The Fitness of Ideas 263 



more to reflect the social judgment in his own systematic 

 determination of knowledge ; and there arises within him- 

 self a criterion of a private sort which is in essential 

 harmony with the social demand, because genetically con- 

 sidered it reflects it. The individual becomes a law unto 

 himself, exercises his private judgment, fights his own 

 battles for truth, shows the virtue of independence and the 

 vice of obstinacy. But he has learned to do it by the 

 selective control of his social environment, and in his judg- 

 ment he has just a sense of this social outcome. 



In the work referred to I have dwelt at length upon the 

 actual facts of this educative dependence of the individual 

 upon social lessons. The aspect to be emphasized here 

 is the selective aspect, i.e., the truth that the internal 

 criterion is, so far as it goes, always in fact the primary 

 criterion in our thinking ; but that in its origin the rela- 

 tion is quite the reverse ; and, further, that the individual's 

 judgment is liable all the time to the final selective revision 

 of the social voice. This shows itself most markedly in 

 those ideal states of mind in which the direct control of 

 objective fact is lacking and where the private determina- 

 tion is more or less explicitly accompanied by a sense of 

 'publicity' a sense that the public judgment is impli- 

 cated with one's own in the approval or disapproval of 

 this act or that. In our ethical judgments I think this 

 ingredient is unmistakable. 



It remains only to say again that in the state of mind 

 called belief, mental indorsement, and in particular cases 

 judgment, we have the actual outgoing of this systematic 

 determination upon the details of experience. All judg- 

 ments in experience are, I think, acts of systematic deter- 

 mination, acts of taking up an attitude, of erecting a plat- 



