EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPLES 149 



is the original statement (p. 202), but it is almost immediately 

 lost sight of and sometimes as pleasant by reason of the char- 

 acter of the object to which it leads. That is to say, the pleasant- 

 ness sometimes attaches to the process, sometimes to the result, 

 without our being informed whether either or both modes are 

 necessary to truth. In the former case, moreover, in addition 

 to the specific pleasantness above mentioned, an appeal to indi- 

 vidual or conventional taste may be a factor the taste for 

 simplicity, for example. In the second place, the knowledge of 

 the second class of realities (the relations between purely mental 

 ideas) is altogether independent of the eventualities of experience. 

 Ideas in agreement with such realities are at once obtained by 

 inspection, and are not subject to confirmation or correction. 1 

 If the results of conduct which they in part control are unsatis- 

 factory, the fault is invariably charged elsewhere: things have 

 been incorrectly subsumed. This anomaly has doubtless struck 

 every reader; but we know not if it has been generally noticed 

 that the whole passage might have been transcribed from Locke 

 or Hume. 2 A similar account in The Principles of Psychology is 

 in fact declared by Mr. James simply "to make a little more 

 explicit the teachings of Locke's fourth book" (p. 662). The 

 pragmatist theory of truth is only verbally brought into connec- 

 tion with the knowledge of the relations in question. Agreement 

 is said to be still "an affair of leading"; but nothing of the sort 

 is made out. The failure of pragmatism is concealed by a bor- 

 rowing from the old dogmatism. 



We believe that the development of the judgment is marked by 

 increasing definiteness and increasing universality, that is to say, 

 by the greater and greater delicacy with which it is contradicted 

 or confirmed by experience, and by its gradual transcendence 



: We recall the statement in Mr. James's Principles of Psychology: "The pure 

 sciences form a body of propositions with whose genesis experience has nothing to 

 do" (p. 641). 



2 Cf. Pragmatism, pp. 209-10 with (e. g.) Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, 

 Part III, Section i. Hume, to be sure, instead of describing the terms of the 

 relations as 'purely mental ideas,' enumerates the classes of relations to which 

 the account applies. 



