, 
 and logically must determine, one's attitude 
 toward them, whether as a matter of fact 
 they do determine the attitude of individual 
 pragmatists or not. 
 
 It will, in fact, be recalled that at the be- 
 ginning of these lectures I set down as one 
 of the characteristic features of pragmatism 
 its attempt to work out a theory of reality. 
 Unfortunately for our purposes, however, 
 this is as yet only an attempt; the prag- 
 matic view of reality is as yet in so embry- 
 onic and unformed a condition that it would 
 be premature and unfair for a non-prag- 
 matist to try to state it. Its central doc- 
 trine seems to be that reality is not stiff and 
 static and independent of us, but is made 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 79 
 
 largely by our interests and desires; and 
 that " knowledge ts reality making a partic- 
 ular and specified sort of change in itself." ^ 
 Just how far pragmatism will carry this gen- 
 eral doctrine and just what it will make out 
 of it remains as yet to be seen. It is to be 
 hoped, in particular, that Professor Dewey 
 will elaborate his view of reality and formu- 
 late it in terms which the non-pragmatist 
 reader can understand. In its present in- 
 cipient state, as I have said, it would be un- 
 fair for one who is not a pragmatist and 
 ■cannot speak with any authority to attempt 
 to expound it, and much more unfair for him 
 to criticise it. I shall, therefore, leave the 
 subject here, and simply refer any of you 
 who would like to know more about it to 
 the following sources: Schiller's essay on 
 " The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics " in 
 " Humanism," ^ and his two essays entitled 
 " The Making of Truth " and " The Making 
 
 ^ Professor Dewey, " Does Reality possess Practical 
 Character?" in the volume of "Essays Philosophical and 
 Psychological, in Honor of William James," p. 59. 
 
 " pp. i-p. 
 
l8o WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of Reality," respectively, in his " Studies in 
 Humanism " ; ^ Dewey's contributions to the 
 " Studies in Logical Theory," ^ his series of 
 papers on " The Control of Ideas by Facts " 
 in Volume IV of \kxit Journal of Philosophy f^ 
 and his most recent statement on the sub- 
 ject (already quoted from) in the Columbia 
 Festschrift for James ; namely, " Does Re- 
 ality possess Practical Character ? " ; * and 
 James's lecture on " Pragmatism and Hu- 
 manism " in his " Pragmatism." " 
 
 But while I shall not venture to expound 
 the pragmatic view of reality in general, I 
 believe I shall be justified in discussing the 
 attitude of pragmatism toward the particular 
 kind of metaphysical problem referred to in 
 the title of this lecture — the religious prob- 
 lem. On this many of the leading prag- 
 matists have very decided views, — views 
 determined, as I said above, largely by nat- 
 ural disposition, — and these views they have 
 expressed clearly and at considerable length. 
 
 Ipp. 179-203,421-451. 
 
 » pp. 1-85. 
 
 ° pp. i97-203> 2S3-2S9> 309-319- 
 
 
 * pp. 53-80. 
 
 6 pp. 239-270, 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION l8l 
 
 Moreover, the fundamental epistemological 
 principles of pragmatism have a necessary 
 and direct bearing upon the religious prob- 
 lems which even a non-pragmatist has a 
 right to point out. The present lecture, 
 therefore, falls naturally into two parts, — 
 it must deal with the general attitude which 
 most pragmatists by temperament hold to- 
 ward religion, and, secondly, it must outline 
 more definitely and in particular the view 
 which pragmatism as such ought to hold if its 
 presuppositions are to be logically carried out. 
 The same temperamental bias which 
 makes the pragmatist lean toward a vol- 
 untaristic psychology and define truth in 
 terms of value usually tends to make him 
 also a pluralist rather than a monist, a be- 
 liever in free will rather than in determin- 
 ism, an upholder of the strenuous, dynamic, 
 dramatic view of the universe in which there 
 are real dangers and genuine crises, rather 
 than an advocate of absolutism with its 
 peaceful and static world in which every- 
 thing is saved from all eternity. To the 
 
l82 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 pragmatist of the James-Schiller type, re- 
 ligion means something very vital and real. 
 The religious view of the world for him 
 is not just the naturalistic view under a 
 new light and with a new name, as is the 
 case too often with some Hegelian philoso- 
 phers ; it is a genuinely and practically dif- 
 ferent world — different in the pragmatic 
 sense of making a difference. " Religion," 
 says Professor James, " in her fullest exercise 
 of function, is not a mere illumination of 
 facts already elsewhere given, not a mere 
 passion, like love, which views things in a 
 rosier light. It is indeed that, but it is 
 something more ; namely, a postulator of 
 new facts as well. The world interpreted 
 religiously is not the materialistic world over 
 again, with an altered expression ; it must 
 have, over and above the altered expression, 
 a natural constitution different at some 
 points from that which a materialistic world 
 would have. It must be such that different 
 events can be expected in it, different con- 
 duct be required." ^ 
 
 1 <• The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. JiS. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 83 
 
 And, to be more explicit, the pragmatic 
 temper finds especially congenial the psy- 
 chological rather than the scholastic view 
 of religion. It likes to look upon religion 
 neither as a divine revelation nor as a phil- 
 osophical construction, but as an essentially 
 human product and one which gets its justi- 
 fication and authority, and its proof (so far 
 as it has any), from the very nature of man, 
 and from its own usefulness to man. Pro- 
 fessor James speaks of his method of evalu- 
 ating religions as " the elimination of the 
 humanly unfit and the survival of the hu- 
 manly fittest, applied to religious beliefs " ; 
 and, he adds, "if we look at history candidly 
 and without prejudice, we have to admit 
 that no religion has ever in the long run 
 established or proved itself in any other way. 
 Religions have approved themselves; they 
 have ministered to sundry vital needs which 
 they found reigning. When they violated 
 other needs too strongly, or when other 
 faiths came which served the same needs 
 better, the first religions were supplanted."^ 
 
 ^ "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 331. 
 
1 84 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 Hence the pragmatist is likely to look 
 with a good deal of favor on the " psychology 
 of religion " and to emphasize the human 
 utility of the various religious concepts. 
 Nor does this involve any lack of belief in 
 the religious view of the universe on the 
 part of the pragmatist. He is indeed 
 skeptical of the value of the historical 
 proofs of God, and is the chief antagonist of 
 the idealistic Absolute. Yet, for all that, he 
 is, as a rule, essentially and temperamentally 
 religious, and he has his own arguments for 
 a religious Weltanschauung. One of these 
 he finds in the very nature of man and of re- 
 ligion as portrayed by contemporary psy- 
 chology. Religion goes deeper than do any 
 of its intellectual formulations ; it springs not 
 from the abstract reason but from the whole 
 man. It is biological rather than intellec- 
 tual, and is an almost instinctive reaction of 
 man to his environment. Religious belief of 
 some kind is a normal and almost a neces- 
 sary human product, and for this reason may 
 be and (in fact) must be trusted. Moreover, 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 85 
 
 our trust in it is justified in the same gen- 
 eral way in which scientific hypotheses are 
 justified : it stands the test of usefulness. It 
 works; it ministers to human needs ; it com- 
 bines harmoniously, on the whole, with hu- 
 man experience, and it furthers human life 
 and happiness. This, says the pragmatist, 
 is the only kind of verification to be found 
 in science, and though in the case of reli- 
 gion the verification is much less exact and 
 complete, it is essentially of the same nature 
 and is sufficient to justify our trust until 
 positively overthrown. For although the 
 beliefs of religion are as yet only partially 
 verified, that is what one must expect from 
 the enormous magnitude and complexity of 
 religion's problem ; and it must be remem- 
 bered, too, that the relatively simple " laws " 
 and " truths " of science, now universally 
 accepted, were one day in the same position 
 and started out as mere postulates. " Sci- 
 ence too takes risks, " as Schiller says, " and 
 ventures herself on postulates, hypotheses, 
 and analogies, which seem wild, until they 
 
1 86 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 are tamed to our service and confirmed in 
 their allegiance. She too must end by say- 
 ing Credo ut intelligam. And she does 
 this because she must. For, as Professor 
 Dewey has admirably shown, all values and 
 meanings rest upon beliefs, and, 'we cannot 
 preserve significance and decline the per- 
 sonal attitude in which it is inscribed and 
 operative. . . .' We start, then, always from 
 the postulates of faith, and transmute them, 
 slowly, into the axioms of reason. The 
 presuppositions of scientific knowledge and 
 religious faith are the same." -^ 
 
 Pragmatism thus seeks to prove the truth 
 of religion by its good and satisfactory con- 
 sequences. Here, however, a distinction 
 must be made ; namely, between the " good, " 
 harmonious, and logically confirmatory con- 
 sequences of religious concepts as such, and 
 the good and pleasant consequences which 
 come from believing these concepts. It is 
 one thing to say a belief is true because the 
 logical consequences that flow from it fit in 
 
 * " Studies in Humanism," pp. 361-362. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 87 
 
 harmoniously with our otherwise grounded 
 knowledge ; and quite another thing to call 
 it true because it is pleasant to believe. 
 We may conceive, therefore, two perfectly 
 distinct methods of verification through con- 
 sequences. The first is exactly that used by 
 science ; the second (namely, through conse- 
 quences which flow not from the idea as 
 such but from our believing it) is very far 
 removed from the scientific method, and is 
 held only by pragmatists — if it be really held 
 even by them. That it is so held by some 
 at least, would seem to be clear from such 
 expressions as the following : " If theologi- 
 cal ideas prove to have a value for concrete 
 life, they will be true, in the sense of being 
 good for so much. " " So far as the Absolute 
 affords comfort it surely is not sterile, it has 
 that amount of value ; it performs a concrete 
 function. As a good pragmatist I myself 
 ought to call the Absolute true in so far 
 forth then; and I unhesitatingly now do 
 so."^ It would seem, therefore, that any- 
 
 1 " Pragmatism," p. 73. 
 
1 88 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 thing is true " in so far forth " which it is 
 comfortable to believe. But whether prag- 
 matism really holds this doctrine is doubtful. 
 As Professor Dewey says, " Light would 
 be thrown upon how Mr. James conceives 
 this matter by statements from him on such 
 points as these: If ideas terminate in good 
 consequences, but yet the goodness of the 
 consequences was no part of the intention 
 of the idea, does the goodness have any ver- 
 ifying force ? If the goodness of conse- 
 quences arises from the context of the idea 
 in belief rather than from the idea itself, does 
 it have any verifying force .'' If an idea leads 
 to consequences which are good in the one 
 respect only of fulfilling the intent of the idea 
 (as when one drinks a liquid to test the idea 
 that it is a poison) does the badness of the 
 consequences in every other respect detract 
 from the verifying force of these conse- 
 quences V'^ 
 
 Certainly if pragmatism means that any- 
 
 1 " What does Pragmatism mean by Practical ? " Jour, of 
 Phil., Vol. V, pp. 93-94. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 89 
 
 thing may be proved true if the consequences 
 of believing it are comforting, it is provided 
 with a very cheap and easy method of dem- 
 onstration. Pragmatists are always indig- 
 nant at the common accusation that they 
 teach us we may believe whatever we like ; 
 but it must be admitted there is consider- 
 able excuse, as Professor Dewey has himself 
 pointed out above, for this interpretation of 
 their doctrine. However, I shall not press 
 this point farther nor take seriously the im- 
 plication that any good consequences which 
 flow from our belief in an hypothesis can be 
 used to prove its truth. And certainly if 
 pragmatism does not mean to use this rather 
 questionable method of verification, but seeks 
 to demonstrate the truth of religious doctrines 
 purely from their own proper and necessary 
 consequences, it is on good logical and scien- 
 tific ground. How far these consequences 
 actually do prove the doctrines referred to is, 
 of course, another question ; and it must be 
 admitted that pragmatism has as yet made 
 but little serious attempt in concrete detail 
 
I go WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 to furnish this sort of verification for our 
 religious concepts. 
 
 So much for the pragmatist's way of prov- 
 ing the truth of our religious beliefs. But 
 this is only a part of what he has to say in 
 defense of faith. For, he continues, even if 
 the proof of religion be not complete, it is at 
 least as good as that of the opposite view, 
 and therefore, seeing that one must choose 
 between rival hypotheses neither of which 
 can be demonstrated, one has a right to take 
 refuge in the will to believe. For belief, 
 after all, is no mere cold intellectualistic state 
 of mind, but has in^it an element of will and 
 of emotion. On vital questions where there 
 is genuine uncertainty one cannot forever 
 keep decision in abeyance. Hence the prag- 
 matist, as a general thing, takes his stand 
 and makes his life venture on the side which 
 promises most if once accepted. Life is 
 better, sweeter, more worthy and worth while 
 with some sort of religious belief than with- 
 out it ; hence, says the pragmatist, since such 
 a belief is at least as well grounded as its 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 191 
 
 rival, let us deliberately adopt it as a working 
 hypothesis until it is discredited. 
 
 Thus a road is opened to religious faith 
 even for those who feel (as modern men are 
 coming more and more to feel) that demon- 
 stration in religious matters is no longer to 
 be expected. For such men, this is perhaps 
 the only protection against a rather sad skep- 
 ticism. And it is a protection because it 
 shows that skepticism itself is quite as much 
 a voluntary choice as is the religious attitude. 
 Choose we must, whether we will or no. 
 Says Professor James, in the famous book 
 which is the very Gospel of this Justification 
 of Faith, " We cannot escape the issue by re- 
 maining skeptical and waiting for more light, 
 because although we do avoid error in that 
 way, if religion be untrue, we lose the good 
 if it be true, just as certainly as if we posi- 
 tively choose to disbelieve. . . . Skepticism 
 then is not avoidance of option ; it is option 
 of a certain particular kind of risk. Better 
 risk loss of truth than chance of error — that 
 is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is 
 
192 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 actively playing his stake as much as the be- 
 liever is ; he is backing the field against the 
 religious hypothesis, just as the believer is 
 backing the religious hypothesis against the 
 field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty 
 until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be 
 found, is tantamount, therefore, to telling us, 
 when in the presence of the religious hypoth- 
 esis, that to yield to our fear of its being 
 error is wiser and better than to yield to our 
 hope that it may be true. . . . And dupery 
 for dupery, what proof is there that dupery 
 through hope is so much worse than dupery 
 through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; 
 and I simply refuse obedience to the scien- 
 tist's command to imitate his kind of option, 
 in a case where my own stake is important 
 enough to give me the right to choose my 
 own form of risk. If religion be true and 
 the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do 
 not wish by putting your extinguisher upon 
 my nature (which feels to me as if it had 
 after all some business in this matter) to for- 
 feit my sole chance in life of getting upon the 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 93 
 
 winning side — that chance depending, of 
 course, on my willingness to run the risk of 
 acting as if my passional need of taking the 
 world religiously might be prophetic and 
 right." ^ 
 
 This, as I have said, is the position taken 
 by most pragmatists. That it is so is due to 
 the general tendencies of their disposition and 
 temperament, rather than to any logical and 
 necessary connection between it and their 
 epistemology. Nor is it by any means pecul- 
 iar to them. It was already old long before 
 pragmatism was born, and is to-day enthusi- 
 astically supported by many pronounced 
 antagonists of pragmatism. Cicero voiced 
 something very like it when he said he 
 would rather be wrong with Plato than right 
 with Plato's opponents. And every one will 
 remember that Kant came even nearer to 
 the " will to believe " when he destroyed 
 knowledge in order to substitute faith. It 
 was, of course, this general point of view 
 that prompted his advocacy of the primacy 
 
 1 "The Will to Believe," pp. 26-27. 
 
194 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 of the practical reason and his moral argu- 
 ment for God. This same attempt to found 
 religion on the moral will was carried farther 
 by Fichte and still farther by Ritschl. The 
 merit of Professor James's brilliant book lay 
 not so much in its originality, as in its giv- 
 ing this century-old doctrine a broader 
 philosophical setting and foundation, by 
 showing that not only religious belief but 
 nearly all belief is in part a matter of will, 
 and in presenting the right to believe in a 
 form at once so persuasive and so inspiring. 
 I think I shall be justified in saying that 
 James's " Will to Believe " has been one of 
 the greatest influences for genuine religious 
 faith that have appeared in the last half 
 century. 
 
 So much for the religious views actually 
 held by many pragmatists. And now for the 
 less interesting but really more important 
 attempt to work out the logical consequences 
 of pragmatic epistemology as applied to re- 
 ligious problems. Our question therefore is 
 not, What attitude does the pragmatist usually 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 95 
 
 take? but What attitude ought he to take if 
 he is going to be faithful to his own presup- 
 positions ? 
 
 I have said that the view which holds the 
 beliefs of religion to be true because of 
 their value for life, and which maintains that 
 we have a right to believe them even when 
 unverified, is not peculiar to pragmatism, 
 and that it does not follow from the funda- 
 mental principles concerning knowledge, 
 truth, and meaning which alone are uniquely 
 pragmatic. But one must go farther than 
 this : and, in fact, the thesis which I shall 
 seek to maintain will be that it is logically 
 inconsistent to proclaim and carry out the 
 more extreme and radical pragmatic prin- 
 ciples, and at the same time cling to the 
 religious view of the universe and seek to 
 uphold genuine belief in it. 
 
 The extreme pragmatist view, if I under- 
 stand it aright, maintains that the meaning 
 of any philosophic proposition can always be 
 brought down to some particular conse- 
 quence in human experience. A true belief 
 
196 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 if it has any meaning always " has a bearing 
 on some human interest." "Theoretical 
 truth is no relation between our mind and 
 the archetypal reality. It falls within the 
 mind, being the accord of some of its pro- 
 cesses and objects with other processes and 
 objects." It is " an experienced relation," or 
 " the effective working of an idea," or the 
 process of the idea's verification. Hence all 
 genuine meaning and all truth (and, of 
 course, all knowledge as well) lie within the 
 individual's experience, or, at the broadest, 
 within the experience of the human race. 
 The beliefs of religion, on the other hand, — 
 the very beliefs for which we have seen the 
 pragmatists so valiantly fighting, — are 
 largely concerned with matters which by 
 their nature lie beyond the limits of human 
 experience. Primal among these, for ex- 
 ample, is the belief in a God, — not merely 
 in future experiences of yours and mine 
 which will be " the same as if " there were a 
 God, but in the actual present existence of a 
 divine being who by definition is not within 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 197 
 
 the experience of any or all of us. What- 
 ever the pragmatists may mean by God, this 
 at least is what the religious man means by 
 the term and what the pragmatist is natu- 
 rally supposed to mean when arguing for the 
 religious hypothesis. And it must be clear 
 to every one that if all truth and meaning 
 are confined to consequences within our 
 human experience, we are deprived of all 
 right to talk about and believe in a being 
 who by the very conditions of the argument 
 is not included within our experience. 
 
 To this the pragmatist will reply that the 
 very peculiarities of the pragmatic epistemol- 
 ogy which I have pointed out make it really 
 the only sure salvation from philosophic 
 doubt. All other views of truth and knowl- 
 edge but his own, the pragmatist will main- 
 tain, are by their nature doomed to end in 
 skepticism. For once admit the necessity of 
 transcendence, the existence of a chasm be- 
 tween your idea and its object, and you have 
 made knowledge forever impossible. Knowl- 
 edge is possible and skepticism vanquished 
 
198 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 only for a theory which denies the existence 
 of any chasm and the necessity of any tran- 
 scendence. This is exactly what pragmatism 
 does. It points out that the whole of your 
 genuine meaning can always be summed up 
 in some possible difference in your own (or 
 other human) life ; that truth is only a con- 
 crete process within the mind ; and that 
 knowledge is a succession of the doubt-in- 
 quiry-answer type and " lives wholly inside 
 the tissue of experience." Hence your idea 
 and its object are not separated by any chasm, 
 but are both parts of the same chain and 
 united by intermediaries of the same nature. 
 Your idea therefore may genuinely know its 
 object and may be proved true since its truth 
 consists just in its satisfactory working. Ap- 
 ply this now to religion, and all becomes clear. 
 " If theological ideas prove to have a value 
 for concrete life, they will be true in the 
 sense of being good for so much." " On prag- 
 matistic principles if the hypothesis of God 
 works satisfactorily in the widest sense of 
 the word, it is true." ^ Of course, you must 
 
 1 " Pragmatism," pp. 73 and 299. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 1 99 
 
 consider with care the question whether it 
 does really work satisfactorily ; but if it does, 
 that is all you mean by its being true, and 
 thus the chasm and the need of transcend- 
 ence is avoided. 
 
 Thus pragmatism attempts to save us from 
 philosaphic doubt by making knowledge, 
 truth, and meaning have their entire being 
 within the tissue of human experience. Buti 
 it was not the things within human expe-< 
 rience which we were ever tempted to doubt. 
 It was the things outside human expe- 
 rience, — God, immortality, the moral nature 
 of the universe, the final victory of the right, 
 — it was of these we felt doubtful. And 
 how does pragmatism help us here ? It does 
 not pretend to tell us what our future expe- 
 rience will be, much less to declare to us the 
 things that are outside all possible human 
 experience. Its message is really this : You 
 may believe there is a God because all you 
 mean by a God is certain " adjustments of 
 our attitudes of hope and expectation." A 
 " vague confidence in the future is the sole 
 
200 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 pragmatic meaning at present discernible in 
 the terms design and designer." " Other 
 than this practical significance, the words 
 God, free will, design, have none." ^ 
 
 " When I affirm that the metaphysical the- 
 ory of the Absolute is false," says Schiller, "I 
 only mean that it is useless, that it simplifies 
 nothing and complicates everjd:hing." ^ And 
 the consistent pragmatist, of course, holds the 
 converse of this; namely, that when he 
 affirms that the theory of God is true he 
 means only that it is useful, that it simplifies 
 things within experience — not that there 
 really is a God. This (if I understand him) 
 is the avowed attitude of Professor Dewey, 
 and it certainly is the only logical and con- 
 sistent attitude of any pragmatist who takes 
 his own doctrines of truth and meaning 
 seriously. 
 
 Of course, this view of religion is not 
 what the reading public understands the 
 pragmatist to mean when he so bravely 
 tells us we have a right to believe in God. 
 
 * " Pragmatism," pp. iij, 121. ^ " Humanism," p. 59. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 20I 
 
 There is a general impression abroad that 
 pragmatism has somehow discovered a 
 short cut to God and religion which makes 
 skepticism no longer tenable, and that if 
 one ever became a real philosophical prag- 
 matist, one would understand what it was. 
 And in fact nearly all the pragmatists 
 themselves, except perhaps Professor Dewey 
 and some of his followers, at times feel the 
 need of something more solid and objective 
 than the sort of " God " one comes to by 
 strict pragmatic principles. Thus at the 
 close of his " Varieties of Religious Experi- 
 ence," Professor James points out that one's 
 " subjective way of feeling things " is not 
 all one wants from religious beliefs; one 
 wants to know also about the "objective 
 truth of their content " ; and he adds in a 
 note, " The word ' truth ' is here taken to 
 mean something additional to bare value 
 for life." ^ The attempt of Professor James 
 to prove the old-fashioned God by the new- 
 iashioned argument is well criticised by 
 » p. 509. 
 
202 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 Professor Dewey in the admirable article 
 from which I have already quoted. " Con- 
 sider," he says, " the case of design. Mr. 
 James begins by accepting a ready-made 
 notion, to which he then applies the prag- 
 matic criterion. The traditional notion is 
 that of a "'seeing force that runs things.' 
 This is rationalistically and retrospectively 
 empty; its being there makes no difference. 
 But ' returning with it into experience, we 
 gain a more confiding outlook on the future. 
 If not a blind force but a seeing force runs 
 things, we may reasonably expect better 
 issues. This vague confidence in the future 
 is the sole pragmatic meaning at present dis- 
 cernible in the terms design and designer* 
 [quoted from James]. Now," Dewey con- 
 tinues, " is this intended to replace the mean- 
 ing of a ' seeing force which runs things '.? 
 Or is it intended to superadd a pragmatic 
 value and validation to that concept of a see- 
 ing force.'' Or does it mean that, irrespec- 
 tive of the existence of any such object, a 
 belief in it has that value .'' Strict prag- 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 203 
 
 matism would seem to require the first in- 
 terpretation, but I do not think that is what 
 Mr. James intends." 
 
 Professor Dewey then takes up the ques- 
 tion of theism and materialism. Strict 
 pragmatism would tell us that the only 
 meaning of theism lies in the differences it 
 makes to us, and would therefore substi- 
 tute these concrete experiential differences 
 for the old view of God as a " superhu- 
 man power," and would, as Dewey says, 
 " simply abolish the meaning of an ante- 
 cedent power." ^ 
 
 In short, we have in the common, loose, 
 pragmatic treatment of religion another illus- 
 tration of the tendency to smuggle in 
 " intellectualistic " results to fill out the 
 deficiencies left by pragmatic methods. 
 " When God is presented as the name of 
 an experienced fact, and theistic theories 
 are taken as methods of interpreting that 
 fact for purposes of response, we are on 
 
 1 " What does Pragmatism mean by Practical ? " pp. 90 
 and 91. 
 
204 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 good pragmatic ground. But when it is 
 declared that 'On pragmatist principles if 
 the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily 
 in the widest sense of the word it is true,' 
 the implication to the innocent reader is 
 far otherwise. We can hardly put the same 
 eloquence into the naked pragmatic assertion, 
 'If the hypothesis of God works satisfac- 
 torily in the widest sense of the word it 
 does work satisfactorily in the widest sense 
 of the word.' God as an addition to an 
 already smoky image of reality at large, God 
 as an aesthetic anticipation of what visual 
 and other experiences we may have face to 
 face when we have passed over the river, 
 God in these simple 'copy' ways of con- 
 sidering our ideas must be omitted, God 
 must be the name of a fact in our experi- 
 ence, and the determination of His ways 
 must be the determination of our way of 
 working out our wills in the light of that 
 fact." 1 
 
 ^ Max Eastman in " The Pragmatic Meaning of Pragma- 
 tism," a paper read before the Psychological Section of the 
 New York Academy of Sciences. 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 205 
 
 The logical outcome of pragmatism, there- 
 fore, when applied to religion is not salva- 
 tion from philosophic doubt, but a necessary 
 and ineradicable skepticism. This, indeed, 
 might have been foreseen from the outset. 
 We shall recognise it clearly enough if, with 
 the light we have now attained, we read over 
 again some of its fundamental principles. 
 Take, for example, its chief "postulate," as 
 presented by Professor Dewey. " Things — 
 anything, everything, in the ordinary or 
 non-technical use of the term thing — are 
 what they are experienced as. Hence if 
 one wishes to describe anything truly, his 
 task is to tell what it is experienced as 
 being." " The real significance of the prin- 
 ciple is that of a method of philosophical 
 analysis. If you wish to find out what sub- 
 jective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, 
 psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, 
 evil, being, quantity — any philosophical 
 term in short — means, go to experience and 
 see what it is experienced as." And, the 
 pragmatist would of course continue, God 
 
206 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 and the other objects of religion are what 
 we experience them as, and (for us and our 
 belief at least) nothing more. Certain aspects 
 of our experience is all they can mean for us. 
 And it is the same with their truth. Since the 
 truth of an idea means merely the fact that the 
 idea works, that fact is all you mean when you 
 say the idea is true. Nothing more, noth- 
 ing " transcendent " nor " cosmic " must be 
 sought from it. It is a very simple matter, 
 you see, — like the multiplication table, — 
 "we simply fill the hole with the dirt we 
 dug out. Why are twice two four.? Be- 
 cause, in fact, four is twice two." It is thus a 
 very easy thing to prove our belief in God to 
 be true by the good consequences that flow 
 from it, because all we mean by God is just 
 those good consequences. The real out- 
 come of pragmatism is therefore an assur- 
 ance that the questions in which ordinary 
 religious people are interested are essentially 
 insoluble, — hopelessly insoluble, in fact, 
 because of the very nature of knowledge and 
 truth and meaning, — and that we should 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 207 
 
 therefore go about our business and fulfill 
 as an hireling our day. For, as Professor 
 Dewey says, " The appropriate subject- 
 matter of awareness is not reality at large, a 
 metaphysical heaven to be mimeographed at 
 many removes upon a badly constructed 
 mental carbon paper which yields at best 
 only fragmentary, blurred, and erroneous 
 copies. Its proper and legitimate object is 
 that relationship of organism and environ- 
 ment in which functioning is most amply 
 and effectively attained ; or by which, in 
 case of obstruction and consequent needed 
 experimentation, its later eventual free 
 course is most facilitated. As for the other 
 reality, metaphysical reality at large, it may, 
 so far as awareness is concerned, go to its 
 own place." ^ 
 
 This consignment of all questions about 
 reality at large which do not directly concern 
 the functioning of the organism to their 
 " own place " (which may be anywhere you 
 
 i"Does Reality Possess Practical Character?" in the 
 Columbia Festschrift for James, pp. 70-71. 
 
2o8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 like except amongst suitable subjects for 
 human discussion) is perfectly justified by, 
 and, in fact, is the only logical conclusion 
 from the fundamental principles of pragma- 
 tism. For if these principles be correct, 'tis 
 idle for us creatures of a day, who cannot 
 even mean anything beyond our own experi- 
 ence, to spend our time on questions neces- 
 sarily so remote and inaccessible as are those 
 which religious people think they are dis- 
 cussing and about which they think they 
 care. From them we are separated by a 
 chasm much more impossible to pass than 
 that which the rationalists seek to bridge 
 with their method of transcendence. For if 
 pragmatism be true, it is not a chasm, but an 
 infinite stretch of empty space that bounds 
 each of us — or at least the race — on every 
 hand, so that if there be another side we at 
 least can neither know nor even mean it. 
 On such an epistemology the discussion of 
 the old problems of religion becomes essen- 
 tially a silly waste of time and gray matter, 
 which might better be spent in tilling the 
 
PRAGMATISM AND RELIGION 209 
 
 soil and nourishing our psychophysical 
 organism. " The Infinite, the Eternal, the 
 All-good — these are names empty of all real 
 meaning, idle fancies for minds that will 
 dream or idly speculate instead of seeking to 
 know and to make better the only real world 
 there is, the world of experience. This 
 world admits no reference to a superhuman 
 reality. We are thus left with reality that is 
 fragmentary only, with experience that is 
 made up of flying, ever changing moments, 
 with thought that never wins final truth, 
 with temporal processes and no eternal 
 to justify and give them meaning; with 
 finite progress and no goal finally won; 
 with a better and no best as the ultimate 
 standard of value judgments. For the satis- 
 faction of ethical and religious ideals and 
 aspirations we must look to our possibly 
 better selves. Our idealized selves are our 
 gods; and the cry after the Divine, the 
 Eternal, the Complete in knowledge and 
 goodness, must be satisfied with that frag- 
 ment of truth and goodness which is all 
 
2IO WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 that our finite lives can possess in their 
 best estate."^ 
 
 Of course, this is not what most pragma- 
 tists actually hold. But it is, I maintain, the 
 logical outcome of their fundamental princi- 
 ples — the principles which alone are pecul- 
 iar to their philosophy. In short, if strictly 
 carried out to its logical conclusions, prag- 
 matism is essentially a philosophy of skepti- 
 cism. Or better still, perhaps, in Papini's 
 naive and ingenuous expression, " Pragma- 
 tism is really less a philosophy than a 
 method of doing without one." 
 
 ^ Professor Russell, " Objective Idealism and Revised 
 Empiricism — Discussion," Phil. Rev., Vol. XV, p. 633. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 
 
LECTURE VI 
 THE "PRACTICAL" POINT , OF VIEW 
 
 "Howsoever these things are in men's 
 depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, 
 which only doth judge itself, teacheth that 
 the inquiry of truth, which is the love- 
 making or wooing of it; the knowledge of 
 truth, which is the presence of it; and the 
 belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, 
 is the sovereign good of human nature." 
 These words of Francis Bacon contain 
 within them the ultimate justification of all 
 philosophy. Whoever accepts them will 
 hold that philosophical investigation is an 
 end in itself, needing no apology or de- 
 fense ; while to the man who challenges 
 them most philosophy will seem but a sorry/ 
 waste of energy. 
 
 The present controversy over pragmatism 
 may at times appear to the non-technical 
 
 313 
 
214 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 reader a battle between ghosts and shad- 
 ows, a smoky discharge of weightless pro- 
 jectiles, a ridiculously noisy war of words 
 in a realm so far removed from the world 
 of real life as to be quite out of touch with 
 any genuine human interest. And even 
 those of us who have somehow got en- 
 tangled in the struggle feel now and then 
 {crede experto) a disheartening doubt that 
 perhaps the game is not worth the candle 
 after all, and that maybe our manuscripts 
 were better used for building fires and 
 baking bread. This sense of uncertainty, 
 however, and of the possible worthlessness 
 of one's efforts, is not peculiar to those 
 involved in the pragmatist controversy. 
 Doubt of the same discouraging sort is 
 apt to come at times upon every one en- 
 gaged in theoretical pursuits of any nature 
 and make him question seriously and sadly 
 the value of his work. The Spirit that 
 Denies is not far from any one of us, and 
 is ever ready with his disconcerting sugges- 
 tion, " It may be clever, but is it worth 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 215 
 
 while ? " At such moments it is well to 
 turn back to our Francis Bacon and read 
 again the comforting words of the father 
 of English philosophy. They bring back 
 courage to our hearts as the touch of 
 earth renewed the strength of Antaeus. 
 The possession of truth is "the sovereign 
 good of human nature." We again feel 
 sure that this is so ; for " truth, which alone 
 doth judge itself, teacheth " it. To make 
 "an unusually obstinate attempt to think 
 clearly and consistently,"^ to carry out our 
 thoughts to their logical conclusions, to see 
 what we really mean and must mean by 
 knowledge and truth, these may be pecul- 
 iarly difficult and dreary tasks, but they 
 are worth our while if the possession of 
 truth is worth our while. The pragmatist 
 controversy is not logomachy nor is it un- 
 important. If the traditional view of truth 
 and knowledge is meaningless, as the prag- 
 matists contend, then we ought to know it, 
 and not slumber on in dogmatic confidence 
 
 ^ James's famous definition of metaphysics. 
 
2l6 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 that our old bottles will stand the strain 
 of the new wine which modern logic and 
 modern science are pouring into them. If 
 new bottles are necessary, by all means let 
 us have them before the old ones perish 
 and the wine be spilt. And if, on the 
 other hand, the pragmatist substitutes for 
 our older concepts are self-contradictory and 
 land us in absurd and untenable positions, 
 that too we ought to know. For clear think- 
 ing is worth while for its own sake, and 
 knowledge of the truth "is the sovereign 
 good of human nature." 
 
 Nor is the aim of either the pragmatists 
 or their opponents merely controversial. 
 At times it may seem so, but this appear- 
 ance is merely superficial. To get the 
 better of the other side is merely an inci- 
 dental aim, and deep down below this runs 
 the genuine and serious desire of both 
 parties to get at the truth for its own sake. 
 In a very real sense there is no controversy 
 here but an investigation, there are not 
 two parties but one, and the aim of all con- 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 217 
 
 cerned is to give each other mutual aid in 
 the common search. The non-pragmatists 
 genuinely wish to see pragmatism com- 
 pletely developed and clearly expressed, 
 and the pragmatists welcome all criticism, 
 adverse or favorable, knowing that this will 
 only aid them in thinking out their own 
 thoughts logically and to the end. We 
 are really partners rather than opponents, 
 each seeking the same thing, each making 
 common cause with the rest, and each 
 wishing the other Godspeed. 
 
 In man's long search after truth — " the 
 lovemaking and wooing of it," as Bacon 
 would say — it is possible to make out two 
 chief tendencies or types of attitude. One 
 class of mind has been so carried away 
 with the joy of mental achievement, so en- 
 chanted by the glory of truth, that in seeking 
 and proclaiming it as the supreme end of 
 life it has quite overlooked the fact that 
 truth is not only an end but a means as 
 well ; that it not only is a good, but also is 
 good for something. The other type of 
 
2l8 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 truth-seeker, noting the error of overem- 
 phasis on truth merely as an end, has 
 sought to counterbalance this mistake by 
 laying its emphasis upon the practical value 
 of truth and its possession ; pointing out 
 that truth and knowledge are means to all 
 sorts of other good things, that they are 
 tools and implements which should be used 
 as well as enjoyed, and that in our enthu- 
 siasm over the possession of these things, 
 the humbler practical values of life must 
 not be slighted. 
 
 It is to this latter tendency that pragma- 
 tism belongs and it is to this broad, living, 
 human point of view that it owes its rather 
 striking popularity and the rapid progress 
 that it has made among non-technical read- 
 ers. For certainly it is not the special 
 technical doctrines of pragmatism that have 
 aroused so much real interest among the 
 reading public. There is no great sponta- 
 neous curiosity in the community at large 
 concerning the interpretation of the terms 
 "meaning," "truth," and "knowledge." It 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 219 
 
 is rather the pragmatist's large, big-hearted, 
 practical way of looking at things that has 
 attracted the general attention to what he 
 has to say. The reading public is seldom 
 interested in the technical and exact side of 
 any science or discipline. It naturally and 
 quite properly hates exactness. It likes 
 X-rays and electrons and geological periods 
 and light years and the survival of the fit- 
 test; but when it comes to technical meth- 
 ods and exact descriptions and definitions, 
 it "wants to be excused." And, therefore, 
 it loves pragmatism not as a technical phil- 
 osophical doctrine, but as an interesting, 
 belligerent, " practical " point of view. 
 
 As such, however, pragmatism is, as I 
 have said, only a part of a larger tendency, 
 — a tendency which, though one of the 
 most important characteristics of contempo- 
 rary thought, is rather difficult to name or 
 define. It might be called the empirical or 
 the biological or the historical or, perhaps, 
 simply the practical point of view. It has 
 permeated so much of our thinking and has 
 
220 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 taken on so many shades and aspects that 
 it has no longer very much unity except as 
 a general "psychological atmosphere," and 
 also, perhaps, as a universal protest against 
 the point of view which it opposes and has 
 in part replaced. To make more plain what 
 I have in mind, it will be necessary to say 
 a few words about this prior point of view, 
 which may be called (for want of a better 
 name) that of excessive intellectualism. 
 
 By this I mean, of course, the tendency 
 already pointed out, which considers truth 
 only as an end and never as a means, and 
 so in part divorces truth and knowledge 
 from the world of active and practical life. 
 This way of conceiving things probably ante- 
 dates history. It had no father, and it seems 
 to have dominated in large part the thought 
 of many of the ancient philosophers. The 
 most famous of its early repfesentatives was, 
 of course, Plato,^ For his severance of the 
 
 ' It should also be pointed out, however, that there is a 
 decidedly pragmatic tendency in Plato, inherited from his 
 spiritual father, Socrates, and seen especially in his doctrine 
 of the Idea of the Good. 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 221 
 
 world of " illusion " from the " real " world of 
 Ideas, however great its value in some re- 
 spects, was certainly the first long step 
 toward the separation of " true knowledge " 
 from the practical world of action and con- 
 crete experience. And, immeasurable as is 
 Plato's gift to philosophy, it cannot be denied 
 that his sharp separation of our meanings 
 from our individual, living experience, in 
 which alone they are genuinely real, was 
 fatal for both. The inaccessible and change- 
 less world of abstract concepts, which Plato 
 is at least supposed to have believed in, was 
 erected for the purpose of explaining the 
 changing world which we actually experi- 
 ence, and the chasm which was made be- 
 tween them defeated the very purpose for 
 which the two had been distinguished. The 
 purely and abstractly logical and intellec- 
 tualistic, purified from all human taint, was 
 so completely divorced from the emotional 
 and volitional, from the struggle and en- 
 deavor of concrete, pulsing actuality, that 
 it became next to useless as a means of 
 
222 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 rationalizing the world of our actual human 
 experience. And while philosophy was con- 
 structing this purely " ideal " realm, an ab- 
 stract psychology was dividing man's mind 
 into three sharply sundered faculties, and 
 not only made reason supreme (as indeed 
 it should), but abstractly " pure " and in- 
 dependent. 
 
 How far the above is a statement of 
 Plato's philosophy and how far a caricature 
 of it, is a question which for our present 
 purposes is irrelevant ; for this at least is 
 the interpretation of his meaning which 
 has had most influence in the history of 
 human thought. And it resulted in an 
 exaltation of the abstract intellect and a 
 contempt for the "passions" and feelings, 
 the impulses and will attitudes of man, 
 which dominated thought for two thousand 
 years. Man was regarded and defined as 
 a " thinking animal." That he was an 
 animal was most unfortunate ; for thought, 
 " pure " thought, was his " essence." The 
 animal nature of man was hardly worthy of 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 223 
 
 investigation, the proper study of mankind 
 being the abstract " Universals " of medize- 
 val "Realism." 
 
 Other influences besides that of Plato 
 were brought to bear in this direction, — 
 in fact, almost every philosopher for more 
 than a thousand years contributed his share. 
 Aristotle's was certainly too catholic a na- 
 ture, too empirical a mind, to be a slave to 
 any such excessive intellectualism ; yet his 
 thought was so interpreted and his work 
 so used that for centuries his influence also 
 tended to bind philosophy and science in 
 intellectualistic fetters. This was largely 
 due, of course, to his placing the " theoreti- 
 cal reason " far above the " practical reason." 
 The syllogism, moreover, which he had 
 contrived as a practical tool for man's use 
 was made a fetish, and elaborated for its 
 own sake. And the questions upon which 
 it was used and to which most scholastic 
 thinkers devoted their lives were sadly re- 
 mote from human experience. Doubtless 
 the abstractions and absurdities of mediaeval 
 
224 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 thinkers have been greatly and unfairly 
 exaggerated; yet, when all is said, it must 
 be admitted that their views of man's na- 
 ture and of man's problems were often false 
 in the extreme, and their quibbles and logom- 
 achy, their absurd interest in purely verbal 
 questions, their expenditure of years upon 
 mere fantastic puzzles, meant a pitiful and 
 irreparable waste of really great intellectual 
 power. 
 
 The point of view of excessive intellec- 
 tualism did not die with the mediaeval school- 
 men. It has its representatives to-day, and 
 it is against this tendency to worship the 
 purely abstract intellect and its artificial 
 problems that the modern spirit in general, 
 and pragmatism in particular, protest. The 
 newer point of view made its appearance 
 in philosophy long, long ago; but from the 
 growth of the natural sciences in the last 
 century, the development of the historical 
 sense, and especially the spread of biologi- 
 cal ideas, it has taken new strength and 
 even a new form. The attitude of the age 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 225 
 
 is expressed by the motto, " Knowledge is 
 power." The suitable subjects for human 
 investigation are seen to be those which - 
 belong to this very world in which we live, 
 and to our actual experience, — the prob- 
 lems whose answers will make a real dif- 
 ference to us. Already two hundred years 
 ago it was perceived that " the proper study 
 of mankind is man " ; and now that man 
 has come to be studied seriously, empirically, 
 scientifically, it is seen that he is a very 
 different sort of creature from that which 
 scholasticism painted him. A "thinking ani- 
 mal," if you like, he is indeed ; but the 
 modern conception puts the emphasis on the 
 " animal " rather than on the " thinking." 
 For, as it views him, man is not an ani- 
 mal in order that he may think ; he thinks in 
 order that he may be a better animal. Life 
 is no longer conceived as existing for thai 
 sake of knowledge ; knowledge exists for the 
 sake of life. Thought is not the " essence " 
 of man, nor is it for its own sake. It is^ 
 merely one of man's tools by which he may 
 
226 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 the better react upon his environment, and 
 therefore stands iipon the same plane as his 
 eyes and his stomach. It was developed by 
 the struggle for existence according to the 
 law of the survival of the fittest, for the defi- 
 nite purpose of guiding the organism and 
 so of helping to preserve the individual and 
 to perpetuate the race. And contemporary 
 physiological psychology, adopting the bio- 
 logical point of view, has carried it out in 
 detail, showing the exact place of thought 
 in the economy of nature, — its position in 
 the reflex arc pointing to its sole function; 
 namely, the guidance of the individual's 
 action upon the environment. Conscious- 
 ness is really only a stop-gap for mechanical 
 action. In the words of an eminent German 
 psychologist,^ it is the " defect of habit." 
 And our own foremost physiological psy- 
 chologist writes as follows : — 
 
 " The structural unity of the nervous 
 system is a triad, neither of whose elements 
 has any independent existence. The sen- 
 
 1 Max Dessoir in " Das Doppel-ich." 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 12-] 
 
 sory impression exists only for the sake of 
 awakening the central process of reflection, 
 and the central process of reflection exists 
 only for the sake of calling forth the final 
 act. All action is thus r)?-action upon the 
 outer world; and the middle stage of con- 
 sideration or contemplation or thinking is 
 only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, 
 both of whose ends have their point of 
 application in the outer world. If it should 
 ever have no roots in the outer world, if 
 it should ever happen that it led to no 
 active measures, it would fail of its essential 
 function, and would have to be considered 
 either pathological or abortive. The cur- 
 rent of life which runs in at our eyes or 
 ears is meant to run out at our hands, 
 feet, or lips. The only use of the thoughts 
 it occasions while inside is to determine 
 its direction to whichever of these organs 
 shall, on the whole, under the circumstances 
 actually present, act in the way most pro- 
 pitious to our welfare."^ 
 
 > James, " Reflex Action and Theism," in « The Will to 
 Believe," pp. 113, 114- 
 
228 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 The difference between what may be 
 called the intellectualistic and the practical 
 views of thought and knowledge is admi- 
 rably stated in another passage by the same 
 brilliant writer. To the question, he says, 
 why we must intellectualize, interpret, and 
 understand our originally pure or raw expe- 
 rience, rationalism and pragmatism give dif- 
 ferent answers. " The rationalistic answer is 
 that the theoretic life is absolute and its 
 interests imperative, and that to understand 
 is simply the duty of man, and that he who 
 questions this need not be argued with, for 
 by the fact of arguing he gives away his 
 case. The pragmatic answer is that the 
 environment kills as well as sustains us, and 
 that the tendency of raw experience to extin- 
 guish the experient himself is lessened just 
 in the degree in which the elements in it 
 that have a practical bearing upon life are 
 analyzed out of the continuum and verbally 
 fixed and coupled together, so that we may 
 know what is in the wind for us and get 
 ready to react in time. Had pure experi- 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 229 
 
 ence, the pragmatist says, been always per- 
 fectly healthy, there would never have been 
 the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any 
 of its terms. We should just have experi- 
 enced inarticulately and unintellectually en- 
 joyed. This leaning on ' reaction ' in the 
 pragmatist account implies that whenever 
 we intellectualize a relatively pure experi- 
 ence, we ought to do so for the sake of 
 redescending to the purer or more concrete 
 level again ; and that if an intellect stays 
 aloft among its abstract terms and general- 
 ized relations, and does not reinsert itself 
 with its conclusions into some particular 
 point of the immediate stream of life, it 
 fails to finish out its function and leaves 
 its normal race unrun. 
 
 " Most rationalists nowadays will agree 
 that pragmatism gives a true enough ac- 
 count of the way in which our intellect 
 arose at first, but they will deny these later 
 implications. The case, they will say, re- 
 sembles that of sexual love. Originating in 
 the animal need of getting another genera- 
 
230 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 tion born, this passion has developed second- 
 arily such imperious spiritual needs that if 
 you ask why another generation ought to 
 be born at all, the answer is : ' Chiefly that 
 love may go on/ Just so with our intellect : 
 it originated as a practical means of serving 
 life; but it has developed incidentally the 
 function of understanding absolute truth ; 
 and life itself now seems to be given chiefly 
 as a means by which that function may be 
 prosecuted."^ All of which the upholders 
 of the practical or biological point of view 
 of course deny. 
 
 The advantages of this viewpoint are, of 
 course, too obvious to need enumeration. 
 It brings down knowledge from the skies 
 and makes it concrete, useful, and living. 
 It directs investigation into paths which 
 lead us to genuine and valuable results. 
 And it brings about a simplification and 
 systematization of our knowledge which, to 
 the scientist, is hard to overvalue. The 
 
 i"The Thing and its Relations," Jour.of PhU., Vol. II, 
 pp. 30-31. 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 231 
 
 various facts of psychology now get a defi- 
 nite setting and fit in with the biological 
 facts, with a place for everything and every- 
 thing in its place, like beads on a string. 
 The one great biological purpose — the 
 forwarding of the life of the individual and 
 of the race — is seen to dominate and to 
 determine each detail, and thus makes the 
 whole circle of the life sciences beautifully 
 systematic and complete. 
 
 Nor is it the life sciences alone that have 
 thus been systematized and illumined by 
 the newer point of view. The biologists 
 have found it possible to apply their for- 
 mula to ethics as well ; and by the aid of it 
 have sought to throw new light on the 
 meaning of duty and the moral imperative. 
 Thus from them we learn that man's chief 
 end is to put himself in line with the prog- 
 ress of evolution and to make the purpose 
 and aim of evolution his own. This aim 
 and purpose is, we are told, the preserva- 
 tion of the individual and the reproduction 
 and "development" of the race. This is 
 
232 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 shown by such facts as the following : 
 that the organism is brought to full per- 
 fection at the age of reproduction, that after 
 that age is passed degeneration begins to set 
 in, — the teeth decay and fall out, the eye 
 grows less keen, the bodily force is abated, 
 etc., etc. Individual preservation and race 
 reproduction being thus the purpose of the 
 evolutionary process, a " scientific " psychol- 
 ogy must interpret all of man's functions 
 in this light. His emotions are for the 
 sake of stimulating him to action, his 
 thought is for the guidance of that action, 
 the action always aiming directly or in- 
 directly at self-preservation or race repro- 
 duction. Nothing else is for its own sake ; 
 or, at any rate, if there seem to be other 
 ultimate aims than action, they are either 
 pathological or abortive. Hence knowledge 
 is purely "practical" and for the sake of 
 action, and the end of righteousness and 
 ground of morality is the preservation of 
 the race. 
 
 Nor have the physiological psychologists 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 233 
 
 been behindhand in assisting the biologists 
 to reformulate our ethical concepts. From 
 one of the most enthusiastic of their num- 
 ber, for example, I quote the following: — 
 "Although to-day the old-fashioned dual- 
 ism of sense and reason has been set aside 
 in the higher scientific circles, and although 
 psycho-physiological science is now in a con- 
 dition to provide the necessary data for a 
 detailed psycho-physiology of the Moral Im- 
 perative," ethics " still continues to waste 
 its efforts in the quest for the criterion of 
 conduct." To seek for a moral criterion is 
 vain, nor is the real truth about the prob- 
 lems of right and wrong to be discovered by 
 the antiquated and intellectualistic meth- 
 ods of the ethical philosophers. It is to 
 be gained only by a study of the reflex-arc. 
 Genuinely to understand the moral impera- 
 tive, it must be got at from the psycho- 
 physiological point of view. Such a truly 
 scientific study shows that "the Moral Im- 
 perative is the psychic correlate of a reflec- 
 tive, cerebro-spinal, ideo-motor process, the 
 
234 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 efferent end of which is organized into 
 motor tracts coordinated for a specific 
 action." ^ 
 
 After what I have said of the over-em- 
 phasis in years past upon the abstract intel- 
 lect and of the great value of the more 
 modem practical point of view, I hope I 
 shall not be accused of doing the latter 
 injustice if I say that in some ways the 
 reaction seems to have gone too far. The 
 last quotation will perhaps illustrate my 
 meaning. The biological tendency of con- 
 temporary thought has contributed a great 
 deal of value to our science and philosophy, 
 but like many another excellent tendency it 
 has, in my opinion, been somewhat over- 
 emphasized. It has pressed its splendidly 
 useful and illuminating formulae too far, it 
 has attempted to simplify too much, and in 
 doing so it has become somewhat narrow, 
 somewhat blind, and somewhat unempirical.. 
 Its formulae are able to explain a great deal 
 
 ' Professor Leuba in " The Psycho-physiology of the- 
 Moral Imperative," Am. Jour, of Psy.,Yo\. VIII, pp. 529-530. 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 235 
 
 of our reality; but, in our enthusiastic ap- 
 plication of them, many things which they 
 do not fit have been either bent out of shape 
 or completely disregarded and left out of 
 account. In fact the whole point and pur- 
 pose of this lecture is to protest against 
 this excessive practical or biological point 
 of view, and to urge a partial return to some- 
 thing like the old-fashioned intellectualism. 
 I am very far from denying either the ex- 
 cesses to which intellectualism has been 
 carried, or the great value of the newer 
 tendency. The reaction was needed, and it 
 has been wonderfully productive and fruit- 
 ful. But, to my thinking, the pendulum has 
 now swung too far in the anti-intellectualistic 
 direction. 
 
 Especially is this the case with the bio- 
 logical view of morality and knowledge. 
 As to the former I need only point out 
 that it is a very loose kind of reasoning 
 which would hold it possible to determine 
 anything about the highest good and the 
 moral imperative from either the course of 
 
236 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 evolution or the nature of the reflex-arc. It 
 may be indeed that the " progress " of evolu- 
 tion tends toward the highest good, but if 
 we know this to be so it is because we know 
 independently of the facts of evolution what 
 we mean by the highest good. The moral 
 imperative may indeed be " the psychic cor- 
 relate of a reflective, cerebro-spinal, ideo- 
 motor process," but it is not the moral 
 imperative because of its correlation to this 
 fearful and wonderful function. The ques- 
 tion how duty is possible, the question what 
 obligation means, are hardly answerable by 
 pointing to the reflex-arc. The truth is, in 
 our reaction against scholastic "logic-chop- 
 ping," description is being substituted for 
 definition, psychology for logic, the ought 
 is neglected for the is, and questions of 
 meaning are set aside or " answered " by 
 theories of origin. Above all (in "the 
 higher scientific circles" especially), the 
 mighty shibboleth " Evolution " and the 
 facts of physiological psychology are com- 
 ing to be regarded as having the answer 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 237 
 
 to nearly all real questions. " Develop- 
 ment" is the catchword of the times — 
 without too much curiosity as to what we 
 are developing toward, or why we should 
 do it. 
 
 Nor should the " practical " view of knowl- 
 edge go altogether unchallenged. No one, 
 indeed, would any longer deny the practical 
 value of knowledge and thought in guiding, 
 the reaction of the individual upon his eni 
 vironment. But when it is maintained that 
 this is the only value to be found in knowl- 
 edge and reason, that all human values are 
 ultimately matters of action, and that the 
 possession of truth is always a means and 
 never an end in itself, then, as it seems to 
 me, it is time to call a halt and to reassert 
 the old and trite thesis that to know the 
 truth is worth while for its own sake. The 
 whole splendid tradition of humanity's 
 scholars and thinkers from the Greeks to 
 the present day is evidence of this. The 
 existence of pragmatism itself proves it. The 
 noble army of "those who know," from 
 
238 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 their master down, rises up to testify to the 
 fact that knowledge itself, and even apart 
 from its practical results, is one of the 
 things most exceedingly worth while. And 
 not only " worth while " is it ; it is as gen- 
 uinely human, as genuinely natural and 
 normal as is digestion or movement or 
 reproduction. In the words of " that im- 
 mortal sentence" of Aristotle's — '■'^ All men 
 by nature desire knowledge^ ^ Nor can I 
 here refrain from quoting a little more at 
 length from "the master of those who know." 
 " If men philosophized in order to escape 
 ignorance it is evident that they pursued 
 wisdom just for the sake of knowing, not 
 for the sake of any advantage it might 
 bring. This is shown too by the ••urse 
 of events. For it is only after practically 
 all things that are necessary for the comfort 
 and convenience of life had been provided 
 that this kind of knowledge began to be 
 sought. Clearly, then, we pursue this knowl- 
 edge for the sake of no extraneous use to 
 
 1 "Metaphysics," I, i. 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 239 
 
 which it may be put; but, just as we call 
 a man free who serves his own and not 
 another's will, so also this science is the 
 only one of all the sciences that is liberal, 
 for it is the only one that exists for its 
 own sake. . . . More necessary, indeed, 
 every other science may be than this ; more 
 excellent there is none."^ 
 
 I have ventured to dwell thus at length 
 on the value of knowledge for its own sake 
 to the human mind because the tendencies 
 of contemporary thought (of which prag- 
 matism is one of the most conspicuous 
 representatives) seem to call for a protest 
 from some one. This is perhaps the first 
 time since the days of Plato when such a 
 protest has been needed. That the posses- 
 sion of reason and of truth was in itself one 
 of the many genuine values of human life, 
 irrespective of what you could do with them, 
 was to our fathers simply a truism. But 
 we, in our enthusiastic assertions that reason 
 is for the sake of life, are almost forgetting 
 
 ' lUd., I, 2 (BakewelPs Translation). 
 
240 WHAT IS PBAGMATISM? 
 
 that reason is a part and a product of life, 
 — in fact its finest product and " the sov- 
 ereign good of human nature" — and that 
 in a very true sense, therefore, life may 
 also be for the sake of reason. 
 
 And I speak of this not only because 
 the protest seems to me timely and need- 
 ful, but also because in the modern de- 
 thronement of reason, the new disregard 
 of certain old distinctions, and the partial 
 substitution of psychology for logic, there 
 is apt to be involved a loss of respect for 
 careful thought and a decreased endeavor 
 after logical consistency. In our revolt 
 against " rationalistic abstractions " and 
 "pure reason" we are in danger of for- 
 getting that the Principles of Contradiction 
 and Identity still hold whether we recog- 
 nize them or not, and that the canons of 
 Aristotle's Logic cannot be disobeyed with 
 impunity. We decry the logomachy, the 
 hair-splitting distinctions, and the "logic- 
 chopping " of the scholastics ; yet it may 
 well be that in throwing these aside we 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 241 
 
 are surrendering some of the clear think- 
 ing that went with them. 
 
 Unless I have quite failed of my purpose 
 in the preceding lectures, I need bring 
 forth no further evidence of the dangers 
 just referred to than pragmatism itself. 
 Pragmatism is one of the signs of the 
 times and is perhaps the most typical repre- 
 sentative of the tendencies of which I have 
 been speaking. A brief repetition and sum- 
 mary of its principal positions will therefore 
 not be out of place in concluding this, our 
 final lecture. 
 
 Pragmatism has too great contempt for 
 " logic-chopping " and " hair-splitting dis- 
 tinctions " to be willing to define for us 
 exactly its view of the nature of meaning. 
 The meaning of any concept, it assures us, 
 is limited to the future practical conse- 
 quences which come from it; — but, as it 
 turns out, these ''practical consequences " 
 mean theoretical ones also ; and it is not at 
 all certain that the "future consequences" 
 need be future after all. Pragmatism is in- 
 
242 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 deed fully persuaded that nothing can have 
 meaning which has not consequences in 
 some one's experience ; but whether this 
 " some one " refers merely to " ourselves " 
 or may include sentient beings of the re- 
 mote past and the distant future, God, and 
 even purely imaginary beings, we cannot 
 yet be perfectly sure. The new doctrine of 
 meaning, on which pragmatism is founded, 
 therefore amounts to this: that meaning is 
 somehow or other related to experience, 
 and probably limited to human experience. 
 Further than this the pragmatist is pre- 
 vented from refining, — for fear, apparently, 
 of chopping logic. 
 
 In his treatment of truth the pragmatist 
 again on principle refuses (or is unable) to 
 recognize a somewhat subtle but very real 
 and important distinction; namely, that 
 between the meaning of a thing and the 
 proof of it, the distinction between the 
 nature of a relation and our knowledge of 
 it. The assertion that an idea might be 
 true when not known to be true seems to 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 243 
 
 him meaningless; nor is he willing to admit 
 any distinction between the truth of an 
 idea and the concrete verification of its 
 truth. When you prove the truth of a 
 thing, the proof and the thing proved are 
 one. In like manner, once you admit that 
 a true idea usually " works," so that you 
 can test its truth by its working, pragma- 
 tism immediately concludes that its truth 
 consists in its working, that its working 
 is all you mean by its truth. In other 
 words, since trueness and working usually 
 go together, the two are identified, and we 
 are told that we have here not two conJ 
 cepts but one, and that when we say truel 
 ness we mean working. And the question 
 is not even asked whether the idea is true 
 because it works or works because it is 
 true — the one conception being simply 
 substituted for the other.* All of which, 
 in good, old-fashioned, much-derided scho- 
 lastic language, is a complete confusion 
 
 ' Here I should make exception of Professor James, who, 
 in one passage, says plainly (as has been pointed out) that 
 the idea works because it is true. 
 
244 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 between " essence " and " accidents " ; i.e., 
 between what we mean by truth and the 
 mark or incidental quality by which we 
 decide whether we have it or not. 
 
 Failure to make distinctions of this kind 
 and to seek for exactness in definition, and 
 possibly also in part a pragmatic belittling 
 of the rules of formal logic have led the 
 pragmatists into the still more serious logi- 
 cal difficulties pointed out in our second 
 lecture on Truth. The moderate pragma- 
 tists hold that the working of an idea is 
 essential to its truth, yet that the idea may 
 be true before it works ; while the radical 
 school which makes the truth of an idea 
 altogether a matter of satisfactory sequent 
 experience is forced thereby to admit that 
 under certain quite natural circumstances 
 contradictory opposites must both be true at 
 the same time and in the same sense. And 
 both schools in all their writings are con- 
 stantly seeking to establish for their theory 
 the very kind of truth which that theory 
 maintains is impossible and meaningless. 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT GF VIEW 245 
 
 In the pragmatic doctrine of knowledge 
 both the odd characteristics of the " large, 
 loose way of pragmatism " (as the prag- 
 matists so picturesquely and truthfully 
 designate their method) reappear ; namely, 
 its curious habit of shying at impor- 
 tant distinctions and the consequent 
 want of consistency that naturally results 
 from looseness of thought. Thus prag- 
 matism will not admit that there is any 
 conceivable difference between a defini- 
 tion of the nature of knowledge and a 
 psychological description of the mental pro- 
 cesses experienced by the individual when 
 he knows. It will not consider the possi- 
 bility that knowledge can be a different 
 sort of thing from an individual's mental 
 process. When you ask what is meant by 
 knowledge pragmatism answers by telling 
 you how you feel when you have it. The 
 possibility of transcendence being thus dog- 
 matically denied, error too becomes, in the 
 long run, merely the way you feel. It is, 
 therefore, quite possible for you and me to 
 
246 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 hold diametrically opposite views on the 
 same subject and both be said to know, 
 provided we are both satisfied and remain 
 satisfied with our respective opinions. Each 
 man thus becomes for himself the measure 
 of all things, and each man has knowledge 
 provided his experience continues to feel 
 satisfactory. And yet the pragmatist is cer- 
 tain that on this question he is in posses- 
 sion of knowledge and you are not, no 
 matter how you feel about it. 
 
 These principles concerning meaning, 
 truth, and knowledge are, as I have said, 
 the presuppositions and foundations of prag- 
 matism. But before bringing these lectures 
 to a close one word more should perhaps 
 be added concerning the general pragmatic 
 view of metaphysics and religion. Before 
 doing this, however, I must make a dis- 
 tinction between the pragmatists ; for in 
 their metaphysical and religious attitudes 
 they are far from being of one mind. 
 
 Professor James has divided all thinkers 
 into two types, the " tough-minded " and the 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 247 
 
 " tender-minded." The former tend to take 
 the naturalistic, scientific, strictly logical 
 view of the world, uninfluenced by human 
 aspirations and desires. The latter look at 
 things in more idealistic fashion ; with them 
 religion and beauty and optimism have 
 more influence than the bare facts of sci- 
 ence or the cold results of reasoning. James 
 has also pointed out that pragmatism is a 
 compromise between the two types, sharing 
 in the characteristics of each. This de- 
 scription seems to me most apt, in respect 
 both to the two tj^ies in general and to the 
 position of pragmatism in particular. To 
 carry it still further into detail, one might 
 say more specifically that the pragmatist 
 is tough-minded intellectually and tender- 
 minded emotionally; or, better still, perhaps, 
 that he is tough-minded and tender-hearted. 
 It might, however, be more exact to say 
 that there is really no such being as "the 
 pragmatist," but that there are many prag- 
 matists and that they are divisible roughly 
 into two schools, — the tough-minded and 
 the tender-minded respectively. 
 
248 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 The tender-minded school is by far the more 
 popular of the two — and, I suppose, justly 
 so. It is interested in the logical and episte- 
 mological principles of pragmatism not so 
 much on their own account, as for the sake 
 of the more humanly important and interest- 
 ing conclusions that may be drawn from 
 them. Its heart is really not so much in 
 logic as in metaphysics and especially in 
 religion. Its pragmatist technique it re- 
 gards purely pragmatically, as a means 
 rather than as an end. The eternally ab- 
 sorbing questions of philosophy which have 
 always appealed and always will appeal to 
 the popular and the philosophic mind alike, 
 are the things it really cares for. It is 
 also essentially human. It dislikes blood- 
 less abstractions and technical terminology 
 and strives always to be clear, concrete, 
 and vital. It is broad in its sympathies, 
 charitable in its interpretations, and impa- 
 tient only of scholastic logic-worship and 
 the rationalistic Absolute. It has a fine 
 feeling for reality, and will not allow its 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 249 
 
 own logical presuppositions permanently 
 to hide from it the real living world. Its 
 view of the universe being essentially opti- 
 mistic (or at least " melioristic "), it likes 
 interesting things and believes in them, 
 Uninteresting things it finds hard to accept. 
 [The rationalistic view of the world must be 
 (false because it is " inert," " static," " stag- 
 1 nantly intellectualistic," — and the opposite 
 ' view must be true because it is " dynamic " 
 I and " dramatic." The tender-minded prag- 
 matist is, in fact, the very impersonation 
 lof the will to belifeve and the great pro- 
 ■tagonist in the world of philosophy of the 
 strenuous life. He treats philosophical 
 questions in a large, generous, practical 
 way, hates logic-chopping, and does not 
 take even his own principles too seriously. 
 It is fortunate for his conclusions that 
 this is the case ; for they are reached not 
 because of the pragmatist principles so much 
 as in spite of them. No better illustration 
 could be given of the oft-repeated remark 
 
 « 
 
 that our philosophical arguments are, as a 
 
250 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 rule, afterthoughts which we construct to 
 excuse or buoy up beUefs that originate 
 and subsist quite independently of reason- 
 ing. Only, in the case of pragmatism the 
 philosophical presuppositions do not even 
 excuse the belief. The tender-minded prag- 
 matist accepts " God " and the conclusions 
 of a religious metaphysics in much the 
 same way as does the old-fashioned thinker, 
 quite oblivious of the fact that if knowledge 
 be merely experienced transition and truth 
 be merely satisfactory consequences and 
 transcendence be nothing but nonsense, it 
 becomes quite absurd to take the old 
 religious beliefs seriously. 
 
 This fact is seen with perfect distinct- 
 ness by the tough-minded pragmatist. He 
 was, in truth, the first to point it out, nor 
 has he been the last in drawing attention 
 to the inconsistencies of his tender-minded 
 brother. Thus, as we saw in the last 
 lecture. Professor Dewey, with his tough- 
 minded disregard for our prejudices, shows 
 that if we cling to our pragmatist presup- 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 251 
 
 positions we can no longer mean by " God " 
 a " seeing force that runs things," but only 
 a vague expectation of better issues in our 
 own experience. Both he and James, in 
 fact, unite in saying : " This vague con- 
 fidence in the future is the sole pragmatic 
 meaning at present discernible in the terms 
 design and designer." For the old notion 
 of " God " as an antecedent Power who 
 was and is and is to come, the consistent 
 , pragmatist will carefully " substitute " the 
 concrete differences which under certain 
 conditions we shall experience, and he will 
 "simply abolish the meaning of an antece- 
 dent power." 
 
 With the same unemotional logic, the 
 tough-minded pragmatist points out that 
 the biological view of thought and knowl- 
 edge leads one inevitably to the same 
 conclusion and shuts out the hypothetical 
 objects of metaphysics and theology from 
 the proper field of human thought. The 
 mind exists for the purpose of guiding the 
 reaction of the psycho-physical organism 
 
252 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 upon its surroundings, and " its proper and 
 legitimate object is that relationship of 
 organism and environment in which func- 
 tioning is most amply and effectively at- 
 tained." The only realities that have or 
 can have any genuine meaning for us are 
 of the " practical " sort. All other " reality " 
 — " metaphysical reality at large " — may, 
 therefore, go to its own place. 
 
 By thus deducing the logical conse- 
 quences of his doctrine the tough-minded 
 pragmatist has put us decidedly in his debt ; 
 for now we can see clearly that the prag- 
 matist controversy is not a mere academic 
 discussion, but has truly pragmatic impor- 
 tance. For it opens up the whole ques- 
 tion of the nature of man and his position 
 in Reality. Is man indeed what the bio- 
 logical pragmatist considers him — a crea- 
 ture of the environment, a successful animal, 
 whose one aim is practical reaction upon 
 his surroundings.? Or is he a twofold 
 being.? Is he what the pragmatist de- 
 scribes and, in addition to that, also what 
 
THE "PRACTICAL" POINT OF VIEW 253 
 
 Plato thought him — a citizen of the realm 
 of eternal reason, the outgrown ape, who 
 means more than he is, whose reach should 
 and does exceed his grasp, who " partly 
 is and wholly hopes to be " ? 
 
 If the pragmatist is right, if it be true 
 that man cannot mean more than he ex- 
 periences, that his reach cannot exceed his 
 grasp, if " God " and the " moral nature of 
 the Universe " in the old sense are really 
 meaningless terms, and if all this follows 
 inevitably from the analysis of our mean- 
 ings and our knowledge, then let us by all 
 means know it, and give in our adherence 
 to the pragmatic and biological view. But 
 let us not accept this analysis too lightly 
 nor without long weighing of its worth, 
 forgetful of the consequences which such 
 acceptance must logically carry in its train. 
 The concepts we have been considering in 
 these lectures may have seemed abstract 
 and lifeless, but the deepest questions of 
 our destiny ultimately hang upon them. 
 And the attitude which we shall adopt 
 
254 WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? 
 
 toward the pragmatist principles will, if we 
 be consistent, determine our whole philos- 
 ophy, our whole outlook upon life and 
 upon the world. If this fact be clearly- 
 grasped I am sure no further excuse need 
 be pleaded for the difficult and, I fear, 
 dreary discussions that I have led you 
 through during the course of these lectures. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute, 37, 56, S7i 100. 184, 
 
 187, 200, 248. 
 Action in Pragmatism, 16, 18, 19, 
 
 226, 227, 237. 
 Aristotle, 223, 238-240. 
 
 Bacon, 213, 215. 
 
 Biological View of Mind, 109, 
 113, 225-230, 234-237, 251- 
 
 Bosanquet, 112. 
 
 Bradley, 31, 37, 38, 52, 53, 67. 
 
 Cicero, 193. 
 
 "Claim," 57-63, 74, 75, 83, 87-89, 
 
 98, 103, 127. 
 Correspondence Theory of Truth, 
 
 6S-79, 95. 96. 102. 106. 108, 
 
 III note, 128. 
 
 Dessoir, 226. 
 
 Dewey, 9 note, 17, 21, 37, 57, 74 
 note, 92, 93, 97, 100, loi, 104, 
 108, 109, III, 114, 115, 123 note, 
 124 note, 125 note, 143, 145, 
 146, 150, 152, 163, 166, 179, 
 180, 186, 18S, 200-303, '°5> 
 207, 250. 
 
 Eastman, 204 note. 
 Ethics, see Morality. 
 Ewer, 68. 
 
 Faith, 13, 186, 190-194. 
 Fichte, 194. 
 
 Future Experience, 19, 38-37, 
 199, 241, 351. 
 
 God, 12, 30, 35, 42, 13s, 184, 
 196-206, 209, 242, 250, 251, 
 =53- 
 
 "Idea" in Pragmatism, 109-115, 
 
 124 note, 125 note. 
 Intellectualism, see Rationalism. 
 
 James, 10, 12-14, 19. =Oi =3. =5. 
 26, 29, 30 note, 31, 33 note, 
 37, 41, 42 note, 57, 67, 68, 
 71, 74 note, 76, 79, 85, 90, 93- 
 97, 100, loi, 108, 129, 139, 142, 
 146-150, 152-159, 166, 180, 182, 
 183, 188, 191, 194, 201-203, 
 215 note, 226-230, 243 note, 
 246, 247, 251. 
 
 Joachim, 52. 
 
 Kant, 13, 193. 
 
 Knowledge, 9, 131, 135-171, 177, 
 179, 196-199, 206, 213, 215, 
 216, 218, 220, 225, 230, 232, 
 235. 237-239, 242, 345, 346, 
 250, 253. 
 
 Leuba, 233, 234. 
 Locke, 135, 136. 
 Logic, 14, 124 note, 136 note, 129, 
 
 130, 178, 236, 244. 
 Lotze, 37. 
 Lowell, 28. 
 
 Man, 222-232, 352, 253. 
 Materialism, 30, 31, 33-36, 303. 
 Meaning, 9-46, 50, 63-65, 72, 74, 
 75. 78, 79. 139. 154. <77. 
 
256 
 
 INDEX 
 
 186, 195-200, 202-206, 209, 
 218, 221, 236, 241, 242, 246, 
 253- 
 
 Metaphysics, 13, 39, 4i, 43, 44, 
 
 177, 207, 246, 248, 250-253. 
 Method in Pragmatism, 10, 12, 20, 
 
 38-45- 
 Modified Pragmatism, 94-108, 
 
 244. 
 Montague, 29 note i, 115 note. 
 Moore, 114 note, 123 note. 
 Morality, 13, 231-236. 
 
 Ostwald, 14. 
 
 Papini, 22, 43, 44, 210. 
 
 Paulsen, 68. 
 
 Pearson, 14. 
 
 Pierce, 15, 16, 19. 
 
 "Plan of Action," 17, 109-115, 
 
 144. 
 Plato, 127, 137, 141, 143. 165, 193, 
 
 220-223, 239, 253. 
 Practical Experience, 16, 19, 25, 
 
 28, 241. 
 
 Rationalism, 77, 142, 220-224, 
 228-230, 235, 237-240, 249. 
 
 Realism, 37, 65, 223. 
 
 Reality, Pragmatic Theory of, 9, 
 178-180. 
 
 Religion, 13, 42, 175-210, 246- 
 248, 250-253. 
 
 Ritschl, 194. 
 
 Royce, 17, 37, 114. 
 
 Russell, 130 note 2, 210 note. 
 
 Satisfaction, see Usefulness. 
 Schiller, 22, 23, 25, 26, 37, 53, 57, 
 
 59. 71-73. 74 note, 75, 87-89, 
 
 92, 97, 101-103, 130, 179, 182, 
 
 185, 200. 
 Scholasticism, 42, 223-225, 240. 
 Science, 13, 14, 55, no, 185, 187, 
 
 224, 233, 239, 247. 
 Skepticism, 130, 131, 191, 197, 
 
 201, 205, 210. 
 Socrates, 220 note. 
 Successful Working, see Useful- 
 
 Theism, 30, 31, 33-36, 203. 
 
 Theoretic Interests in Pragma- 
 tism, 23-25, 39-43- 
 
 Transcendence Theory of Knowl- 
 xcdge, 138-140, 143, 149-162, 
 168-171, 197-199, 206, 208, 
 
 245. 250- 
 Trueness, 52, 60, 65, 67, 70, 74, 
 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 107, 112, 
 
 243- 
 Truth, 8, 13, 15, 22, 45, 46, 47- 
 131. 141. 161, 177, 181, 185, 
 196-201, 204, 206, 209, 213, 
 215-220, 237, 239, 242-244, 246, 
 250. 
 
 Usefulness, 13, 15, 61, 62, 90-121, 
 124 note, 125 note, 126, 145, 
 158, 159, 164-169, 185-189, 
 196, 198-200, 204, 206, 243, 
 244. 250- 
 
 Verifiability, 94, 101-104, 118, 
 119. 
 
 Verification, 61-64, 78, 86-88, 90- 
 107, 115-121, 127, 128, 145, 165, 
 185-190, 196, 198, 243,