238 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



advanced is valid with reference to Professor Dewey s position, 

 it will, I think, hold respecting that of Professor James. 



The doctrine of immediatism is the pragmatist s substitute for 

 ontology. It is briefly expressed in the formula, that reality is, 

 or things really are, what they are experienced as. The formula 

 owes its point to the distinction between things as known and 

 things as otherwise experienced. The fallacy of older theories 

 is supposed to lie precisely in the assumption, that the object of 

 knowledge alone is real; or, otherwise put, that reality sustains 

 but a single sort of relation to us, namely, that of object to be 

 known. Such an assumption, however, fails signally to do 

 justice either to the nature of reality, or to our relations to it. 

 For reality is practical; and, besides being object of knowledge, 

 it is that with which we hold commerce, economic, ethical, 

 aesthetic, and the like. Hence it is whatever, and all, it is ex 

 perienced to be. More specifically, the real is what it is imme 

 diately experienced as, not alone what it is found to be for a later 

 reflection. Thus, in the illustration used by Professor Dewey, 

 the noise heard in the night is really fearsome, even though in 

 vestigation shows it to be only the harmless flapping of a shade 

 in the wind. This is not meant to imply that the object of the 

 subsequent knowledge-experience is unreal (because known as 

 harmless), but merely that the object know T n has no exclusive 

 title to reality. The knowledge-experience, albeit the issue of a 

 process of mediation, is, as experience, itself immediate, and 

 hence as real, if no more real, than any other kind of experience. 

 Reality, then, is identifiable with experience in its immediate as 

 pect. To the objection that the real object thus becomes the 

 subject of contradictory predicates, the reply of the pragmatist 

 is that the ascription of contradictory predicates becomes a dif 

 ficulty only when the real object is conceived as a static entity. 

 The solution lies in conceiving the real itself to change. The 

 noise of the illustration is really fearsome and really harmless, 

 just because the reality experienced has changed, and changed, 

 indeed, by virtue of the knowing itself. It is a false account of 



