TRUTH AMONG THE PRAGMATISTS. 103 



jective in practice which is not self-interest. How far they have 

 succeeded in estabHshing this latter distinction cannot now be 

 fully argued. But a strange phenomenon will give a clue to their 

 small success. They have failed to bring home this distinction 

 to most of the learned philosophers, who have appreciated their 

 speculations with some degree of sympathy. Prof. James has 

 written a volume to reply to the misunderstandings of his critics 

 on the meaning of truth. Having propounded in pragmatism a 

 philosophy which boasts of its singular privilege of systematising 

 the concrete imagination of the average man, he is much sur- 

 prised that there should be such difficulty in grasping his mean- 

 ing. 



" It seems as if the power of imagining the world concretely might 

 have been common enough to let our readers apprehend it better, as if 

 they might have read between our lines, and in spite of all our in- 

 felicities of expression, guessed a little more correctly what our thought 

 was-" * 



Now if there is one field in which the average reader or 



listener is competent, it is the field of concrete imagination. 



And Prof. James is a master in the art of apt illustration and the 



concrete example. If in such a fertile field, and with his natural 



ability, he has failed to be lucid in his original exposition er in 



its subsequent defence, we can only accuse the recalcitrant nature 



of the subject-matter. His meaning remains vague and shadowy, 



because his definition of truth is loose, variable and liable to all 



the irregularities of the himian will when not controlled by some 



objective reality outside its own acts or wishes. The greatest 



difficulty in dealing with the pragmatist notion of truth arises 



from the number of definitions that they have given. Even 



Prof. James has elaborated several distinct expositions of the 



word and its content, which he himself has not- as yet harmonised 



with any great success. But the most explicit or rather the least 



vague is that in " Pragmatism " (p. 222 ). 



" The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way 

 of our thinking, just as right is only the expedient in the way of be- 

 having. Expedient in almost any fashion ; and expedient in the long 

 run, and on the whole of our course ; for what meets expediently all 

 the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all further experiences 

 equally satisfactorily." 



In the mind of the plain man there is a radical opposition 

 between expediency and truth. Hence we may infer that it is 

 not quite in the sense of the plain man that the expedient is here 

 ofifered as an elucidation of the true. The creative philosopher 

 dares to give words new meanings. It is open to question 

 whether this new creative departure is wise ; but it is now more 

 urgent to realise its import. The expedient in thought is, 

 according to one pragmatist, that which unites in harmony with 

 all a man's experiences. 



'■' I start with two things [says Professor James] the objective facts 

 and the claims (,i.e., truth-claims or, as we might gloss his words, the 



* " The Meaning of Truth," p. 216. 



