THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION 141 



the window and through listening and looking in 

 tently the listening and the looking being modes 

 of behavior organize into a single situation ele 

 ments of existence and meaning which were previ 

 ously disconnected. In this way an idea is made 

 true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is 

 no longer merely a propounding or a guess. If I 

 had not reacted in a way appropriate to the idea 

 it would have remained a mere idea; at most a 

 candidate for truth that, unless acted upon upon 

 the spot, would always have remained a theory. 

 Now in such a case where the end to be accom 

 plished is the discovery of a certain order of facts 

 would the intellectualist claim that apart from 

 the forming and entertaining of some interpreta 

 tion, the category of truth has either existence or 

 meaning? Will he claim that without an original 

 practical uneasiness introducing a practical aim of 

 inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an 

 idea? Must the world for some purely intellectual 

 reason be intellectually reduplicated? Could not 

 that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy 

 street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence 

 is concerned, its unidentified status of being mere 

 physical alteration in a vast unidentified complex 

 of matter-in-motion ? Was there any intellectual 

 necessity that compelled the event to arouse just 

 this judgment, that it meant a street-car? Was 

 there any physical or metaphysical necessity? 



