Yet is not its whole procedure a signal example of human arbitrariness and perversity?  We professed to be impelled by logical necessity at every step, but were free to escape from all our perplexities by adopting the pragmatic inferences from them.  The Pragmatic Method of observing the consequences readily suggests the means of discriminating between truth and error, of sifting values and of testing claims.  And, though not infallible, it is adequate to all our needs.  The pragmatic notion that Truth is practical closes the artificial gulf between the theoretic and the practical side of life, and assigns to truth a biological function and vital value.  The humanist contention that Truth is human rescues man from the despondency in which his failure to grasp absolute truth had left him.  The Protagorean dictum that Man is the measure of all things assures him that his knowledge may become adequate to his reality, and that the value of truths and the differences between truth and error also are susceptible of estimation.

True, this policy averts the bankruptcy of the intellect by scaling down the intolerable charges on it.  True, practical knowledge is not absolute; but if it is enough to live by, is it not better to live by it than to be lured on to perish in the deserts of Scepticism by the mirage of an absolute truth not humanly attainable?  True, verification is not ‘proof,’ but as its conclusions are not incorrigible, its defects are not fatal, and its demands are not impracticable.  True, no truth and no reality are wholly ‘objective,’ in the sense of wholly indifferent to our action; but to say that the human and ‘subjective’ factor in all knowledge must be taken into account does not preclude our apprehending and measuring an ‘objective’ world as real as, and more knowable than, any other theory can offer.

Thus the proposals of Pragmatism for reconstructing the business of the intellect, and rescuing it from the bankruptcy of Intellectualism, are not unreasonable.  They open out to it a prospect of recovering its credit and its usefulness by returning to the service of Life.

CHAPTER VIII

THOUGHT AND LIFE

The mission of Pragmatism is to bring Philosophy into relation to real Life and Action.  So far from regarding Thought as a self-centred, self-enclosed activity, Pragmatism insists upon replacing it in its context among the other functions of life, and in measuring its value by its effect upon them.  So far, again, from regarding the abstract intellect as a vast Juggernaut machine which absorbs and crushes the individual thinker, it treats him individually as having his own constitution, raison d’etre, and intrinsic interest, and credits him with a power to make new truths and to enrich the resources of thought.  Each thinker has before him an individual situation, a system of aims and values, a stock of knowledge and of means from which he must select what is relevant to his ends, and so cannot escape in any judgment from the responsibilities of a personal decision.