If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example will make them more concrete.  Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist.  He admits that our intellect is primarily practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is simply Truth.[1] Truth, moreover, must be assumed ‘consistent.’  Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all.  Yet when so broken it is less consistent than ever.  Taken raw, it is all undistinguished.  Intellectualized, it is all distinction without oneness.  ’Such an arrangement may work, but the theoretic problem is not solved’ (p. 23).  The question is, ’How the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness’ (p. 118).  To go back to pure experience is unavailing.  ‘Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle’ (p. 104).  Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an understanding.  ’It is a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view’ (pp. 108-109).  The experiences offered as facts or truths ’I find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves.  They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it cannot repeat as its own....  For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in the lump’ (p. 570).  So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of ‘understanding’ (as he conceives that function), turns his back on finite

[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, pp. 152-133.]

experience forever.  Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon opposite paths.  For the one, those intellectual products are most true which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one.  For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wavelet.  Such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been true (as an addition may ‘prove’ that a subtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true.  Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all.

III

In Section the 6th of my article, ‘A world of pure experience,’ I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd.  The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation cannot logically be the same term which it was at first.