166 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 



would he appeal to other than what is ultimately 

 a practical need and a practical criterion in en 

 deavoring to convert others. 



Pupil: Objection Nine. Still the pragmatic 

 criterion, being satisfactory working, is purely 

 personal and subjective. Whatever works so as 

 to please me is true. Either this is your result (in 

 which case your reference to social relations only 

 denotes at bottom a number of purely subjectivistic 

 satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume an 

 intellectual department of our nature that has 

 to be satisfied ; and whose satisfaction is truth. 

 Thereby you admit the intellectualistic criterion. 



Teacher: Reply. We seem to have got back 

 to our starting-point, the nature of satisfaction. 

 The intellectualist seems to think that because the 

 pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, 

 purpose, and realization in the making and testing 

 of judgments, the impersonal factor is therefore 

 denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist 

 that the human factor must work itself out in 

 co-operation with the environmental factor, and 

 that their co-adaptation is both &quot; correspondence &quot; 

 and &quot; satisfaction.&quot; As long as the human factor 

 is ignored and denied, or is regarded as merely 

 psychological (whatever, once more, that means), 

 this human factor will assert itself in irresponsible 

 ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy, a 

 flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we 



