THE INTELLECTUALIST CRITERION U3 



garded not as a truism but as furnishing some ad 

 ditional knowledge ; as if it were, indeed, the dawn 

 ing of a revelation regarding truth. Then it is 

 said that the idea worked or was verified because 

 it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth; 

 the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error 

 of supposing that it is true because it works. If 

 one remembers that what the experimentalist means 

 is that the effective working of an idea and its 

 truth are one and the same thing this working 

 being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth 

 but its nature it is hard to see the point of this 

 statement. A man under peculiarly precarious 

 circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A 

 by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. 

 &quot; Yes,&quot; replies some one, &quot; but he was a saved man 

 all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it 

 gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it.&quot; 

 Now even such a statement as pure tautology, 

 as characterizing the entire process in terms of its 

 issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like 

 all tautology, it seems to say something but does 

 not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier 

 condition of affairs, apart from the active process 

 by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such 

 a statement would be monstrously false ; and would 

 declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, 

 the man would have been left to drown. In like 

 fashion, to say, after the event, that a given idea 



