It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth, as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular career that may be awaiting him.  Now since this entity, luck, is a mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be transferred to the concrete facts it stands for.  Faith in one’s luck must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not needful nor philosophical at all.  The case is the same with working hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some confusion.  Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be clear.  Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles.  But for Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain, anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic theory is true.  If they are right, the validity of this theory would not be that of pragmatic “truth” but of pragmatic “fact”; for it would be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the experience of a universal observer.  It would be knowledge of reality in M. Bergson’s sense.  Pragmatic “truth,” on the contrary, is the relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is instrumental.

For theory too has more than one signification.  It may mean such a symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their experimental character.  Algebra and language are theoretical in the first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they gather objects of experience together without distorting them.  But it is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably applied;