Makch 31, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



443 



benefit it has conferred, and he gives spe- 

 cial point to all this by a dictum which for 

 its brevity and concentrated wisdom is well 

 worth remembering: 



Once the harbor lights are passed and the ship 

 is in port, it matters little whether the pilot 

 steered by a Jacli o ' lantern or the stars. 



The history of the human mind is then 

 that of long ages of discipline in pragma- 

 tism. It is the pragmatic mind that has 

 brought man along the road of progress 

 through the million or more years of the 

 prehistoric period to the stage of civiliza- 

 tion of to-day. It is the pragmatic mind 

 that will lead him^ indeed force him, along 

 the road of progress in the many, many 

 millions of years during which the race 

 will possess the earth. In all that time to 

 come he will refine more and more the 

 processes by which he arrives at what he 

 will regard as truth and he will subject it 

 to ever rigider tests as the millenia pass. 

 As a result, there will be many a discarded 

 belief and generalization once looked upon 

 as truth, just as there has been in the past 

 a long series of beliefs and generalizations 

 which for a time worked and then became 

 superstitions. Truth then will have its 

 paleontology just as life has, with its myri- 

 ads of forms which have passed away. 



To those who are inclined to accept the 

 intellectualist's teachings, this view of 

 truth as earth-born rather than heaven- 

 born, appears repellant and degrading. It 

 does not seem possible for them to idealize 

 it as they can idealize what Carlyle calls 

 "The eternal verities." They, with 

 Chaucer, may hold that ' ' truth is the high- 

 est thing a man may keep," and they are 

 prone, accordingly, to sublimate it, as the 

 intellectualist does, until it has no earthly 

 afSnities. They should remember that 

 truth of the absolute school has had a re- 

 pellant history. Men have in the past as- 



sumed that they were in the possession of 

 absolute truth and they attempted to eom- 

 l^el all others to accept it also. Not to re- 

 ceive the absolute truth, they held, was to 

 murder the soul, and to prevent such 

 murder the extremest cruelty was consid- 

 ered justifiable. Hence arose persecution, 

 religious wars, death at the stake and on 

 the scaffold, massacres of thousands and re- 

 lapses into barbarism. Absolute truth has 

 then its paleontology to remind it that it, 

 like the truth of pragmatism, is subject to 

 growth, to evolution, and that it may ripen 

 only with the ages. 



From all that I have said it follows that 

 the long discussions on the nature of truth 

 as the pure intellectualist understands it 

 have been but vain dallyings with illusory 

 ideas. There is no absolute truth know- 

 able to the human mind. All that passes 

 for such can, at best, be but a remote ap- 

 proximation to what may, in the final cast 

 of thought in the far-distant future, be a 

 dim limning of the ultimate, the absolute, 

 the fundamental significance of the rela- 

 tions of reality and mind. 



Now what is the bearing of all this on 

 scientific truth? 



Its significance lies in the fact that the 

 representatives of science must always face 

 the question of the validity of its position 

 as an exponent of organized knowledge. 

 There is in the popular mind a notion that 

 the processes by which the facts and gen- 

 eralizations of science are established are 

 different from those which are employed 

 outside of the laboratory or observatory to 

 establish the working hypotheses of daily 

 life, or which were employed, more or less 

 unconsciously, in the development of the 

 most firmly founded principles on which 

 our present social order rests. This has 

 caused science to be regarded as a thing 

 apart, as the lore of an oracle whose pro- 



