If, however, it be urged that pragmatic truths never grow absolutely true at all, and that the most prolonged pragmatic tests do not exclude the possibility of an ultimate error in the idea, there is no difficulty about admitting this.  The pragmatic test yields practical, and not ‘absolute,’ certainty.  The existence of absolute certainty is denied, and the demand for it, in a world which contains only the practical sort, merely plays into the hands of scepticism.  The uncertainty of all our verificatory processes, however, is not the creation of the pragmatist, nor is he a god to abolish it.  Abstractly, there is always a doubt about what transcends our immediate experience, and this is why it is so healthy to have to repudiate so many theoretic doubts in every act we do.  For beliefs have to be acted on, and the results of the action rightly react on the beliefs.  The pragmatic test is practically adequate, and is the only one available.  That it brings out the risk of action only brings out its superiority to a theory which cannot get started at all until it is supplied with absolute certainty, and meantime can only idly rail at all existing human truths.

We have in all this consistently referred the truth of ideas to individual experiences for verification.  This evidently makes all truths in some sense dependent upon the personality of those who assert and accept them.  Intellectualist logic, on the other hand, has always proclaimed that mental processes, if true, are ‘independent’ of the idiosyncrasies of particular minds.  Ideas have a fixed meaning, and cohere in bodies of ‘universal’ truth, quite irrespective of whether any particular mind harbours them or not.  This is not only a contention fatal to the pragmatic claims, but also bound up with other assumptions of Formal Logic.  So it becomes necessary to inquire whether this Logic is a success, and so can coherently abstract from the personality of the knower and the particular situations that incite him to know.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote C:  Not even ‘I lie,’ which is meaningless as it stands, Cf. Dr. Schiller’s Formal Logic, p. 373.]

[Footnote D:  This same difficulty reappears in various forms, as e.g., in a recent theory which makes the truth of a judgment lie in its asserting a relation between different objects, and not in the existence of those objects themselves.  This formula also applies as evidently to false judgments as to true.  It, too, brings no independent evidence of the existence of the objects referred to, and might fall into error through asserting a relation between objects which did not exist.  It is, moreover, incapable of showing that a relation corresponding to the idea we have of it really exists when we judge that it does.]

[Footnote E:  Each perception, however, contains much that is supplied by the mind, not ‘given’ to it.]