49° TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



this unhallowed link has once been established, retribution overtakes us. 

 For when the reality of the thing is independently certain, we [then] have 

 to admit that the reality of the thing should determine our approval of that 

 thing. I find it difiicult to imagine a more degraded position. 



Mr, McTaggart ends his chapter with the heroic words : 



For those who do not pray, there remains the resolve that, so far as 

 their strength may permit, neither the pains of death nor the pains of life 

 shall drive them to any comfort in that which they hold to be false, or drive 

 them from any comfort [discomfort?] in that which they hold to be true. 



How can so ingenious-minded a writer fail to see how far over 

 the heads of the enemy all his arrows pass? When Mr. McTaggart 

 himself believes that the universe is run by the dialectic energy of the 

 absolute idea, his insistent desire to have a world of that sort is felt 

 by him to be no chance example of desire in general, but an altogether 

 peculiar insight-giving passion to which, in this if in no other instance, 

 he would be stupid not to yield. He obeys its concrete singularity, 

 not the bare abstract feature in it of being a " desire." His situation 

 is as particular as that of an actress who resolves that it is best for 

 her to marry and leave the stage, of a priest who becomes secular, of a 

 politician who abandons public life. What sensible man would seek to 

 refute the concrete decisions of such persons by tracing them to 

 abstract premises, such as that " all actresses must marry," " all clergy- 

 men must be laymen," " all politicians should resign their posts " ? 

 Yet this type of refutation, absolutely unavailing though it be for 

 purposes of conversion, is spread by Mr. McTaggart through many 

 pages of his book. For the aboundingness of our real reasons he sub- 

 stitutes one narrow point. For men's real probabilities he gives an 

 abstraction which no man is tempted to believe. 



The abstraction in my next example is less simple, but is quite as 

 flimsy as a weapon of attack. Empiricists think that truth in general 

 is distilled from single men's ideas ; and the so-called pragmatists " go 

 them one better " by trying to define what it consists in when it comes. 

 It consists in such a working, I have elsewhere said, on the part of the 

 ideas, as may bring the man into satisfactory relations with objects to 

 which these latter point. The working is of course a concrete working 

 in the actual experience of human beings, among their ideas, feelings, 

 perceptions, beliefs and acts, as well as among the physical things of 

 their environment, and the relations must be understood as being pos- 

 sible as well as actual. In the chapter on truth of my recent book 

 called " Pragmatism "" I have myself taken considerable pains to 

 defend this view. Strange have been some of the misconceptions of 

 it by its enemies, and many have these latter been. Among the most 

 formidable-sounding onslaughts on the attempt to introduce some 

 concreteness into our notion of what the truth of an idea may mean, 



•Longmans, Green & Co., 1908. 



