A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 167 



shall find, as at present, the most ambitious intel- 

 lectualistic systems accepted simply because of the 

 personal comfort they yield those who contrive 

 and accept them. Once recognize the human fac 

 tor, and pragmatism is at hand to insist that the 

 believer must accept the full consequences of his 

 beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, 

 through acting upon them, to discover what is 

 their meaning or consequence. Till so tested, he 

 insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seem 

 ingly edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the 

 testing has been worked out very completely and 

 patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional, 

 as working hypotheses, as methods : and he recog 

 nizes the probability that, as additional modes of 

 testing develop, more and more so-called truths 

 will be relegated to the category of working hypo 

 theses till the dogmatic mind is crowded out and 

 starved out. At present, the ignoring by philos 

 ophers of the part played by personal education, 

 temperament, and preference in their philosophies 

 is the chief source of pretentiousness and insin 

 cerity in their systems, and is the ground of the 

 popular disregard for them. 



Pupil. What you say calls to mind something 

 of Chesterton s that I read recently : &quot; I agree with 

 the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is 

 not the whole matter ; that there is an authoritative 

 need to believe the things that are necessary to 



