pletely 'true,"" says Schiller; "because it leaves unremoved and unresolved a sense of final discord in existence, it must ever stimulate anew to fresh efforts to overcome the discrepancy. But it is clearly recognized by both of these writers that such considerations of sentiment are to be allowed to weigh only when the tests of perception or consistency are not decisive. Were the less parsimonious or less harmonious hypothesis to be verified by an experimentum crucis, or proved the only means of avoiding contradiction, man's taste for parsimony and harmony would not create the least presumption against it. The perfectly agreeable hypothesis must yield at once before fact or contradiction.

Would it not be clearer and more accurate, then, to say that while sentiment has nothing to do with truth, it may, as an extra-logical motive, be allowed to influence belief where verification proper is impossible? Indeed this is, I think, a fair rendering of James's famous "right to believe." The religious hypothesis is essentially an unverifiable hypothesis. Appeal to sensible facts and inference from established truth both leave the issue doubtful. But meanwhile it is necessary to act on some such hypothesis. We must in the practical sense believe where we cannot in the theoretical sense know. And here we are justified in allowing our tastes and our hopes to incline the balance. For we should be no better supported by proof if we believed the contrary, and should lose the emotional values beside. Furthermore, in this case, belief contributes evidence in its own support. For what I believe in is, so far as I am actively concerned in it, the more likely to prevail if I do so believe. Such a making true, means making facts which will in time afford a sensible verification for my belief. So in James's entire philosophy of religion' it is constantly implied that there is a strict sense of the term 'truth,' relating to the cognitive or theoretic

1 James: Pragmatism, p. 217; F. C. S. Schiller: Humanism, p. 50. • See below, pp. 369-370.

interest, and both independent of and prior to all sentimental grounds for belief.

§ 7. Verification by general utility, is the proof of an idea's truth by the total satisfaction it affords, by its Verification by suitability to all the purposes of life, individual General Utility and social. "Truth," writes Schiller, "is that manipulation of [objects] which turns out upon trial to be useful, primarily for any human end, but ultimately for that perfect harmony of our whole life which forms our final aspiration." Thus, my idea of the future state would be proved true on this ground, if it proved in all respects a good idea to live by, borne out by facts, consistent with my other ideas, a good working hypothesis, and above all consoling and inspiring. And it would receive additional verification of the same type if it satisfied the needs of mankind in the aggregate and survived the test of time.

The significant thing about this criterion is its indiscriminate merging of the more specific criteria discussed above. Pragmatists have repeatedly protested that the truth of an idea is determined by the specific purpose and the specific situation that give rise to the idea. Thus Dewey says, "It is the failure to grasp the coupling of truth of meaning with a specific promise, undertaking, or intention expressed by a thing which underlies, so far as I can see, the criticisms passed upon the experimental or pragmatic view of the truth." In this opinion Dewey is undoubtedly correct. Pragmatism has seemed to most of its critics to put strictly cognitive considerations upon a par with considerations of sentiment and subsequential utility. And pragmatist writers are responsible for this impression — or misunderstanding, if such it be. Owing perhaps to the

1 Humanism, p. 61.

Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other Essays, p. 95, note. Cf. also Studies in Logic, pp. 20, 23, where he defines a logic concerned with description and interpretation of the function of reflective thought," and insists that thought cannot be judged “apart from the limits of particular crises in the growth of experience."

exigencies of controversy, or to a carelessness of statement, pragmatists have taught us to believe that an idea is true in so far as it works or satisfies in any respect whatsoever. Or they have referred now to one ideational value and now to another, without consistently distinguishing the cognitive value from the rest. It has not unnaturally been supposed that pragmatism intends to make these various values commensurable and interchangeable. And it would be correct to infer from such a supposition that an idea which was shown to be contrary to sensible fact, or contradictory to accredited truths, might yet be proved true by affording a surplus of sentimental or utilitarian value.

But such a conclusion is very properly denounced as reactionary. Science has become solvent and prosperous through regarding these values as fictitious, and excluding them from its accounts. Indeed enlightenment and criticism mean little more than conscious discrimination against these values. For the intellectual hero, this is the great renunciation. He must forego the pleasing and the hopeful hypothesis, and he must be resolutely indifferent to the extra-theoretical uses to which his hypothesis may be put. Knowledge advances pari passu with the specialization and refinement of the theoretic interest. The very use of knowledge, the variety and fruitfulness of its applications, depend on its being first tried and proved independently of these applications. And knowledge is a means of adaptation, not in proportion to its pleasantness and hopefulness, but in proportion as it dispels illusions, be they ever so grateful and inspiring. In short the pragmatist handling of this question of truth is confusing and dangerous in so far as it consists of loose generaliza

1 Cf., e.g., such a statement as the following: "All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should have practical consequences. In England the word has been used more broadly still, to cover the notion that the truth of any statement consists in the consequences, and particularly in their being good consequences." James: The Meaning of Truth,

tions concerning the practical or satisfying character of truth; in so far as it tends to blur the difference between the strictly theoretic value of ideas on the one hand, and certain derivative and secondary values on the other. Pragmatism is reactionary and dangerous in so far as it coördinates and equalizes verification by perception and consistency with verification by sentiment and subsequential utility.

There remains a strict and limited pragmatism which is not guilty of this offence. Such a pragmatism consists in the proof that the theoretic interest itself is in fact an interest. Ideas are functional rather than substantial. Their relation to their objects is not one of resemblance, but of leading or guidance. Their verification is not a matching of similars, but a process in which their leading or guidance is followed to that terminus of fact or being which they mean. And since the theoretic interest is an interest, it is as a whole rooted in life, and answerable to the needs and projects of life. In other words, truth, a theoretic utility, has also, because of the auspices under which it is begotten, a subsequential utility. Finally, it is the proper and consistent sequel to this to allow taste, aspiration, and hope to incline the balance of belief when, and only when, truth in the strict sense is not attainable. § 8. Epistemology and metaphysics are so intimately related in contemporary philosophy, that a theory of The Realistic knowledge is not infrequently accepted withVersion of out further ado as a theory of being. And Pragmatism yet, as we have learned from our study of idealism, such procedure begs a most crucial philosophical question. What is the place of knowledge in reality? To what extent does the order of nature conform to the order of knowledge? Is the cognitive version of experience final and definitive, or is it abstract and partial? These are clearly independent questions, that are not necessarily involved in an account of knowledge itself. We have thus far confined our attention to the pragmatist description

of the knowledge process. We must now face the further question: What is the pragmatist doctrine concerning the metaphysical status of the knowledge process? And we shall find, I believe, that pragmatism is here divided against itself on the same issue that divides idealism and realism. Some pragmatists, such as James, are avowedly, and on the whole consistently, realistic. Others, such as Schiller, favor, if they do not unequivocally adopt, the subjectivistic alternative.

Let us examine, first, the realistic version of pragmatism. Knowledge, according to all pragmatists, is a specific complex, comprising an idea or belief, an object ideated or believed, and a relation of meaning and verification connecting the two. Now a realistic version of this theory will assert that the various components of the knowledge process are independent of their places in this process. They are regarded as having other places besides, so that their being is not conditional on their finding a place in knowledge.' Thus a realistic pragmatist will in his epistemology describe the sensible facts of nature as the termini to which ideas lead, but he will not suppose that such facts must be thus related to ideas in order to be. Sensible facts are occasionally and accidentally the termini of ideas, but not essentially so. And he is led naturally to this view by his acceptance of the general biological categories. Knowledge is a form of adaptation to a preëxisting environment. Thought proposes, fact disposes. "If my idea is to work," says Bradley, in criticising pragmatism, "it must correspond to a determinate being which it cannot be said to make." In the name of pragmatism, James accepts this very conclusion. "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."

1 For a full discussion of the relation between realism and pragmatism, cf. W. P. Montague's articles, "May a Realist be a Pragmatist?" Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Scientific Methods, Vol. VI, Nos. 17-20.

• "On Truth and Practice,” Mind, N. S., Vol. XIII, p. 311.