notion of truth in general may be.  But that this fact should make it impossible for truth to form itself authentically out of the life of opinion is what no critic has yet proved.  Truth may well consist of certain opinions, and does indeed consist of nothing but opinions, tho not every opinion need be true.  No pragmatist needs to dogmatize about the consensus of opinion in the future being right—­he need only postulate that it will probably contain more of truth than any one’s opinion now.

XIV

TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

Mr. Bertrand Russell’s article entitled ‘Transatlantic Truth,’ [Footnote:  In the Albany Review for January, 1908.] has all the clearness, dialectic subtlety, and wit which one expects from his pen, but it entirely fails to hit the right point of view for apprehending our position.  When, for instance, we say that a true proposition is one the consequences of believing which are good, he assumes us to mean that any one who believes a proposition to be true must first have made out clearly that its consequences be good, and that his belief must primarily be in that fact,—­an obvious absurdity, for that fact is the deliverance of a new proposition, quite different from the first one and is, moreover, a fact usually very hard to verify, it being ‘far easier,’ as Mr. Russell justly says, ’to settle the plain question of fact:  “Have popes always been infallible?"’ than to settle the question whether the effects of thinking them infallible are on the whole good.’

We affirm nothing as silly as Mr. Russell supposes.  Good consequences are not proposed by us merely as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by which truth’s presence is habitually ascertained, tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a sign; they are proposed rather as the lurking motive inside of every truth-claim, whether the ‘trower’ be conscious of such motive, or whether he obey it blindly.  They are proposed as the causa existendi of our beliefs, not as their logical cue or premise, and still less as their objective deliverance or content.  They assign the only intelligible practical meaning to that difference in our beliefs which our habit of calling them true or false comports.

No truth-claimer except the pragmatist himself need ever be aware of the part played in his own mind by consequences, and he himself is aware of it only abstractly and in general, and may at any moment be quite oblivious of it with respect to his own beliefs.

Mr. Russell next joins the army of those who inform their readers that according to the pragmatist definition of the word ‘truth’ the belief that A exists may be ‘true’ even when A does not exist.  This is the usual slander repeated to satiety by our critics.  They forget that in any concrete account of what is denoted by ‘truth’ in human life, the word can only be used relatively to some particular trower.  Thus, I may hold it