A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 157 



only if experience means only mental states. The 

 critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine that 

 experience is made up of states of mind, of sensa 

 tions and ideas. It is then for him to decide how, 

 on his basis, he escapes subjective idealism, or 

 &quot; mentalism.&quot; The pragmatist starts from a much 

 more commonplace notion of experience, that of 

 the plain man who never dreams that to experience 

 a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to 

 substitute a mental state for it. More particu 

 larly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience * 

 is a matter of functions and habits, of active ad 

 justments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations 

 and activities, rather than of states of conscious 

 ness. To criticise the pragmatist by reading into 

 him exactly the notion of experience that he denies 

 and replaces, may be psychological and unregener- 

 ately &quot; pragmatic,&quot; but it is hardly &quot; intellectual.&quot; 

 Pupil: Objection Three. You remind me, curi 

 ously enough, of a contention of my old instructor 

 to the effect that the pragmatist, when criticised, 

 always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and 

 subjectivism, he falls back on things independent 

 of ideas, adducing them in order to pass upon the 

 truth or falsity of the latter. But thereby he only 

 covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard. 

 Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of sci 

 ence and a clamorous reiteration, in new phrase 

 ology* of what all philosophers hold. 



