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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIII. No. 1109 



plore its own depths and exploit its own 

 processes, whatever the result may be, yet 

 I would point that the world is not peopled 

 wholly by Greens, Cairds, Bosanquets, 

 Bradleys and Royces, and that the life and 

 thought of the exoteric many can never but 

 remotely be influenced by this doctrine of 

 truth. 



The other school of philosophy is a pro- 

 ponent of a doctrine of truth quite differ- 

 ent from the product of pure intellectual- 

 ism and which can be understood and 

 applied by the many to daily life, and be- 

 cause it can be of service to them it can be 

 absolved from the charge that "it bakes no 

 bread." This school of philosophy holds, 

 as its cardinal tenet, that truth is a body 

 of beliefs or generalizations that work when 

 you apply in it in your needs. The truth 

 in a particular case is the generalization, 

 great or small, that you find in accordance 

 with the facts, and the facts themselves are 

 isolated truths, the products of your ex- 

 perience, that you accept as satisfying 

 your intellectual tests. Whatever works 

 then in daily life is truth, and, if a gener- 

 alization, or belief, can not be so applied, it 

 has no function or significance intellectu- 

 ally or practically, and can not be truth as 

 it is conceived by the disciples of this 

 school. 



This school of philosophy is known as 

 the pragmatic school and it is generally 

 supposed to have been founded within our 

 own time by the late C. S. Pierce and Pro- 

 fessor William James, of Harvard, and Dr. 

 P. C. S. Schiller, of Oxford, and Professor 

 John Dewey, of Columbia, who still remain 

 its leaders. The school, however, repre- 

 sents an attitude of mind that has influ- 

 enced the race since its origin one or more 

 millions of years ago. Ever since the mid- 

 dle of the Pliocene Age, or, perhaps, even 

 since the end of the Miocene, man has had 



to struggle with his environment, and that 

 very struggle postulated a system of be- 

 liefs and generalizations, which, if they 

 served him, represented to him truth. The 

 beliefs and generalizations did not work, 

 if he failed in the struggle and was ex- 

 terminated. They were, of necessity, at 

 first of the crudest, the most barbaric type 

 and limited in their scope and application 

 to the needs of the moment, but they were 

 changed as they slowly underwent the test 

 of experience, and the beliefs and generali- 

 zations of one age were discarded wholly 

 or became the superstitions of succeeding 

 ages. Even to-day the vast majority of 

 mankind regard their beliefs and generali- 

 zations as true because they work or give 

 a satisfactory explanation of the scheme of 

 things as it appears now. 



That the pragmatic point determined 

 what truth was in the mind of prehistoric 

 man may be gathered from the study of 

 the beliefs and practises of those tribes 

 which are still in the prehistoric stage of 

 culture. Sir John G. Prazer, the author of 

 "The Golden Bough," and one of the pro- 

 foundest students of the history of human 

 culture, in his work "Psyche's Task" 

 claims that the evolution of some of our 

 most cherished convictions and principles, 

 such as the sacredness of human life, sex- 

 ual morality, the rights of property and 

 our conception of social order, was pro- 

 moted by the beliefs and generalizations of 

 prehistoric races. These beliefs and gen- 

 eralizations now appear to us as supersti- 

 tion, and of the grossest character in some 

 respects, but this very superstition in pro- 

 moting those convictions and principles on 

 which the whole fabric of society rests has 

 rendered a great service to humanity. Sir 

 John Prazer admits that superstition has 

 been productive of evil in the history of 

 the race, but this should not blind us to the 



