What I have said of the theory of truth will, I am sure, have appeared obscure and unsatisfactory to most of you by reason of us brevity.  I shall make amends for that hereafter.  In a lecture on ‘common sense’ I shall try to show what I mean by truths grown petrified by antiquity.  In another lecture I shall expatiate on the idea that our thoughts become true in proportion as they successfully exert their go-between function.  In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in Truth’s development.  You may not follow me wholly in these lectures; and if you do, you may not wholly agree with me.  But you will, I know, regard me at least as serious, and treat my effort with respectful consideration.

You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller’s and Dewey’s theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule.  All rationalism has risen against them.  In influential quarters Mr. Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking.  I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism.  Pragmatism is uncomfortable away from facts.  Rationalism is comfortable only in the presence of abstractions.  This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they ‘work,’ etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth.  Such truths are not real truth.  Such tests are merely subjective.  As against this, objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted.  It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality.  It must be what we ought to think, unconditionally.  The conditioned ways in which we do think are so much irrelevance and matter for psychology.  Down with psychology, up with logic, in all this question!

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind!  The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes.  Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience.  For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer.  When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken.  He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it.  Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness:  other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral.  If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality.  It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.