EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPLES l6l 



tion. So, when the pragmatist interprets his doctrine as an 

 individualism, we declare that we find the rationalist right as 

 against him; for the latter merely describes as a realized, or 

 definitely realizable, end an indefinitely distant ideal toward 

 which the developing judgment tends. 



Will it be said that the development which we have been trac 

 ing is not of truth, but of the capacity of the judgment for ex 

 pressing truth, that truth itself is the eternal ideal toward which 

 the whole development is tending? Well and good; we need 

 not quarrel about terms. But, in the first place, let it be re 

 membered, that the stages of this development are not past and 

 gone. We cannot live by pure mathematics alone, enormously 

 valuable as its conceptions are to us. Truths such as, Johnny 

 is a baby,&quot; and &quot;William is still young,&quot; are still wonderfully 

 important to us; and it is idle to say that they are not true. 

 Whatever truth may mean for an absolute consciousness, for us 

 it certainly includes all the grades that have been mentioned, 

 and no doubt others which we have not distinguished. It is an 

 utterly arbitrary use of terms to restrict it to the ultimate ideal. 

 In the second place, we must beware of imagining that science 

 as a whole is approaching the mathematical type that the day 

 is nearing, though still far distant, when all our encyclopedias 

 shall be reduced to tables of formulae. Take any particular field 

 of concrete inquiry, and as investigation proceeds, a body of more 

 and more general and precise propositions is accumulated within 

 it. But even within the given field the looser, more vaguely 

 limited propositions likewise accumulate. The evolution is a 

 spreading-out and a filling-in, as well as a growth upward. The 

 same is true of knowledge in general. Paradoxical as the state 

 ment may seem, each new stage in the advancement of science 

 makes it more and more manifestly impossible that its highest 

 type of judgment should ever be applied to express its entire 

 content. There is a manifest increase in clearness and universal 

 ity, but there is also a constant expansion of the confused and the 

 contingent; and the importance of these in our world-view is 

 assuredly not declining. 



