little imagination in philosophy.  The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history.  Schiller says the true is that which ‘works.’  Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities.  Dewey says truth is what gives ‘satisfaction.’  He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant.

Our critics certainly need more imagination of realities.  I have honestly tried to stretch my own imagination and to read the best possible meaning into the rationalist conception, but I have to confess that it still completely baffles me.  The notion of a reality calling on us to ‘agree’ with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is ‘unconditional’ or ‘transcendent,’ is one that I can make neither head nor tail of.  I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I would ‘claim’ if I were allowed to.  If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and copy me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive.  What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as motives for the claim (as they are by our rationalist authorities) I cannot fathom.  When the Irishman’s admirers ran him along to the place of banquet in a sedan chair with no bottom, he said, “Faith, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot.”  So here:  but for the honor of the thing, I might as well have remained uncopied.  Copying is one genuine mode of knowing (which for some strange reason our contemporary transcendentalists seem to be tumbling over each other to repudiate); but when we get beyond copying, and fall back on unnamed forms of agreeing that are expressly denied to be either copyings or leadings or fittings, or any other processes pragmatically definable, the what of the ‘agreement’ claimed becomes as unintelligible as the why of it.  Neither content nor motive can be imagine for it.  It is an absolutely meaningless abstraction. [Footnote:  I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with reality.  Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty.  This fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim’s candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject.  Rickert deals with part of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls ‘Relativismus.’  I cannot discuss his text here.  Suffice it to say that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem almost incredible in so generally able a writer.]