A DEFENCE OF PRAGMATISM 357 



variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of 

 new words and pronunciations — and then to generalize it, to make it 

 apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects 

 through ages. 



The process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for 

 generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into 

 new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual 

 has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that 

 puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective 

 moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of 

 facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which 

 they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his 

 mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape 

 by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it 

 as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. 

 So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist 

 change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which 

 he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of 

 the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new 

 experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and ex- 

 pediently. 



This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves 

 the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching 

 them just enough to make them admit the novelty and conceiving 

 that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree ex- 

 planation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a 

 true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till 

 we found something less excentric. The most violent revolutions in an 

 individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and 

 space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography 

 remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over 

 of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show 

 a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold a theory true 

 just in proportion to its success in solving this ' problem of maxima 

 and minima.' But success in solving this problem is eminently a 

 matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it on the whole 

 more satisfactorily than that theory ; but that means more satisfactorily 

 to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction 

 differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. 



The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played 

 by the older truths. Failure to take account of it is the source of many 

 of the unjust criticisms leveled against pragmatism. The influence of 

 elder truths is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first 

 principle — in most cases it is the only principle. The most usual way 

 of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious 



