360 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective 

 truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, 

 august, exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts 

 with an equally absolute reality. It must be what we ought to think, 

 unconditionally. The ways in which we do think are so much 

 irrelevance and matter for psychology. Down with psychology, up 

 with logic, in all this question ! 



See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind ! The pragmatist 

 clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in par- 

 ticular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name 

 for definite working values in experience. For the rationalist it re- 

 mains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. 

 When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must 

 defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which 

 his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth, whereas 

 we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always 

 ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders 

 at concreteness. Other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and 

 spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose 

 the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much 

 purer, clearer, nobler. 



I hope that as these lectures go on, the concreteness and closeness 

 to facts of the pragmatism which they advocate may be what approves 

 itself to you as its most satisfactory peculiarity. It only follows here 

 the example of the sister sciences, interpreting the unobserved by the 

 observed. It brings old and new harmoniously together. It converts 

 the absolutely empty notion of a bare static relation of ' correspond- 

 ence' (whatever that may mean) between our minds and reality, into 

 that of a rich and active commerce, that any one may follow in detail 

 and understand, between particular thoughts of ours, and the great 

 universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have 

 their uses. 



But enough of this at present? The justification of what I say 

 must be postponed. I wish now to add a word in further explanation 

 of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a 

 happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more reli- 

 gious demands of human beings. 



Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may 

 remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the 

 unsympathetic tone of the philosophy which present-day idealism 

 offers them. It is too intellectualistic for them. Old-fashioned dual- 

 istic theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted 

 monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous ' attri- 

 butes'; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, 



