AN ABUSE OF ABSTRACTION 491 



is one that has been raised in many quarters to the effect that to make 

 truth grow in any way out of human opinion is but to reproduce that 

 protagorean doctrine that the individual man is " the measure of all 

 things/' which Plato in his immortal dialogue, the Thaeatetus, laid 

 away so comfortably in its grave two thousand years ago. The two 

 cleverest brandishers of this objection to make truth concrete, Pro- 

 fessors Eickert and Miinsterberg, write in German, and " Eelativis- 

 mus " is the name they give to the heresy which they endeavor to 

 uproot. 



The first step in their campaign against " Eelativismus " is entirely 

 in the air. They accuse relativists — and we pragmatists are typical 

 relativists — of being debarred by their self-adopted principles, not 

 only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of believ- 

 ing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and abso- 

 lute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in the 

 pragmatic sense of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree, and 

 which no man should ever wish to change. Both charges fall wide 

 of their mark. I myself, as a pragmatist, believe in my own account 

 of truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his. And 

 I believe in it for the very reason that I have the idea of truth which 

 my learned adversaries contend that no pragmatist can frame. I 

 expect, namely, that the more fully men discuss and test my account, 

 the more they will agree that it fits, and the less will they desire a 

 change. I may of course be premature in this confidence, and the 

 glory of being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later re- 

 vision and correction of my scheme, which scheme will then be judged 

 untrue in just the measure in which it departs from that finally satis- 

 factory formulation. To admit, as we pragmatists do, that we are 

 liable to correction (even though we may not expect it) involves the 

 use on our part of an ideal standard. Eationalists themselves are, as 

 modest individuals, sceptical enough to admit the abstract possibility 

 of their own present opinions being corrigible and revisable to some 

 degree, so that the fact that the mere notion of an absolute standard 

 should seem to them so important a thing to claim for themselves 

 and to deny to us is not easy to explain. If, along with the notion of 

 the standard, they could also claim its exclusive warrant for their 

 own fulminations now, it would be important to them indeed. But 

 absolutists like Eickert freely admit the sterility of the notion, even 

 in their own hands. Truth is what we ougJit to believe, they say, even 

 though no man ever did or shall believe it, and even though we have 

 no way of getting at it save by the usual empirical processes of testing 

 our opinions by one another and by facts. Pragmatically, then, this 

 part of the dispute is idle. No relativist who ever actually walked 

 the earth® has denied the constitutive character in his own thinking 

 of the notion of absolute truth. What is challenged by relativists is 



