to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena.  Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.  This is the ‘instrumental’ view of truth taught so successfully at Chicago, the view that truth in our ideas means their power to ‘work,’ promulgated so brilliantly at Oxford.

Messrs. Dewey, Schiller and their allies, in reaching this general conception of all truth, have only followed the example of geologists, biologists and philologists.  In the establishment of these other sciences, the successful stroke was always to take some simple process actually observable in operation—­as denudation by weather, say, or variation from parental type, or change of dialect by incorporation of new words and pronunciations—­and then to generalize it, making it apply to all times, and produce great results by summating its effects through the ages.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions.  The process here is always the same.  The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain.  Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy.  The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.  He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives.  So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.

This new idea is then adopted as the true one.  It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.  An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty.  We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.  The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.  Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched.  New truth is always a go-between,