Meaning of Truth Index

THE MEANING OF TRUTH

A SEQUEL TO 'PRAGMATISM'

BY WILLIAM JAMES

PREFACE

THE pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the
relation called 'truth' which may obtain between an idea
(opinion, belief, statement, or what not) and its object. 'Truth,' I
there say, 'is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their
agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with
reality. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this
definition as a matter of course.

'Where our ideas [do] not copy definitely their object, what does
agreement with that object mean? ... Pragmatism asks its
usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what
concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual
life? What experiences [may] be different from those which would
obtain if the belief were false? How will the truth be realized?
What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential
terms?" The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the
answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE,
CORROBORATE, AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That
is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that
therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known
as.

'The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.
Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events.
Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its
verifying itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of
its validATION. [Footnote: But 'VERIFIABILITY,' I add, 'is as good
as verification. For one truth-process completed, there are a
million in our lives that function in [the] state of nascency. They
lead us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings
of the object they envisage; and then, if everything, runs on
harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we
omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens.']

'To agree in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be
guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be
put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or
something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better
either intellectually or practically .... Any idea that helps us
to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the
reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress in
frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the
reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet
the requirement. It will be true of that reality.

'THE TRUE, to put it very briefly, IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY
OF OUR THINKING, JUST AS THE RIGHT IS ONLY THE EXPEDIENT IN THE WAY
OF OUR BEHAVING. Expedient in almost any fashion, and expedient in
the long run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently
all the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther
experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways
of BOILING OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.'

This account of truth, following upon the similar ones given by
Messrs. Dewey and Schiller, has occasioned the liveliest
discussion. Few critics have defended it, most of them have scouted
it. It seems evident that the subject is a hard one to understand,
under its apparent simplicity; and evident also, I think, that
the definitive settlement of it will mark a turning-point in the
history of epistemology, and consequently in that of general
philosophy. In order to make my own thought more accessible to those
who hereafter may have to study the question, I have collected in
the volume that follows all the work of my pen that bears directly
on the truth-question. My first statement was in 1884, in the
article that begins the present volume. The other papers follow in
the order of their publication. Two or three appear now for the
first time.

One of the accusations which I oftenest have had to meet is that of
making the truth of our religious beliefs consist in their 'feeling
good' to us, and in nothing else. I regret to have given some excuse
for this charge, by the unguarded language in which, in the book
Pragmatism, I spoke of the truth of the belief of certain
philosophers in the absolute. Explaining why I do not believe in the
absolute myself (p. 78), yet finding that it may secure 'moral
holidays' to those who need them, and is true in so far forth (if to
gain moral holidays be a good), [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 75.] I
offered this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my enemies. But they,
as is only too common with such offerings, trampled the gift under
foot and turned and rent the giver. I had counted too much on their
good will--oh for the rarity of Christian charity under the sun! Oh
for the rarity of ordinary secular intelligence also! I had supposed
it to be matter of common observation that, of two competing views
of the universe which in all other respects are equal, but of which
the first denies some vital human need while the second satisfies
it, the second will be favored by sane men for the simple reason
that it makes the world seem more rational. To choose the first view
under such circumstances would be an ascetic act, an act of
philosophic self-denial of which no normal human being would be
guilty. Using the pragmatic test of the meaning of concepts, I had
shown the concept of the absolute to MEAN nothing but the
holiday giver, the banisher of cosmic fear. One's objective
deliverance, when one says 'the absolute exists,' amounted, on my
showing, just to this, that 'some justification of a feeling
of security in presence of the universe,' exists, and that
systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of security would be
to do violence to a tendency in one's emotional life which
might well be respected as prophetic.

Apparently my absolutist critics fail to see the workings of their
own minds in any such picture, so all that I can do is to apologize,
and take my offering back. The absolute is true in NO way then, and
least of all, by the verdict of the critics, in the way which I
assigned!

My treatment of 'God,' 'freedom,' and 'design' was similar.
Reducing, by the pragmatic test, the meaning of each of these
concepts to its positive experienceable operation, I showed them all
to mean the same thing, viz., the presence of 'promise' in the
world. 'God or no God?' means 'promise or no promise?' It seems to
me that the alternative is objective enough, being a question as to
whether the cosmos has one character or another, even though our own
provisional answer be made on subjective grounds. Nevertheless
christian and non-christian critics alike accuse me of summoning
people to say 'God exists,' EVEN WHEN HE DOESN'T EXIST, because
forsooth in my philosophy the 'truth' of the saying doesn't
really mean that he exists in any shape whatever, but only that to
say so feels good.

Most of the pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare is over what the
word 'truth' shall be held to signify, and not over any of the
facts embodied in truth-situations; for both pragmatists and anti-
pragmatists believe in existent objects, just as they believe in our
ideas of them. The difference is that when the pragmatists speak of
truth, they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely
their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth
they seem most often to mean something about the objects. Since the
pragmatist, if he agrees that an idea is 'really' true, also
agrees to whatever it says about its object; and since most anti-
pragmatists have already come round to agreeing that, if the object
exists, the idea that it does so is workable; there would seem so
little left to fight about that I might well be asked why instead of
reprinting my share in so much verbal wrangling, I do not show my
sense of 'values' by burning it all up.

I understand the question and I will give my answer. I am interested
in another doctrine in philosophy to which I give the name of
radical empiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the
pragmatist theory of truth is a step of first-rate importance in
making radical empiricism prevail. Radical empiricism consists first
of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a
generalized conclusion.

The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from
experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad
libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic
debate.]

The statement of fact is that the relations between things,
conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of
direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the
things themselves.

The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves
parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in
short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but
possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.

The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is
the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given
is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world
out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there.
In the prevalent idealism this agency is represented as the absolute
all-witness which 'relates' things together by throwing
'categories' over them like a net. The most peculiar and unique,
perhaps, of all these categories is supposed to be the truth-
relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of
them a knower, and of the other a thing known, yet which is itself
contentless experientially, neither describable, explicable, nor
reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by uttering the name
'truth.'

The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that
it has a definite content, and that everything in it is
experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The
'workableness' which ideas must have, in order to be true, means
particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or
possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete
experience. Were this pragmatic contention admitted, one great point
in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored, for the
relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it, is held
by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to stand
outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation,
so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate
rally.

Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this
volume can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of
resistance, not only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also
(for if the truth-relation were transcendent, others might be so
too), that I feel strongly the strategical importance of having
them definitely met and got out of the way. What our critics most
persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth, yet
they do not constitute it. It is numerically additional to them,
prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise to be explained
BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for our enemies to
establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically additional and
prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since the
OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists plead IT,
and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the bystanders
the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the
object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that our critics
have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this
volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real
existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that
the existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,'
is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work
successfully, if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse
of language, to say the least, to transfer the word 'truth' from the
idea to the object's existence, when the falsehood of ideas that
won't work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of
those that will.

I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries.
But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word
'truth' represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something
mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens
fair and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism
on its merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its
workings, or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up
those workings; it will mean neither the idea's object, nor anything
'saltatory' inside the idea, that terms drawn from experience cannot
describe.

One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes
made between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing
the object's existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which
they, as more radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself
understand these authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting
the transcendency of the object (provided it be an experienceable
object) to the subject, in the truth-relation. Dewey in
particular has insisted almost ad nauseam that the whole meaning of
our cognitive states and processes lies in the way they intervene in
the control and revaluation of independent existences or facts. His
account of knowledge is not only absurd, but meaningless, unless
independent existences be there of which our ideas take account, and
for the transformation of which they work. But because he and
Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent' in
the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics
pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that
they deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects
external to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote:
It gives me pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the
pragmatistic church, so far as his epistemology goes. See his
vigorous book, The Metaphysics of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A.
(London, Black, 1908.) The work What is Reality? by Francis Howe
Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the acquaintance only while
correcting these proofs, contains some striking anticipations of the
later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking, by Irving
E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I
am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the
extraordinarily acute article by H. V. Knox. in the Quarterly Review
for April, 1909.]

It seems incredible that educated and apparently sincere
critics should so fail to catch their adversary's point of view.

What misleads so many of them is possibly also the fact that the
universes of discourse of Schiller, Dewey, and myself are panoramas
of different extent, and that what the one postulates explicitly the
other provisionally leaves only in a state of implication, while the
reader thereupon considers it to be denied. Schiller's universe is
the smallest, being essentially a psychological one. He starts with
but one sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the
independent objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most
successfully validated of all claims is that such facts are
there. My universe is more essentially epistemological. I start with
two things, the objective facts and the claims, and indicate which
claims, the facts being there, will work successfully as
the latter's substitutes and which will not. I call the former
claims true. Dewey's panorama, if I understand this colleague, is
the widest of the three, but I refrain from giving my own account of
its complexity. Suffice it that he holds as firmly as I do to
objects independent of our judgments. If I am wrong in saying this,
he must correct me. I decline in this matter to be corrected at
second hand.

I have not pretended in the following pages to consider all the
critics of my account of truth, such as Messrs. Taylor, Lovejoy,
Gardiner, Bakewell, Creighton, Hibben, Parodi, Salter, Carus,
Lalande, Mentre, McTaggart, G. E. Moore, Ladd and others,
especially not Professor Schinz, who has published under the title
of Anti-pragmatisme an amusing sociological romance. Some of these
critics seem to me to labor under an inability almost pathetic, to
understand the thesis which they seek to refute. I imagine that most
of their difficulties have been answered by anticipation elsewhere
in this volume, and I am sure that my readers will thank me for not
adding more repetition to the fearful amount that is already there.

95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE (MASS.), August, 1909.

CONTENTS

I       THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION

II      THE TIGERS IN INDIA

III     HUMANISM AND TRUTH

IV      THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN

V       THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

VI      A WORD MORE ABOUT TRUTH

VII     PROFESSOR PRATT ON TRUTH

VIII    THE PRAGMATIST ACCOUNT OF TRUTH AND ITS MIS-UNDERSTANDERS

X       THE EXISTENCE OF JULIUS CAESAR

XI      THE ABSOLUTE AND THE STRENUOUS LIFE

XII     PROFESSOR HEBERT ON PRAGMATISM

XIII    ABSTRACTIONISM AND 'RELATIVISMUS'

XIV     TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

XV      A DIALOGUE

THE MEANING OF TRUTH

I

THE FUNCTION OF COGNITION
[Footnote: Read before the Aristotelian Society, December 1,
1884, and first published in Mind, vol. x (1885).--This, and
the following articles have received a very slight verbal
revision, consisting mostly in the omission of redundancy.]

The following inquiry is (to use a distinction familiar
to readers of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson) not an inquiry into
the 'how it comes,' but into the 'what it is' of
cognition. What we call acts of cognition are evidently
realized through what we call brains and their events,
whether there be 'souls' dynamically connected with the
brains or not. But with neither brains nor souls has this
essay any business to transact. In it we shall simply
assume that cognition IS produced, somehow, and limit
ourselves to asking what elements it contains, what
factors it implies.

Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it
implies is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition
shall take place. Having elsewhere used the word 'feeling' to
designate generically all states of consciousness considered
subjectively, or without respect to their possible function, I shall
then say that, whatever elements an act of cognition may imply
besides, it at least implies the existence of a FEELING. [If the
reader share the current antipathy to the word 'feeling,' he may
substitute for it, wherever I use it, the word 'idea,' taken in the
old broad Lockian sense, or he may use the clumsy phrase 'state of
consciousness,' or finally he may say 'thought' instead.]

Now it is to be observed that the common consent of mankind has
agreed that some feelings are cognitive and some are simple
facts having a subjective, or, what one might almost call a
physical, existence, but no such self-transcendent function as
would be implied in their being pieces of knowledge. Our task
is again limited here. We are not to ask, 'How is self-transcendence
possible?' We are only to ask, 'How comes it that common sense
has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed not only to be
possible but actual? And what are the marks used by common sense
to distinguish those cases from the rest?' In short, our inquiry is
a chapter in descriptive psychology,--hardly anything more.

Condillac embarked on a quest similar to this by his famous
hypothesis of a statue to which various feelings were successively
imparted. Its first feeling was supposed to be one of fragrance. But
to avoid all possible complication with the question of genesis, let
us not attribute even to a statue the possession of our imaginary
feeling. Let us rather suppose it attached to no matter, nor
localized at any point in space, but left swinging IN VACUO, as
it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a god. And let us also, to
escape entanglement with difficulties about the physical or
psychical nature of its 'object' not call it a feeling of
fragrance or of any other determinate sort, but limit ourselves to
assuming that it is a feeling of Q. What is true of it under this
abstract name will be no less true of it in any more particular
shape (such as fragrance, pain, hardness) which the reader may
suppose.

Now, if this feeling of Q be the only creation of the god, it will
of course form the entire universe. And if, to escape the cavils of
that large class of persons who believe that SEMPER IDEM SENTIRE AC
NON SENTIRE are the same, [Footnote:1 'The Relativity of Knowledge,'
held in this sense, is, it may be observed in passing, one of the
oddest of philosophic superstitions. Whatever facts may be cited in
its favor are due to the properties of nerve-tissue, which may be
exhausted by too prolonged an excitement. Patients with neuralgias
that last unremittingly for days can, however, assure us that
the limits of this nerve-law are pretty widely drawn. But if
we physically could get a feeling that should last
eternally unchanged, what atom of logical or psychological argument
is there to prove that it would not be felt as long as it
lasted, and felt for just what it is, all that time? The reason for
the opposite prejudice seems to be our reluctance to think that
so stupid a thing as such a feeling would necessarily be, should be
allowed to fill eternity with its presence. An
interminable acquaintance, leading to no knowledge-about,--such
would be its condition.] we allow the feeling to be of as short a
duration as they like, that universe will only need to last an
infinitesimal part of a second. The feeling in question will thus be
reduced to its fighting weight, and all that befalls it in the way
of a cognitive function must be held to befall in the brief
instant of its quickly snuffed-out life,--a life, it will also be
noticed, that has no other moment of consciousness either preceding
or following it.

Well now, can our little feeling, thus left alone in the universe,--
for the god and we psychological critics may be supposed left out of
the account,--can the feeling, I say, be said to have any sort of a
cognitive function? For it to KNOW, there must be something to be
known. What is there, on the present supposition? One may reply,
'the feeling's content q.' But does it not seem more proper to call
this the feeling's QUALITY than its content? Does not the
word 'content' suggest that the feeling has already dirempted itself
as an act from its content as an object? And would it be quite safe
to assume so promptly that the quality q of a feeling is one and the
same thing with a feeling of the quality q? The quality q, so far,
is an entirely subjective fact which the feeling carries so to speak
endogenously, or in its pocket. If any one pleases to dignify so
simple a fact as this by the name of knowledge, of course
nothing can prevent him. But let us keep closer to the path of
common usage, and reserve the name knowledge for the cognition of
'realities,' meaning by realities things that exist independently of
the feeling through which their cognition occurs. If the content of
the feeling occur nowhere in the universe outside of the feeling
itself, and perish with the feeling, common usage refuses to call it
a reality, and brands it as a subjective feature of the
feeling's constitution, or at the most as the feeling's DREAM.

For the feeling to be cognitive in the specific sense, then, it must
be self-transcendent; and we must prevail upon the god to CREATE A
REALITY OUTSIDE OF IT to correspond to its intrinsic quality Q. Thus
only can it be redeemed from the condition of being a solipsism. If
now the new created reality RESEMBLE the feeling's quality Q I say
that the feeling may be held by us TO BE COGNIZANT OF THAT REALITY.

This first instalment of my thesis is sure to be attacked. But one
word before defending it 'Reality' has become our warrant for
calling a feeling cognitive; but what becomes our warrant for
calling anything reality? The only reply is--the faith of the
present critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he
finds himself subject to a belief in SOME realities, even though his
realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the next.
Whenever he finds that the feeling he is studying contemplates what
he himself regards as a reality, he must of course admit the feeling
itself to be truly cognitive. We are ourselves the critics here; and
we shall find our burden much lightened by being allowed to take
reality in this relative and provisional way. Every science must
make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but fallible
mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do it by
means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the
fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly
confess that our results in this field are affected by our own
liability to err. THE MOST WE CAN CLAIM IS, THAT WHAT WE SAY ABOUT
COGNITION MAY BE COUNTED AS TRUE AS WHAT WE SAY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.
If our hearers agree with us about what are to be held 'realities,'
they will perhaps also agree to the reality of our doctrine of the
way in which they are known. We cannot ask for more.

Our terminology shall follow the spirit of these remarks. We will
deny the function of knowledge to any feeling whose quality or
content we do not ourselves believe to exist outside of that feeling
as well as in it. We may call such a feeling a dream if we like; we
shall have to see later whether we can call it a fiction or an
error.

To revert now to our thesis. Some persons will immediately cry out,
'How CAN a reality resemble a feeling?' Here we find how wise we
were to name the quality of the feeling by an algebraic letter Q. We
flank the whole difficulty of resemblance between an inner state
and an outward reality, by leaving it free to any one to postulate
as the reality whatever sort of thing he thinks CAN resemble a
feeling,--if not an outward thing, then another feeling like
the first one,--the mere feeling Q in the critic's mind for example.
Evading thus this objection, we turn to another which is sure to
be urged.

It will come from those philosophers to whom 'thought,' in the sense
of a knowledge of relations, is the all in all of mental life; and
who hold a merely feeling consciousness to be no better--one would
sometimes say from their utterances, a good deal worse--than no
consciousness at all. Such phrases as these, for example, are common
to-day in the mouths of those who claim to walk in the footprints
of Kant and Hegel rather than in the ancestral English paths: 'A
perception detached from all others, "left out of the heap we call a
mind," being out of all relation, has no qualities--is simply
nothing. We can no more consider it than we can see vacancy.' 'It is
simply in itself fleeting, momentary, unnameable (because while we
name it it has become another), and for the very same reason
unknowable, the very negation of knowability.' 'Exclude from what we
have considered real all qualities constituted by relation, we find
that none are left.'

Altho such citations as these from the writings of Professor Green
might be multiplied almost indefinitely, they would hardly repay
the pains of collection, so egregiously false is the doctrine they
teach. Our little supposed feeling, whatever it may be, from the
cognitive point of view, whether a bit of knowledge or a dream, is
certainly no psychical zero. It is a most positively and definitely
qualified inner fact, with a complexion all its own. Of course there
are many mental facts which it is NOT. It knows Q, if Q be a
reality, with a very minimum of knowledge. It neither dates nor
locates it. It neither classes nor names it. And it neither knows
itself as a feeling, nor contrasts itself with other feelings, nor
estimates its own duration or intensity. It is, in short, if there
is no more of it than this, a most dumb and helpless and useless
kind of thing.

But if we must describe it by so many negations, and if it can say
nothing ABOUT itself or ABOUT anything else, by what right do we
deny that it is a psychical zero? And may not the 'relationists' be
right after all?

In the innocent looking word 'about' lies the solution of this
riddle; and a simple enough solution it is when frankly looked at. A
quotation from a too seldom quoted book, the Exploratio Philosophica
of John Grote (London, 1865), p. 60, will form the best
introduction to it.

'Our knowledge,' writes Grote, 'may be contemplated in either of two
ways, or, to use other words, we may speak in a double manner of
the "object" of knowledge. That is, we may either use language thus:
we KNOW a thing, a man, etc.; or we may use it thus: we know such
and such things ABOUT the thing, the man, etc. Language in general,
following its true logical instinct, distinguishes between these two
applications of the notion of knowledge, the one being yvwvai,
noscere, kennen, connaitre, the other being eidevai, scire, wissen,
savoir. In the origin, the former may be considered more what I have
called phenomenal--it is the notion of knowledge as ACQUAINTANCE or
familiarity with what is known; which notion is perhaps more akin to
the phenomenal bodily communication, and is less purely
intellectual than the other; it is the kind of knowledge which we
have of a thing by the presentation to the senses or the
representation of it in picture or type, a Vorstellung. The
other, which is what we express in judgments or propositions, what
is embodied in Begriffe or concepts without any necessary
imaginative representation, is in its origin the more
intellectual notion of knowledge. There is no reason, however, why
we should not express our knowledge, whatever its kind, in
either manner, provided only we do not confusedly express it, in the
same proposition or piece of reasoning, in both.'

Now obviously if our supposed feeling of Q is (if knowledge at all)
only knowledge of the mere acquaintance-type, it is milking a he-
goat, as the ancients would have said, to try to extract from it
any deliverance ABOUT anything under the sun, even about itself. And
it is as unjust, after our failure, to turn upon it and call it a
psychical nothing, as it would be, after our fruitless attack upon
the billy-goat, to proclaim the non-lactiferous character of
the whole goat-tribe. But the entire industry of the Hegelian school
in trying to shove simple sensation out of the pale of philosophic
recognition is founded on this false issue. It is always the
'speechlessness' of sensation, its inability to make any
'statement,'[Footnote: See, for example, Green's Introduction to
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, p. 36.] that is held to make the
very notion of it meaningless, and to justify the student of
knowledge in scouting it out of existence. 'Significance,' in the
sense of standing as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be
the sole function of what mental states we have; and from the
perception that our little primitive sensation has as yet no
significance in this literal sense, it is an easy step to call it
first meaningless, next senseless, then vacuous, and finally to
brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in this universal
liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of
direct acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until at last nothing is
left about which the knowledge can be supposed to obtain, does not
all 'significance' depart from the situation? And when our knowledge
about things has reached its never so complicated perfection, must
there not needs abide alongside of it and inextricably mixed in with
it some acquaintance with WHAT things all this knowledge is about?

Now, our supposed little feeling gives a WHAT; and if other feelings
should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as
subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some
judgment, perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which
the other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a
name and be no longer speechless. But every name, as students
of logic know, has its 'denotation'; and the denotation always means
some reality or content, relationless as extra or with its
internal relations unanalyzed, like the Q which our
primitive sensation is supposed to know. No relation-
expressing proposition is possible except on the basis of a
preliminary acquaintance with such 'facts,' with such contents, as
this. Let the Q be fragrance, let it be toothache, or let it be a
more complex kind of feeling, like that of the full-moon swimming in
her blue abyss, it must first come in that simple shape, and be held
fast in that first intention, before any knowledge ABOUT it can be
attained. The knowledge ABOUT it is IT with a context added. Undo
IT, and what is added cannot be CONtext. [Footnote: If A enters and
B exclaims, 'Didn't you see my brother on the stairs?' we all hold
that A may answer, 'I saw him, but didn't know he was your brother';
ignorance of brotherhood not abolishing power to see. But those who,
on account of the unrelatedness of the first facts with which we
become acquainted, deny them to be 'known' to us, ought in
consistency to maintain that if A did not perceive the relationship
of the man on the stairs to B, it was impossible he should
have noticed him at all.]

Let us say no more then about this objection, but enlarge our
thesis, thus: If there be in the universe a Q other than the Q in
the feeling, the latter may have acquaintance with an entity
ejective to itself; an acquaintance moreover, which, as mere
acquaintance, it would be hard to imagine susceptible either of
improvement or increase, being in its way complete; and which would
oblige us (so long as we refuse not to call acquaintance
knowledge) to say not only that the feeling is cognitive, but that
all qualities of feeling, SO LONG AS THERE IS ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF
THEM WHICH THEY RESEMBLE, are feelings OF qualities of existence,
and perceptions of outward fact.

The point of this vindication of the cognitive function of the first
feeling lies, it will be noticed, in the discovery that q does exist
elsewhere than in it. In case this discovery were not made, we could
not be sure the feeling was cognitive; and in case there were
nothing outside to be discovered, we should have to call the feeling
a dream. But the feeling itself cannot make the discovery. Its own q
is the only q it grasps; and its own nature is not a particle
altered by having the self-transcendent function of cognition either
added to it or taken away. The function is accidental; synthetic,
not analytic; and falls outside and not inside its being. [Footnote:
It seems odd to call so important a function accidental, but I do
not see how we can mend the matter. Just as, if we start with the
reality and ask how it may come to be known, we can only reply by
invoking a feeling which shall RECONSTRUCT it in its own more
private fashion; so, if we start with the feeling and ask how it may
come to know, we can only reply by invoking a reality which shall
RECONSTRUCT it in its own more public fashion. In either case,
however, the datum we start with remains just what it was. One may
easily get lost in verbal mysteries about the difference between
quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving and
reconstructing the knowledge of a reality. But at the end we must
confess that the notion of real cognition involves an
unmediated dualism of the knower and the known. See Bowne's
Metaphysics, New York, 1882, pp. 403-412, and various passages in
Lotze, e.g., Logic, Sec. 308. ['Unmediated' is a bad word to
have used.--1909.]]

A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or
hit, they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however,
something starts up opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or
feel, they hit and know.

But with this arises a worse objection than any yet made. We the
critics look on and see a real q and a feeling of q; and because the
two resemble each other, we say the one knows the other. But what
right have we to say this until we know that the feeling of q means
to stand for or represent just that SAME other q? Suppose, instead
of one q, a number of real q's in the field. If the gun shoots and
hits, we can easily see which one of them it hits. But how can we
distinguish which one the feeling knows? It knows the one it stands
for. But which one DOES it stand for? It declares no intention in
this respect. It merely resembles; it resembles all indifferently;
and resembling, per se, is not necessarily representing or standing-
for at all. Eggs resemble each other, but do not on that account
represent, stand for, or know each other. And if you say this
is because neither of them is a FEELING, then imagine the world to
consist of nothing but toothaches, which ARE feelings, feelings
resembling each other exactly,--would they know each other the
better for all that?

The case of q being a bare quality like that of toothache-pain is
quite different from that of its being a concrete individual thing.
There is practically no test for deciding whether the feeling of a
bare quality means to represent it or not. It can DO nothing to the
quality beyond resembling it, simply because an abstract quality is
a thing to which nothing can be done. Being without context or
environment or principium individuationis, a quiddity with
no haecceity, a platonic idea, even duplicate editions of such a
quality (were they possible), would be indiscernible, and no sign
could be given, no result altered, whether the feeling I meant to
stand for this edition or for that, or whether it simply resembled
the quality without meaning to stand for it at all.

If now we grant a genuine pluralism of editions to the quality q, by
assigning to each a CONTEXT which shall distinguish it from its
mates, we may proceed to explain which edition of it the feeling
knows, by extending our principle of resemblance to the context too,
and saying the feeling knows the particular q whose context it most
exactly duplicates. But here again the theoretic doubt recurs:
duplication and coincidence, are they knowledge? The gun shows which
q it points to and hits, by BREAKING it. Until the feeling can show
us which q it points to and knows, by some equally flagrant token,
why are we not free to deny that it either points to or knows any
one of the REAL q's at all, and to affirm that the
word 'resemblance' exhaustively describes its relation to the
reality?

Well, as a matter of fact, every actual feeling DOES show us, quite
as flagrantly as the gun, which q it points to; and practically in
concrete cases the matter is decided by an element we have hitherto
left out. Let us pass from abstractions to possible instances, and
ask our obliging deus ex machina to frame for us a richer world. Let
him send me, for example, a dream of the death of a certain man, and
let him simultaneously cause the man to die. How would our practical
instinct spontaneously decide whether this were a case of cognition
of the reality, or only a sort of marvellous coincidence of a
resembling reality with my dream? Just such puzzling cases as this
are what the 'society for psychical research' is busily
collecting and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If my dream were the only one of the kind I ever had in my life, if
the context of the death in the dream differed in many particulars
from the real death's context, and if my dream led me to no action
about the death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange
coincidence, and naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a
long context, agreeing point for point with every feature that
attended the real death; if I were constantly having such
dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking I had a habit of
ACTING immediately as if they were true and so getting 'the start'
of my more tardily instructed neighbors,--we should in all
probability have to admit that I had some mysterious kind of
clairvoyant power, that my dreams in an inscrutable way meant just
those realities they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed
to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any one
preserved would completely vanish, if it should appear that from the
midst of my dream I had the power of INTERFERING with the course of
the reality, and making the events in it turn this way or that,
according as I dreamed they should. Then at least it would be
certain that my waking critics and my dreaming self were dealing
with the SAME.

And thus do men invariably decide such a question. THE FALLING OF
THE DREAM'S PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES into the real world, and the
EXTENT of the resemblance between the two worlds are the criteria
they instinctively use. [Footnote: The thoroughgoing objector might,
it is true, still return to the charge, and, granting a dream which
should completely mirror the real universe, and all the actions
dreamed in which should be instantly matched by duplicate actions in
this universe, still insist that this is nothing more than harmony,
and that it is as far as ever from being made clear whether
the dream-world refers to that other world, all of whose details it
so closely copies. This objection leads deep into metaphysics. I do
not impugn its importance, and justice obliges me to say that but
for the teachings of my colleague, Dr. Josiah Royce, I should
neither have grasped its full force nor made my own practical and
psychological point of view as clear to myself as it is. On this
occasion I prefer to stick steadfastly to that point of view; but I
hope that Dr. Royce's more fundamental criticism of the function of
cognition may ere long see the light. [I referred in this note to
Royce's religious aspect of philosophy, then about to be published.
This powerful book maintained that the notion of REFERRING involved
that of an inclusive mind that shall own both the real q and the
mental q, and use the latter expressly as a representative symbol of
the former. At the time I could not refute this transcendentalist
opinion. Later, largely through the influence of Professor D. S.
Miller (see his essay 'The meaning of truth and error,' in the
Philosophical Review for 1893, vol. 2 p. 403) I came to see that any
definitely experienceable workings would serve as
intermediaries quite as well as the absolute mind's
intentions would.]] All feeling is for the sake of action, all
feeling results in action,--to-day no argument is needed to prove
these truths. But by a most singular disposition of nature which we
may conceive to have been different, MY FEELINGS ACT UPON THE
REALITIES WITHIN MY CRITIC'S WORLD. Unless, then, my critic can
prove that my feeling does not 'point to' those realities which it
acts upon, how can he continue to doubt that he and I are alike
cognizant of one and the same real world? If the action is performed
in one world, that must be the world the feeling intends; if in
another world, THAT is the world the feeling has in mind. If your
feeling bear no fruits in my world, I call it utterly detached from
my world; I call it a solipsism, and call its world a dream-world.
If your toothache do not prompt you to ACT as if I had a toothache,
nor even as if I had a separate existence; if you neither say to me,
'I know now how you must suffer!' nor tell me of a remedy, I deny
that your feeling, however it may resemble mine, is really cognizant
of mine. It gives no SIGN of being cognizant, and such a sign is
absolutely necessary to my admission that it is.

Before I can think you to mean my world, you must affect my world;
before I can think you to mean much of it, you must affect much of
it; and before I can be sure you mean it AS I DO, you must affect it
JUST AS I SHOULD if I were in your place. Then I, your critic, will
gladly believe that we are thinking, not only of the same reality,
but that we are thinking it ALIKE, and thinking of much of its
extent.

Without the practical effects of our neighbor's feelings on our own
world, we should never suspect the existence of our
neighbor's feelings at all, and of course should never
find ourselves playing the critic as we do in this article. The
constitution of nature is very peculiar. In the world of each of us
are certain objects called human bodies, which move about and act on
all the other objects there, and the occasions of their action are
in the main what the occasions of our action would be, were they our
bodies. They use words and gestures, which, if we used them, would
have thoughts behind them,--no mere thoughts uberhaupt, however, but
strictly determinate thoughts. I think you have the notion of
fire in general, because I see you act towards this fire in my room
just as I act towards it,--poke it and present your person towards
it, and so forth. But that binds me to believe that if you feel
'fire' at all, THIS is the fire you feel. As a matter of fact,
whenever we constitute ourselves into psychological critics, it is
not by dint of discovering which reality a feeling 'resembles' that
we find out which reality it means. We become first aware of which
one it means, and then we suppose that to be the one it resembles.
We see each other looking at the same objects, pointing to them and
turning them over in various ways, and thereupon we hope and trust
that all of our several feelings resemble the reality and each
other. But this is a thing of which we are never theoretically sure.
Still, it would practically be a case of grubelsucht, if a ruffian
were assaulting and drubbing my body, to spend much time in subtle
speculation either as to whether his vision of my body resembled
mine, or as to whether the body he really MEANT to insult were not
some body in his mind's eye, altogether other from my own. The
practical point of view brushes such metaphysical cobwebs away. If
what he have in mind be not MY body, why call we it a body at all?
His mind is inferred by me as a term, to whose existence we trace
the things that happen. The inference is quite void if the term,
once inferred, be separated from its connection with the body
that made me infer it, and connected with another that is not mine
at all. No matter for the metaphysical puzzle of how our two minds,
the ruffian's and mine, can mean the same body. Men who see each
other's bodies sharing the same space, treading the same earth,
splashing the same water, making the same air resonant, and pursuing
the same game and eating out of the same dish, will never
practically believe in a pluralism of solipsistic worlds.

Where, however, the actions of one mind seem to take no effect in
the world of the other, the case is different. This is what happens
in poetry and fiction. Every one knows Ivanhoe, for example; but so
long as we stick to the story pure and simple without regard to
the facts of its production, few would hesitate to admit that there
are as many different Ivanhoes as there are different minds
cognizant of the story. [Footnote: That is, there is no REAL
'Ivanhoe,' not even the one in Sir Walter Scott's mind as he was
writing the story. That one is only the FIRST one of the Ivanhoe-
solipsisms. It is quite true we can make it the real Ivanhoe if we
like, and then say that the other Ivanhoes know it or do not know
it, according as they refer to and resemble it or no. This is done
by bringing in Sir Walter Scott himself as the author of the real
Ivanhoe, and so making a complex object of both. This object,
however, is not a story pure and simple. It has dynamic
relations with the world common to the experience of all the
readers. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe got itself printed in volumes
which we all can handle, and to any one of which we can refer to
see which of our versions be the true one, i.e., the original one
of Scott himself. We can see the manuscript; in short we can
get back to the Ivanhoe in Scott's mind by many an avenue
and channel of this real world of our experience,--a thing we can by
no means do with either the Ivanhoe or the Rebecca, either the
Templar or the Isaac of York, of the story taken simply as such, and
detached from the conditions of its production. Everywhere, then, we
have the same test: can we pass continuously from two objects in two
minds to a third object which seems to be in BOTH minds, because
each mind feels every modification imprinted on it by the other? If
so, the first two objects named are derivatives, to say the least,
from the same third object, and may be held, if they resemble each
other, to refer to one and the same reality.] The fact that all
these Ivanhoes RESEMBLE each other does not prove the contrary. But
if an alteration invented by one man in his version were to
reverberate immediately through all the other versions, and
produce changes therein, we should then easily agree that all these
thinkers were thinking the SAME Ivanhoe, and that, fiction or no
fiction, it formed a little world common to them all.

Having reached this point, we may take up our thesis and improve it
again. Still calling the reality by the name of q and letting
the critic's feeling vouch for it, we can say that any other feeling
will be held cognizant of q, provided it both resemble q, and refer
to q, as shown by its either modifying q directly, or modifying some
other reality, p or r, which the critic knows to be continuous with
q. Or more shortly, thus: THE FEELING OF q KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT
RESEMBLES, AND EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON. If it
resemble without operating, it is a dream; if it operate without
resembling, it is an error. [Footnote: Among such errors are those
cases in which our feeling operates on a reality which it does
partially resemble, and yet does not intend: as for instance, when
I take up your umbrella, meaning to take my own. I cannot be said
here either to know your umbrella, or my own, which latter my
feeling more completely resembles. I am mistaking them both,
misrepresenting their context, etc.

We have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily one
mind, and the feeling criticised another. But the criticised feeling
and its critic may be earlier and later feelings of the same mind,
and here it might seem that we could dispense with the notion of
operating, to prove that critic and criticised are referring to and
meaning to represent the SAME. We think we see our past feelings
directly, and know what they refer to without appeal. At the worst,
we can always fix the intention of our present feeling and MAKE it
refer to the same reality to which any one of our past feelings may
have referred. So we need no 'operating' here, to make sure that the
feeling and its critic mean the same real q. Well, all the better if
this is so! We have covered the more complex and difficult case in
our text, and we may let this easier one go. The main thing
at present is to stick to practical psychology, and ignore
metaphysical difficulties.

One more remark. Our formula contains, it will be observed, nothing
to correspond to the great principle of cognition laid down by
Professor Ferrier in his Institutes of Metaphysic and apparently
adopted by all the followers of Fichte, the principle, namely, that
for knowledge to be constituted there must be knowledge of the
knowing mind along with whatever else is known: not q, as we have
supposed, but q PLUS MYSELF, must be the least I can know. It is
certain that the common sense of mankind never dreams of using any
such principle when it tries to discriminate between conscious
states that are knowledge and conscious states that are not. So
that Ferrier's principle, if it have any relevancy at all, must
have relevancy to the metaphysical possibility of consciousness
at large, and not to the practically recognized constitution
of cognitive consciousness. We may therefore pass it by
without further notice here.] It is to be feared that the reader may
consider this formula rather insignificant and obvious, and hardly
worth the labor of so many pages, especially when he considers that
the only cases to which it applies are percepts, and that the whole
field of symbolic or conceptual thinking seems to elude its grasp.
Where the reality is either a material thing or act, or a state of
the critic's consciousness, I may both mirror it in my mind and
operate upon it--in the latter case indirectly, of course--as
soon as I perceive it. But there are many cognitions, universally
allowed to be such, which neither mirror nor operate on their
realities.

In the whole field of symbolic thought we are universally held both
to intend, to speak of, and to reach conclusions about--to know in
short--particular realities, without having in our subjective
consciousness any mind-stuff that resembles them even in a remote
degree. We are instructed about them by language which awakens no
consciousness beyond its sound; and we know WHICH realities they
are by the faintest and most fragmentary glimpse of some remote
context they may have and by no direct imagination of themselves. As
minds may differ here, let me speak in the first person. I am sure
that my own current thinking has WORDS for its almost exclusive
subjective material, words which are made intelligible by being
referred to some reality that lies beyond the horizon of direct
consciousness, and of which I am only aware as of a terminal
MORE existing in a certain direction, to which the words might lead
but do not lead yet. The SUBJECT, or TOPIC, of the words is
usually something towards which I mentally seem to pitch them in a
backward way, almost as I might jerk my thumb over my shoulder to
point at something, without looking round, if I were only entirely
sure that it was there. The UPSHOT, or CONCLUSION, of the words is
something towards which I seem to incline my head forwards, as if
giving assent to its existence, tho all my mind's eye catches sight
of may be some tatter of an image connected with it, which tatter,
however, if only endued with the feeling of familiarity and reality,
makes me feel that the whole to which it belongs is rational and
real, and fit to be let pass.

Here then is cognitive consciousness on a large scale, and yet what
it knows, it hardly resembles in the least degree. The formula last
laid down for our thesis must therefore be made more complete. We
may now express it thus: A PERCEPT KNOWS WHATEVER REALITY IT
DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY OPERATES ON AND RESEMBLES; ACONCEPTUAL
FEELING, OR THOUGHT KNOWS A REALITY, WHENEVER IT ACTUALLY OR
POTENTIALLY TERMINATES IN A PERCEPT THAT OPERATES ON, OR RESEMBLES
THAT REALITY, OR IS OTHERWISE CONNECTED WITH IT OR WITH ITS CONTEXT.
The latter percept may be either sensation or sensorial idea; and
when I say the thought must TERMINATE in such a percept, I mean that
it must ultimately be capable of leading up thereto,--by the way of
practical

Is an incomplete 'thought about' that reality, that reality is its
'topic,' etc. experience, if the terminal feeling be a sensation; by
the way of logical or habitual suggestion, if it be only an image in
the mind.

Let an illustration make this plainer. I open the first book I take
up, and read the first sentence that meets my eye: 'Newton saw
the handiwork of God in the heavens as plainly as Paley in the
animal kingdom.' I immediately look back and try to analyze the
subjective state in which I rapidly apprehended this sentence as I
read it. In the first place there was an obvious feeling that the
sentence was intelligible and rational and related to the world of
realities. There was also a sense of agreement or harmony between
'Newton,' 'Paley,' and 'God.' There was no apparent image connected
with the words 'heavens,' or 'handiwork,' or 'God'; they were
words merely. With 'animal kingdom' I think there was the faintest
consciousness (it may possibly have been an image of the steps) of
the Museum of Zoology in the town of Cambridge where I write. With
'Paley' there was an equally faint consciousness of a small
dark leather book; and with 'Newton' a pretty distinct vision of the
right-hand lower corner of curling periwig. This is all the mind-
stuff I can discover in my first consciousness of the meaning of
this sentence, and I am afraid that even not all of this would have
been present had I come upon the sentence in a genuine reading of
the book, and not picked it out for an experiment. And yet my
consciousness was truly cognitive. The sentence is 'about realities'
which my psychological critic--for we must not forget him--
acknowledges to be such, even as he acknowledges my distinct feeling
that they ARE realities, and my acquiescence in the general
rightness of what I read of them, to be true knowledge on my part.

Now what justifies my critic in being as lenient as this? This
singularly inadequate consciousness of mine, made up of symbols
that neither resemble nor affect the realities they stand for,--how
can he be sure it is cognizant of the very realities he has himself
in mind?

He is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such
inadequate and symbolic thoughts, by developing themselves,
terminate in percepts that practically modified and presumably
resembled his own. By 'developing' themselves is meant obeying their
tendencies, following up the suggestions nascently present in them,
working in the direction in which they seem to point, clearing up
the penumbra, making distinct the halo, unravelling the
fringe, which is part of their composition, and in the midst of
which their more substantive kernel of subjective content seems
consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the
Paley direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing
the passages about the animal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I
may satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for
him, by showing him IN CONCRETO the very animals and their
arrangements, of which the pages treat. I may get Newton's works and
portraits; or if I follow the line of suggestion of the wig, I may
smother my critic in seventeenth-century matters pertaining to
Newton's environment, to show that the word 'Newton' has the same
LOCUS and relations in both our minds. Finally I may, by act and
word, persuade him that what I mean by God and the heavens and
the analogy of the handiworks, is just what he means also.

My demonstration in the last resort is to his SENSES. My thought
makes me act on his senses much as he might himself act on
them, were he pursuing the consequences of a perception of his own.
Practically then MY thought terminates in HIS realities. He
willingly supposes it, therefore, to be OF them, and inwardly to
RESEMBLE what his own thought would be, were it of the same symbolic
sort as mine. And the pivot and fulcrum and support of his
mental persuasion, is the sensible operation which my thought leads
me, or may lead, to effect--the bringing of Paley's book, of
Newton's portrait, etc., before his very eyes.

In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think
about and talk about the same world, because WE BELIEVE OUR
PERCEPTS ARE POSSESSED BY US IN COMMON. And we believe this because
the percepts of each one of us seem to be changed in consequence of
changes in the percepts of someone else. What I am for you is in the
first instance a percept of your own. Unexpectedly, however, I open
and show you a book, uttering certain sounds the while. These acts
are also your percepts, but they so resemble acts of yours with
feelings prompting them, that you cannot doubt I have the
feelings too, or that the book is one book felt in both our worlds.
That it is felt in the same way, that my feelings of it resemble
yours, is something of which we never can be sure, but which we
assume as the simplest hypothesis that meets the case. As a matter
of fact, we never ARE sure of it, and, as ERKENNTNISSTHEORETIKER, we
can only say that of feelings that should NOT resemble each other,
both could not know the same thing at the same time in the same way.
[Footnote: Though both might terminate in the same thing and be
incomplete thoughts 'about' it.] If each holds to its own percept
as the reality, it is bound to say of the other percept, that,
though it may INTEND that reality, and prove this by working change
upon it, yet, if it do not resemble it, it is all false and wrong.
[Footnote: The difference between Idealism and Realism is
immaterial here. What is said in the text is consistent with
either theory. A law by which my percept shall change yours
directly is no more mysterious than a law by which it shall
first change a physical reality, and then the reality change
yours. In either case you and I seem knit into a continuous
world, and not to form a pair of solipsisms.]

If this be so of percepts, how much more so of higher modes of
thought! Even in the sphere of sensation individuals are
probably different enough. Comparative study of the simplest
conceptual elements seems to show a wider divergence still. And when
it comes to general theories and emotional attitudes towards life,
it is indeed time to say with Thackeray, 'My friend, two different
universes walk about under your hat and under mine.'

What can save us at all and prevent us from flying asunder into a
chaos of mutually repellent solipsisms? Through what can our
several minds commune? Through nothing but the mutual resemblance of
those of our perceptual feelings which have this power of modifying
one another, WHICH ARE MERE DUMB KNOWLEDGES-OF-ACQUAINTANCE, and
which must also resemble their realities or not know them aright at
all. In such pieces of knowledge-of-acquaintance all our knowledge-
about must end, and carry a sense of this possible termination as
part of its content. These percepts, these termini, these sensible
things, these mere matters-of-acquaintance, are the only
realities we ever directly know, and the whole history of our
thought is the history of our substitution of one of them for
another, and the reduction of the substitute to the status of a
conceptual sign. Contemned though they be by some thinkers, these
sensations are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock,
the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad
quem of the mind. to find such sensational termini should be our aim
with all our higher thought. They end discussion; they destroy the
false conceit of knowledge; and without them we are all at sea with
each other's meaning. If two men act alike on a percept, they
believe themselves to feel alike about it; if not, they may suspect
they know it in differing ways. We can never be sure we understand
each other till we are able to bring the matter to this test.
[Footnote: 'There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to
consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.... It
appears, then, that the rule for attaining the [highest] grade
of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what
effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we
conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our
conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the
object.' Charles S. Peirce: 'How to make our Ideas clear,' in
Popular Science Monthly, New York, January, 1878, p. 293.] This is
why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air;
they have no practical issue of a sensational kind. 'Scientific'
theories, on the other hand, always terminate in definite
percepts. You can deduce a possible sensation from your theory and,
taking me into your laboratory, prove that your theory is true of my
world by giving me the sensation then and there. Beautiful is the
flight of conceptual reason through the upper air of truth.
No wonder philosophers are dazzled by it still, and no wonder they
look with some disdain at the low earth of feeling from which the
goddess launched herself aloft. But woe to her if she return not
home to its acquaintance; Nirgends haften dann die unsicheren
Sohlen--every crazy wind will take her, and, like a fire-balloon at
night, she will go out among the stars.

NOTE.--The reader will easily see how much of the account of the
truth-function developed later in Pragmatism was already explicit in
this earlier article, and how much came to be defined later. In this
earlier article we find distinctly asserted:--

1. The reality, external to the true idea;

2. The critic, reader, or epistemologist, with his own belief, as
warrant for this reality's existence;

3. The experienceable environment, as the vehicle or
medium connecting knower with known, and yielding the
cognitive RELATION;

4. The notion of POINTING, through this medium, to the reality, as
one condition of our being said to know it;

5. That of RESEMBLING it, and eventually AFFECTING it, as
determining the pointing to IT and not to something else.

6. The elimination of the 'epistemological gulf,' so that the whole
truth-relation falls inside of the continuities of
concrete experience, and is constituted of particular processes,
varying with every object and subject, and susceptible of being
described in detail.

The defects in this earlier account are:--

1. The possibly undue prominence given to resembling, which altho a
fundamental function in knowing truly, is so often dispensed with;

2. The undue emphasis laid upon operating on the object itself,
which in many cases is indeed decisive of that being what we refer
to, but which is often lacking, or replaced by operations on other
things related to the object.

3. The imperfect development of the generalized notion of the
WORKABILITY of the feeling or idea as equivalent to
that SATISFACTORY ADAPTATION to the particular reality,
which constitutes the truth of the idea. It is this more generalized
notion, as covering all such specifications as pointing, fitting,
operating or resembling, that distinguishes the developed view
of Dewey, Schiller, and myself.

4. The treatment, [earlier], of percepts as the only realm of
reality. I now treat concepts as a co-ordinate realm.

The next paper represents a somewhat broader grasp of the topic on
the writer's part.

II

THE TIGERS IN INDIA [Footnote: Extracts from a presidential address
before the American Psychological Association, published in the
Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895).]

THERE are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or
intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or
representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our
eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the
tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of
philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual
knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we
sit here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the
tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so
confidently claimed is KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth
Hodgson's inelegant but valuable form of words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is
having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to
our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of
our thought to them. A great mystery is usually made of
this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy,
which is only common sense grown pedantic, would explain it as a
peculiar kind of existence, called INTENTIONAL EXISTENCE of the
tigers in our mind. At the very least, people would say that what we
mean by knowing the tigers is mentally POINTING towards them as we
sit here.

But now what do we mean by POINTING, in such a case as this? What is
the pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer--one
that traverses the pre-possessions not only of common sense
and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological
writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made brief, is this:
The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely
as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that
follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed
out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate
presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar,
if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine
tiger if so shown. It is known as our ability to utter all sorts of
propositions which don't contradict other propositions that are true
of the real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers very
seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly
intuited tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the
purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the
striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-
transcendency in our mental images TAKEN BY THEMSELVES. They are one
phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the
tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, IF
YOU ONCE GRANT A CONNECTING WORLD TO BE THERE. In short, the ideas
and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to
use Hume's language, as any two things can be; and pointing means
here an operation as external and adventitious as any that
nature yields.[Footnote: A stone in one field may 'fit,' we say, a
hole in another field. But the relation of 'fitting,' so long as no
one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name
for the fact that such an act MAY happen. Similarly with the
knowing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory
name for a further associative and terminative process that
MAY occur.]

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge
there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain
of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing.
TO KNOW AN OBJECT IS HERE TO LEAD TO IT THROUGH A CONTEXT WHICH THE
WORLD SUPPLIES. All this was most instructively set forth by our
colleague D. S. Miller at our meeting in New York last Christmas,
and for re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion, I owe him this
acknowledgment. [Footnote: See Dr. Miller's articles on Truth and
Error, and on Content and Function, in the Philosophical Review,
July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.]

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive
acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper
before our eyes. The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here
indistinguishably the same in nature, as we saw a moment since, and
there is no context of intermediaries or associates to stand between
and separate the thought and thing. There is no 'presence in
absence' here, and no 'pointing,' but rather an allround
embracing of the paper by the thought; and it is clear that the
knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when the tigers
were its object. Dotted all through our experience are states
of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief
always does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or
squareness of this paper. Whether such qualities be truly ultimate
aspects of being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to
till we get better informed, is quite immaterial for our present
inquiry. So long as it is believed in, we see our object face to
face. What now do we mean by 'knowing' such a sort of object
as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger
if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us
to his lair?

This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in
the fewest words. And let me first say this: So far as the white
paper or other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to
enter also into some one else's experience, and we, in knowing it,
are held to know it there as well as here; so far, again, as it is
considered to be a mere mask for hidden molecules that other now
impossible experiences of our own might some day lay bare to view;
so far it is a case of tigers in India again--the things known
being absent experiences, the knowing can only consist in
passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary context that
the world supplies. But if our own private vision of the paper be
considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it
constituted by itself the universe (and it might perfectly well do
so, for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the
paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one
indivisible fact which, properly named, is THE DATUM, THE
PHENOMENON, OR THE EXPERIENCE. The paper is in the mind and the
mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names
that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger
world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in
different directions. [Footnote: What is meant by this is that 'the
experience' can be referred to either of two great associative
systems, that of the experiencer's mental history, or that of the
experienced facts of the world. Of both of these systems it forms
part, and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of
intersection. One might let a vertical line stand for the mental
history; but the same object, O, appears also in the mental history
of different persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It
thus ceases to be the private property of one experience, and
becomes, so to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its
outer history in this way, and represent it by the horizontal line.
(It is also known representatively at other points of the
vertical lines, or intuitively there again, so that the line of its
outer history would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it
straight for simplicity's sake.)] In any case, however, it is the
same stuff figures in all the sets of lines.

TO KNOW IMMEDIATELY, THEN, OR INTUITIVELY, IS FOR MENTAL CONTENT AND
OBJECT TO BE IDENTICAL. This is a very different definition from
that which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither
definition involves those mysterious notions of self-transcendency
and presence in absence which are such essential parts of the
ideas of knowledge, both of philosophers and of common men.
[Footnote: The reader will observe that the text is written from the
point of view of NAIF realism or common sense, and avoids raising
the idealistic controversy.]

III

HUMANISM AND TRUTH [Footnote: Reprinted, with slight
verbal revision, from Mind, vol. xiii, N. S., p. 457 (October,
1904). A couple of interpolations from another article in Mind,
'Humanism and truth once more,' in vol. xiv, have been made.]

RECEIVING from the Editor of Mind an advance proof of Mr. Bradley's
article on 'Truth and Practice,' I understand this as a hint to me
to join in the controversy over 'Pragmatism' which seems to have
seriously begun. As my name has been coupled with the movement, I
deem it wise to take the hint, the more so as in some quarters
greater credit has been given me than I deserve, and
probably undeserved discredit in other quarters falls also to my
lot.

First, as to the word 'pragmatism.' I myself have only used the term
to indicate a method of carrying on abstract discussion. The serious
meaning of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete
difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to
bring all debated conceptions to that' pragmatic' test, and you will
escape vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which
of two statements be true, then they are really one statement in two
verbal forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a given
statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning.
In neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may
save our breath, and pass to more important things.

All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should
HAVE practical [Footnote: 'Practical' in the sense of PARTICULAR, of
course, not in the sense that the consequences may not be MENTAL as
well as physical.] consequences. In England the word has been used
more broadly still, to cover the notion that the truth of any
statement CONSISTS in the consequences, and particularly in their
being good consequences. Here we get beyond affairs of method
altogether; and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are
so different, and both are important enough to have different names,
I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal to call the wider pragmatism by
the name of 'humanism' is excellent and ought to be adopted. The
narrower pragmatism may still be spoken of as the
'pragmatic method.'

I have read in the past six months many hostile reviews of
Schiller's and Dewey's publications; but with the exception of Mr.
Bradley's elaborate indictment, they are out of reach where I write,
and I have largely forgotten them. I think that a free discussion of
the subject on my part would in any case be more useful than a
polemic attempt at rebutting these criticisms in detail. Mr. Bradley
in particular can be taken care of by Mr. Schiller. He repeatedly
confesses himself unable to comprehend Schiller's views, he
evidently has not sought to do so sympathetically, and I
deeply regret to say that his laborious article throws, for my mind,
absolutely no useful light upon the subject. It seems to me on the
whole an IGNORATIO ELENCHI, and I feel free to disregard
it altogether.

The subject is unquestionably difficult. Messrs. Dewey's and
Schiller's thought is eminently an induction, a generalization
working itself free from all sorts of entangling particulars. If
true, it involves much restatement of traditional notions. This is a
kind of intellectual product that never attains a classic form of
expression when first promulgated. The critic ought therefore not to
be too sharp and logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but should
weigh it as a whole, and especially weigh it against its possible
alternatives. One should also try to apply it first to one instance,
and then to another to see how it will work. It seems to me that it
is emphatically not a case for instant execution, by conviction of
intrinsic absurdity or of self-contradiction, or by caricature of
what it would look like if reduced to skeleton shape. Humanism is in
fact much more like one of those secular changes that come upon
public opinion overnight, as it were, borne upon tides 'too deep for
sound or foam,' that survive all the crudities and extravagances of
their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential
statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from
classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling,
from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life--changes of
which we all have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to
such changes the method of confutation by single decisive
reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or
traverses some fundamental principle. This is like stopping a river
by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. Round your obstacle
flows the water and 'gets there all the same.' In reading some of
our opponents, I am not a little reminded of those catholic writers
who refute darwinism by telling us that higher species cannot come
from lower because minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of
transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their
own destruction, and that would violate the principle that
every reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view
is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive
argument. Wide generalizations in science always meet with these
summary refutations in their early days; but they outlive them, and
the refutations then sound oddly antiquated and scholastic. I
cannot help suspecting that the humanistic theory is going through
this kind of would-be refutation at present.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-
minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines
of least, resistance 'on the whole.' 'In other words,' an opponent
might say, 'resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.' 'Even so,'
I make reply,--'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For
humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory'
(Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and
ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of
renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic
scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially
consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of
standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given
case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight,
may to the end be a sum of PLUSES and MINUSES, concerning which we
can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a
maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be
approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with
absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this inductive view of the
conditions of belief.

As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its
being to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought
about in the older notions of scientific truth. 'God geometrizes,'
it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclid's elements
literally reproduced his geometrizing. There is an eternal and
unchangeable 'reason'; and its voice was supposed to reverberate in
Barbara and Celarent. So also of the 'laws of nature,' physical and
chemical, so of natural history classifications--all were supposed
to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried
in the structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in
our intellect enables us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world
is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was
thought. Up to about 1850 almost every one believed that sciences
expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-
human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of
theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any
one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than
another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many
physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one
of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the
notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a
literal transcript has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws now
treated as so much 'conceptual shorthand,' true so far as they are
useful but no farther. Our mind has become tolerant of symbol
instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of
plasticity instead of rigor. 'Energetics,' measuring the bare
face of sensible phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all
their changes of 'level,' is the last word of this scientific
humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding as to the
reason for so curious a congruence between the world and the mind,
but which at any rate makes our whole notion of scientific truth
more flexible and genial than it used to be.

It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either in
mathematics, logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be
literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of God. The
main forms of our thinking, the separation of subjects from
predicates, the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments, are
purely human habits. The ether, as Lord Salisbury said, is only a
noun for the verb to undulate; and many of our theological ideas are
admitted, even by those who call them 'true,' to be humanistic in
like degree.

I fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what
originally gave the impulse to Messrs. Dewey's and Schiller's views.
The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of
our formulas to another may not consist so much in its
literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like
its usefulness, its 'elegance' or its congruity with our residual
beliefs. Yielding to these suspicions, and generalizing, we fall
into something like the humanistic state of mind. Truth we conceive
to mean everywhere, not duplication, but addition; not the
constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but
rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a
clearer result. Obviously this state of mind is at first full of
vagueness and ambiguity. 'Collaborating' is a vague term; it must at
any rate cover conceptions and logical arrangements. 'Clearer' is
vaguer still. Truth must bring clear thoughts, as well as clear
the way to action. 'Reality' is the vaguest term of all. The only
way to test such a programme at all is to apply it to the various
types of truth, in the hope of reaching an account that shall be
more precise. Any hypothesis that forces such a review upon one has
one great merit, even if in the end it prove invalid: it gets
us better acquainted with the total subject. To give the theory
plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better
tactics than to choke it off at the outset by abstract
accusations of self-contradiction. I think therefore that a decided
effort at sympathetic mental play with humanism is the provisional
attitude to be recommended to the reader.

When I find myself playing sympathetically with humanism, something
like what follows is what I end by conceiving it to mean.

Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to
digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs
of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating,
rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees. Some of the
apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own, but most of
them are common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not
a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that
was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive
generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia,
of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive The notions of
one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the
distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between
permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of
classes with sub classes within them; the separation of
fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were
once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in
their attempt to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences
into a more shareable and manageable shape. They proved of such
sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very
structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose with them. No
experience can upset them. On the contrary, they apperceive every
experience and assign it to its place.

To what effect? That we may the better foresee the course of our
experiences, communicate with one another, and steer our lives by
rule. Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer, more inclusive
mental view.

The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one
Time and one Space, is probably the concept of permanently
existing things. When a rattle first drops out of the hand of a
baby, he does not look to see where it has gone. Non-perception he
accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief. That our
perceptions mean BEINGS, rattles that are there whether we hold them
in our hands or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what
happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten. It
applies with equal felicity to things and persons, to the
objective and to the ejective realm. However a Berkeley, a Mill, or
a Cornelius may CRITICISE it, it WORKS; and in practical life we
never think of 'going back' upon it, or reading our
incoming experiences in any other terms. We may,
indeed, speculatively imagine a state of 'pure' experience before
the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed;
and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have
struck into a different hypothesis. But we cannot positively
imagine today what the different hypothesis could have been, for the
category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the foundations
of our life. Our thoughts must still employ it if they are to
possess reasonableness and truth.

This notion of a FIRST in the shape of a most chaotic pure
experience which sets us questions, of a SECOND in the way of
fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our
consciousness and practically irreversible, which define the general
frame within which answers must fall, and of a THIRD which gives the
detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our
present needs, is, as I take it, the essence of the
humanistic conception. It represents experience in its
pristine purity to be now so enveloped in predicates historically
worked out that we can think of it as little more than an OTHER, of
a THAT, which the mind, in Mr. Bradley's phrase, 'encounters,' and
to whose stimulating presence we respond by ways of thinking which
we call 'true' in proportion as they facilitate our mental or
physical activities and bring us outer power and inner peace. But
whether the Other, the universal THAT, has itself any definite inner
structure, or whether, if it have any, the structure resembles any
of our predicated WHATS, this is a question which humanism leaves
untouched. For us, at any rate, it insists, reality is an
accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle
for 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle
to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as
possible the old.

It is hard to see why either Mr. Bradley's own logic or his
metaphysics should oblige him to quarrel with this conception. He
might consistently adopt it verbatim et literatim, if he would, and
simply throw his peculiar absolute round it, following in this the
good example of Professor Royce. Bergson in France, and his
disciples, Wilbois the physicist and Leroy, are thoroughgoing
humanists in the sense defined. Professor Milhaud also appears to be
one; and the great Poincare misses it by only the breadth of a hair.
In Germany the name of Simmel offers itself as that of a humanist of
the most radical sort. Mach and his school, and Hertz and Ostwald
must be classed as humanists. The view is in the atmosphere and must
be patiently discussed.

The best way to discuss it would be to see what the alternative
might be. What is it indeed? Its critics make no explicit
statement, Professor Royce being the only one so far who has
formulated anything definite. The first service of humanism to
philosophy accordingly seems to be that it will probably oblige
those who dislike it to search their own hearts and heads. It will
force analysis to the front and make it the order of the day. At
present the lazy tradition that truth is adaequatio intellectus et
rei seems all there is to contradict it with. Mr. Bradley's only
suggestion is that true thought 'must correspond to a
determinate being which it cannot be said to make,' and obviously
that sheds no new light. What is the meaning of the word to
'correspond'? Where is the 'being'? What sort of things are
'determinations,' and what is meant in this particular case by 'not
to make'?

Humanism proceeds immediately to refine upon the looseness of these
epithets. We correspond in SOME way with anything with which we
enter into any relations at all. If it be a thing, we may produce an
exact copy of it, or we may simply feel it as an existent in a
certain place. If it be a demand, we may obey it without knowing
anything more about it than its push. If it be a proposition, we may
agree by not contradicting it, by letting it pass. If it be a
relation between things, we may act on the first thing so as to
bring ourselves out where the second will be. If it be
something inaccessible, we may substitute a hypothetical object for
it, which, having the same consequences, will cipher out for us real
results. In a general way we may simply ADD OUR THOUGHT TO IT; and
if it SUFFERS THE ADDITION, and the whole situation harmoniously
prolongs and enriches itself, the thought will pass for true.

As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to, although
they may be outside of the present thought as well as in it,
humanism sees no ground for saying they are outside of finite
experience itself. Pragmatically, their reality means that we submit
to them, take account of them, whether we like to or not, but this
we must perpetually do with experiences other than our own. The
whole system of what the present experience must correspond to
'adequately' may be continuous with the present experience itself.
Reality, so taken as experience other than the present, might be
either the legacy of past experience or the content of experience to
come. Its determinations for US are in any case the adjectives which
our acts of judging fit to it, and those are essentially humanistic
things.

To say that our thought does not 'make' this reality means
pragmatically that if our own particular thought were annihilated
the reality would still be there in some shape, though possibly it
might be a shape that would lack something that our thought
supplies. That reality is 'independent' means that there is
something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If
it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence,
we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one
result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience,
against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in
a direction that is the destiny of our belief. That this drift of
experience itself is in the last resort due to something independent
of all possible experience may or may not be true. There may or may
not be an extra-experiential 'ding an sich' that keeps the ball
rolling, or an 'absolute' that lies eternally behind all the
successive determinations which human thought has made. But
within our experience ITSELF, at any rate, humanism says, some
determinations show themselves as being independent of others; some
questions, if we ever ask them, can only be answered in one way;
some beings, if we ever suppose them, must be supposed to have
existed previously to the supposing; some relations, if they exist
ever, must exist as long as their terms exist.

Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation of less fixed
parts of experience (predicates) to other relatively more fixed
parts (subjects); and we are not required to seek it in a relation
of experience as such to anything beyond itself. We can stay at
home, for our behavior as exponents is hemmed in on every side. The
forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by our own
objects, and the notion of truth as something opposed to waywardness
or license inevitably grows up SOLIPSISTICALLY inside of every human
life.

So obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic
authors 'makes me tired.' 'How can a deweyite discriminate sincerity
from bluff?' was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where I
reported on Dewey's Studies. 'How can the mere [Footnote: I know of
no 'mere' pragmatist, if MERENESS here means, as it seems to, the
denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist's THOUGHT.] pragmatist
feel any duty to think truly?' is the objection urged by Professor
Royce. Mr. Bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his
own doctrine, 'he must hold any idea, however mad, to be the truth,
if any one will have it so.' And Professor Taylor
describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases and calling
it truth.

Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men's thinking
actually goes on seems to me most surprising. These critics appear
to suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft of our
experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even
THO there were compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be
no pole for them to point to. There must be absolute sailing-
directions, they insist, decreed from outside, and an
independent chart of the voyage added to the 'mere' voyage itself,
if we are ever to make a port. But is it not obvious that even
THO there be such absolute sailing-directions in the shape of pre-
human standards of truth that we OUGHT to follow, the only
guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human
equipment. The 'ought' would be a brutum fulmen unless there were a
felt grain inside of our experience that conspired. As a matter of
fact the DEVOUTEST believers in absolute standards must admit that
men fail to obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite of the eternal
prohibitions, and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is
no warrant against unlimited error in rebus being incurred. The only
REAL guarantee we have against licentious thinking is the
CIRCUMPRESSURE of experience itself, which gets us sick of
concrete errors, whether there be a trans-empirical reality or not.
How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him
to think? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no
means of guessing what it wants of him except by following the
humanistic clues. The only truth that he himself will ever
practically ACCEPT will be that to which his finite experiences lead
him of themselves. The state of mind which shudders at the idea of a
lot of experiences left to themselves, and that augurs protection
from the sheer name of an absolute, as if, however inoperative,
that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is like the
mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a social
tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to puff, and say
'Parliament or Congress ought to make a law against it,' as if an
impotent decree would give relief.

All the SANCTIONS of a law of truth lie in the very texture of
experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth FOR US will
always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most
profitably combine.

And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist will always
have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than
will your believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the
standard rigid. If by this latter believer he means a man who
pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist
will doubtless prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the
absolutist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately
our present-day absolutists do follow) empirical methods of inquiry
in concrete affairs. To consider hypotheses is surely always better
than to DOGMATISE ins blaue hinein.

Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been
used to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as he does, that
truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most
propitious reaction, he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a
learned colleague say, from trying to convert opponents, for does
not their view, being THEIR most propitious momentary reaction,
already fill the bill? Only the believer in the ante-rem brand of
truth can on this theory seek to make converts without self-
stultification. But can there be self-stultification in urging any
account whatever of truth? Can the definition ever contradict the
deed? 'Truth is what I feel like saying'--suppose that to be the
definition. 'Well, I feel like saying that, and I want you to feel
like saying it, and shall continue to say it until I get you to
agree.' Where is there any contradiction? Whatever truth may be
said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held
to carry. The TEMPER which a saying may comport is an extra-logical
matter. It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than
in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the humanist,
for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to
make one proselyte, if his nature be enthusiastic enough.

'But how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you
know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to
alter during the next minute? How is any heroic devotion to the
ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions?'

This is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists
show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of
the situation. If they would only follow the pragmatic method and
ask: 'What is truth KNOWN-AS? What does its existence stand for in
the way of concrete goods?'--they would see that the name of it is
the inbegriff of almost everything that is valuable in our lives.
The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is
practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is
lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and
unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of
whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the
sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons
with a vengeance why we should turn to truth--truth saves us from a
world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens
loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional
fool's paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison
with its bare pursuit! When absolutists reject humanism because they
feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their
mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in
comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a
few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is
what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them
reject our humanism--as they apprehend it. Just so with us
humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed,
eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. These
contradict the DRAMATIC TEMPERAMENT of nature, as our dealings with
nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive
it. They seem oddly personal and artificial, even when not
bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree. We turn from them
to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it
to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists
are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater
and cleaner intellectual abodes. [Footnote: I cannot forbear quoting
as an illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist
tempers of mind, in a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks
on the Dreyfus 'affaire,' written by one who assuredly had
never heard of humanism or pragmatism. 'Autant que la Revolution,
"l'Affaire" est desormais une de nos "origines." Si elle n'a pas
fait ouvrir le gouffre, c'est elle du moins qui a rendu patent et
visible le long travail souterrain qui, silencieusement,
avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps d'aujourd'hui, pour
ecarter enfin, d'un coup soudain, la France des traditionalistes
(poseurs de principes, chercheurs d'unite, constructeurs de systemes
a priori) el la France eprise du fait positif et de libre examen;--
la France revolutionnaire et romantique si l'on veut, celle qui met
tres haut l'individu, qui ne veut pas qu'un juste perisse, fut-ce
pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la verite dans toutes ses
parties aussi bien que dans une vue d'ensemble ... Duclaux ne
pouvait pas concevoir qu'on preferat quelque chose a la verite.
Mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui, mettant
en balance la vie d'un homme et la raison d'Etat, lui avouaient de
quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence
individuelle, pour innocente qu'elle fut. C'etaient des
classiques, des gens a qui l'ensemble seul importe.' La Vie de
Emile Duclaux, par Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247-248.]

This is surely enough to show that the humanist does not ignore the
character of objectivity and independence in truth. Let me turn next
to what his opponents mean when they say that to be true, our
thoughts must 'correspond.'

The vulgar notion of correspondence here is that the thoughts must
COPY the reality--cognitio fit per assimiliationem cogniti
et cognoscentis; and philosophy, without having ever fairly sat down
to the question, seems to have instinctively accepted this idea:
propositions are held true if they copy the eternal thought; terms
are held true if they copy extra-mental realities. Implicitly, I
think that the copy-theory has animated most of the criticisms
that have been made on humanism.

A priori, however, it is not self-evident that the sole business of
our mind with realities should be to copy them. Let my reader
suppose himself to constitute for a time all the reality there is in
the universe, and then to receive the announcement that another
being is to be created who shall know him truly. How will he
represent the knowing in advance? What will he hope it to be? I
doubt extremely whether it could ever occur to him to fancy it as a
mere copying. Of what use to him would an imperfect second edition
of himself in the new comer's interior be? It would seem pure waste
of a propitious opportunity. The demand would more probably be for
something absolutely new. The reader would conceive the knowing
humanistically, 'the new comer,' he would say, 'must TAKE ACCOUNT OF
MY PRESENCE BY REACTING ON IT IN SUCH A WAY THAT GOOD WOULD ACCRUE
TO US BOTH. If copying be requisite to that end, let there be
copying; otherwise not.' The essence in any case would not be
the copying, but the enrichment of the previous world.

I read the other day, in a book of Professor Eucken's, a phrase,
'Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins,' which seems to
be pertinent here. Why may not thought's mission be to increase and
elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence?
No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment
on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which
brands them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing in the thing.
The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as
a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational.
Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the
whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter
may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious
supplement.

'Knowing,' in short, may, for aught we can see beforehand to the
contrary, be ONLY ONE WAY OF GETTING INTO FRUITFUL RELATIONS WITH
REALITY whether copying be one of the relations or not.

It is easy to see from what special type of knowing the copy-theory
arose. In our dealings with natural phenomena the great point is to
be able to foretell. Foretelling, according to such a writer as
Spencer, is the whole meaning of intelligence. When Spencer's 'law
of intelligence' says that inner and outer relations must
'correspond,' it means that the distribution of terms in our inner
time-scheme and space-scheme must be an exact copy of
the distribution in real time and space of the real terms. In strict
theory the mental terms themselves need not answer to the real terms
in the sense of severally copying them, symbolic mental terms being
enough, if only the real dates and places be copied. But in our
ordinary life the mental terms are images and the real ones are
sensations, and the images so often copy the sensations, that we
easily take copying of terms as well as of relations to be the
natural significance of knowing. Meanwhile much, even of this common
descriptive truth, is couched in verbal symbols. If our symbols
FIT the world, in the sense of determining our expectations rightly,
they may even be the better for not copying its terms.

It seems obvious that the pragmatic account of all this routine of
phenomenal knowledge is accurate. Truth here is a relation, not
of our ideas to non-human realities, but of conceptual parts of our
experience to sensational parts. Those thoughts are true which
guide us to BENEFICIAL INTERACTION with sensible particulars as they
occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

From the frequency of copying in the knowledge of phenomenal fact,
copying has been supposed to be the essence of truth in
matters rational also. Geometry and logic, it has been supposed,
must copy archetypal thoughts in the Creator. But in these abstract
spheres there is no need of assuming archetypes. The mind is free to
carve so many figures out of space, to make so many numerical
collections, to frame so many classes and series, and it can analyze
and compare so endlessly, that the very superabundance of the
resulting ideas makes us doubt the 'objective' pre-existence of
their models. It would be plainly wrong to suppose a God whose
thought consecrated rectangular but not polar co-ordinates, or
Jevons's notation but not Boole's. Yet if, on the other hand, we
assume God to have thought in advance of every POSSIBLE flight of
human fancy in these directions, his mind becomes too much like
a Hindoo idol with three heads, eight arms and six breasts, too much
made up of superfoetation and redundancy for us to wish to copy it,
and the whole notion of copying tends to evaporate from these
sciences. Their objects can be better interpreted as being created
step by step by men, as fast as they successively conceive them.

If now it be asked how, if triangles, squares, square roots, genera,
and the like, are but improvised human 'artefacts,' their
properties and relations can be so promptly known to be 'eternal,'
the humanistic answer is easy. If triangles and genera are of our
own production we can keep them invariant. We can make them
'timeless' by expressly decreeing that on THE THINGS WE MEAN time
shall exert no altering effect, that they are intentionally and it
may be fictitiously abstracted from every corrupting real associate
and condition. But relations between invariant objects will
themselves be invariant. Such relations cannot be happenings, for by
hypothesis nothing shall happen to the objects. I have tried to
show in the last chapter of my Principles of Psychology [Footnote:
Vol. ii, pp. 641 ff.] that they can only be relations of comparison.
No one so far seems to have noticed my suggestion, and I am too
ignorant of the development of mathematics to feel very confident of
my own view. But if it were correct it would solve the difficulty
perfectly. Relations of comparison are matters of direct inspection.
As soon as mental objects are mentally compared, they are perceived
to be either like or unlike. But once the same, always the same,
once different, always different, under these timeless conditions.
Which is as much as to say that truths concerning these man-made
objects are necessary and eternal. We can change our conclusions
only by changing our data first.

The whole fabric of the a priori sciences can thus be treated as a
man-made product. As Locke long ago pointe

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