in TRUTH 59 



comprehension of truth. It contends that once more, 

 only more signally and clearly than in the individual s 

 case, it is the usefulness and efficiency of the propositions 

 for which truth is claimed that determines their social 

 recognition. The use -criterion selects the individual 

 truth -valuations, and constitutes thereby the objective 

 truth which obtains social recognition. Hence in the 

 fullest sense of Truth its definition must be pragmatist. 

 Truth is the useful, efficient, workable, to which our 

 practical experience tends to restrict our truth-valuations ; 

 if anything the reverse of this professes to be true, it is 

 (sooner or later) detected and rejected. 



As an account of Truth this is not so much a 

 speculative theory as a description of plain fact. When 

 ever we observe a struggle between two rival theories of 

 events we find that it is ultimately the greater con- 

 duciveness of the victor to our use and convenience that 

 determines our preference and its consequent acceptance 

 as true. Illustrations of this fact might be multiplied 

 without limit. It will suffice however to allude to the 

 well - known fact that what decided the rejection of 

 the Ptolemaic epicycles in favour of the Copernican 

 astronomy was not any sheer failure to represent celestial 

 motions, but the growing cumbrousness of the assumptions 

 and the growing difficulty of the calculations which its 

 truth involved. Similarly when I affirm (as I have 

 now been doing for a good dozen years) that the 

 metaphysical theory of the Absolute Is false, I only mean 

 that it is useless, that it simplifies nothing and complicates 

 everything, and that its supposed advantages are one and 

 all illusory. And I hope that as the pragmatist way of 

 looking at things grows to be more familiar, more of my 

 philosophic confreres will allow themselves to perceive 

 these simple facts. 



Of course there still remain complications of detail 

 about the doctrine that social usefulness is an ultimate 

 determinant of truth. It is obvious, for example, that 

 delicate questions may arise out of the fact that not only 

 does what works receive social recognition, but also that 



