ii USELESS KNOWLEDGE 35 



that if I submitted to his discipline, I should infallibly 

 come to see for myself what he knew to be true. I asked 

 him how, and was amused to find that he wanted me to 

 sit in the sun all day in a stiff and upright posture, 

 breathing in a peculiar way, stopping the right nostril 

 with the thumb, and then slowly drawing in the breath 

 through the left, and breathing it out through the right. 

 By doing this and ejaculating the sacred word &quot; Om &quot; ten 

 thousand times daily, he assured me I should become a 

 god, nay, greater than all gods. I asked him how soon 

 this fate was likely to befall me, if I tried. He thought 

 enlightenment might come to me in one year, or ten, or 

 more. It all depended on me. I replied that even if I 

 failed to get a sunstroke I should be more likely to 

 become an idiot than a god, but that I should already 

 be one if I tried anything so silly. You, however, 

 seem to me to be committing yourself to the same 

 absurdity when you try to extend to contemplation the 

 method which is appropriate only to action. 



But that, Aristotle, is just the point to be proved. 

 My contention is that Pragmatism extends to the ac 

 quisition of theoretical principles a method as appropriate 

 to them as to practice. As for Gymnosophistic, I think 

 that your Indian friend s method was really quite different 

 For though he professed to reach truth by training, there 

 was no rational connexion between the truths he aimed at 

 and the methods he advocated, which indeed could only 

 produce self-deception. In moral matters, on the other 

 hand, it is, as you say, necessary to dispose the mind for 

 the perception of truth by appropriate action. If we 

 declined to do this we should not start with a mind free 

 from bias and impartially open to every belief for that 

 is impossible but with one biassed by different action in 

 a different direction. So that really the training you 

 demand is only what is needed to clear away the anti- 

 moral prejudices to which our character would otherwise 

 predispose us. Is this not so? 



Certainly ; you speak well so far. 



Thank you. May I point out next that the method 



