492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the pretence on any one's part to have found for certain at any given 

 moment what the shape of that truth is. Since the better absolutists 

 agree in this, admitting that the proposition " There is absolute truth " 

 is the only absolute truth of which we can be sure/ further debate is 

 practically unimportant, so we may pass to their next charge. 



It is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most 

 apparent. The anti-pragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, refuses 

 to give any account of what the words may mean. For him they form 

 a self-explanatory term. The pragmatist, on the contrary, articulately 

 defines their meaning. Truth absolute, he says, means an ideal set 

 of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of 

 experience be expected to converge. In this definition of absolute truth 

 he not only postulates that there is a tendency to such convergence of 

 opinions, but he postulates the other factors of his definition equally, 

 borrowing them by anticipation from the true conclusions expected to be 

 reached. He postulates the existence of opinions, he postulates the ex- 

 perience that will sift them, and the consistency which that experience 

 will show. He justifies himself in these assumptions by saying that 

 human opinion has already reached a pretty stable equilibrium regard- 

 ing them, and that if its future development fails to alter them, the 

 definition itself, with all its terms included, will be part of the very 

 absolute truth which it defines. The hypothesis will, in short, have 

 worked successfully all round the circle and proved self-corroborative, 

 and the circle will be closed. 



The anti-pragmatist, however, immediately falls foul of the word 

 " opinion " here, abstracts it from the universe of life, and uses it as a 

 bare dictionary-substantive, to deny the rest of the assumptions with 

 which it coexists. The dictionary says that an opinion is "what 

 some one thinks or believes." This leaves every one's opinion free to be 

 autogenous, or unrelated either to what any one else may think, or to 

 what the truth may be. Therefore, continue our abstractionists, we 

 must conceive it as essentially thus unrelated, so that even were a billion 

 men to sport the same opinion, and only one man to differ, we could 

 admit no collateral circumstances which might presumptively make it 

 more probable that he, not they, should be wrong. Truth, they say, 

 follows not the counting of noses, nor is it only another name for a 



• Of course the bugaboo creature called " the sceptic " in the logic-books, 

 who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one 

 he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy-target for the rationalist 

 shooting gallery — hit him and he turns a summersault — yet he is the only 

 sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist. 



' Compare Rickert's " Gegenstand der Erkentniss," pp. 137, 138. Miinster- 

 berg's version of this first truth is that " Es gibt eine Welt" — see his "Philos- 

 ophic der Werte," pp. 38 and 74. And, after all, both these philosophers confess 

 in the end that the primal truth of which they consider our supposed denial so 

 irrational is not properly an insight at all but a dogma adopted by the will 

 which any one who turns his back on duty may disregard! 



