THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF REALITY 253 



process of thought? Assuredly not. Yet we are not thereby 

 committed to say with the immediatist that reality is just our un- 

 analyzed immediate experience, and that the real nature of noises 

 and lines and events in no other than what they have been actu- 

 ally experienced as. For the assumption that a given thing 

 really possesses the character we ascribe to it, implies not only 

 that (as we have already pointed out) it has stood the test of in- 

 quiry, but also that it may be counted upon similarly to bear the 

 light of any future inquiry, that it to say, no matter what fur- 

 ther investigation might reveal about the thing, what we know 

 now will stand as an integral part of the enlarged knowledge of it. 

 This assumption, as we are ever, upon reflection, ready to admit, 

 is erroneous ; for we are aware that the enlargement of knowledge 

 does not take place by mere addition to the existing stock, but 

 continually involves the modification and even transformation of 

 that which has hitherto been accepted as most assured and most 

 fundamental. In other words, the untruth of the assumption is 

 simply the untruth which attaches to any abstraction whatsoever, 

 the mistake of supposing that a partial account of anything 

 may be absolutely true so far as it goes. The fact remains, that 

 all our actual knowledge is of this sort, an everlasting synec- 

 doche in which the abstract poses for the concrete. The very 

 terms in which our most certain judgments are expressed are 

 themselves only relatively determinate. But let us note that 

 even as we demand only that degree of flexibility in the cord of 

 our pulley which will satisfy the requirements of our purpose, so it 

 is only a certain degree of determinateness which is relevant to 

 the ends of either action or thought. A certain degree of in- 

 determinateness is negligible; and, as in the case of the pulley, 

 just how much is negligible depends upon the specific purpose of 

 the application. 



And so we may, as instrumentalists, find a new interpretation 

 for the absolute idealist's definition of reality. It may be legiti- 

 mately taken as a description of a 'pure case,' or ideal limit, 

 analogous to the fundamental formulae of the mathematical sci- 



