to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly disclaimed.  We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates, and for which it stands.

It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths or the graphic and verbal machinery of science.  Yet the fact is patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not prove inexplicable.  Theology has long applied the name truth pre-eminently to fiction.  When the conviction first dawned upon pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed.  The pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be accepted instead of the possession of it.  But it is characteristic of Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has abandoned.  So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for, the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to what was to take its place—­spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.  And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.

Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of science possess, but with the language they use.  If science meant knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the probable ancestors of the human race—­all knowledge of actual or possible facts.  It would not be knowledge of selection or of spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the gaps in that knowledge, and mark the lacunae and unsolved problems of the science.  Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe “Science” in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincare, turned his subtle irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the “bankruptcy of science,” whereas it is merely the language of science that he had reduced to its pragmatic value—­to convenience and economy in the registering of facts—­and had by no means questioned that positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.  It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.