But if we treat all this abstraction literally and oppose it to its mother soil in experience, see what a preposterous position we work ourselves into.

We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking.  When shall I acknowledge this truth and when that?  Shall the acknowledgment be loud?—­or silent?  If sometimes loud, sometimes silent, which now?  When may a truth go into cold-storage in the encyclopedia? and when shall it come out for battle?  Must I constantly be repeating the truth ‘twice two are four’ because of its eternal claim on recognition? or is it sometimes irrelevant?  Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?—­or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology?

It is quite evident that our obligation to acknowledge truth, so far from being unconditional, is tremendously conditioned.  Truth with a big T, and in the singular, claims abstractly to be recognized, of course; but concrete truths in the plural need be recognized only when their recognition is expedient.  A truth must always be preferred to a falsehood when both relate to the situation; but when neither does, truth is as little of a duty as falsehood.  If you ask me what o’clock it is and I tell you that I live at 95 Irving Street, my answer may indeed be true, but you don’t see why it is my duty to give it.  A false address would be as much to the purpose.

With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract imperative, the pragmatistic treatment of truth sweeps back upon us in its fulness.  Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.

When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that he denied matter’s existence.  When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying its existence.  These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level.  A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller’s doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.

I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander.  Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations?  If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson.  We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science.  It is high time to urge the use of a