true that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name, and may express my opinion to a critic.  If the critic be both a pragmatist and a baconian, he will in his capacity of pragmatist see plain that the workings of my opinion, I being who I am, make it perfectly true for me, while in his capacity of baconian he still believes that Shakespeare never wrote the plays in question.  But most anti-pragmatist critics take the wont ‘truth’ as something absolute, and easily play on their reader’s readiness to treat his owe truths as the absolute ones.  If the reader whom they address believes that A does not exist, while we pragmatists show that those for whom tho belief that it exists works satisfactorily will always call it true, he easily sneers at the naivete of our contention, for is not then the belief in question ‘true,’ tho what it declares as fact has, as the reader so well knows, no existence?  Mr. Russell speaks of our statement as an ‘attempt to get rid of fact’ and naturally enough considers it ’a failure’ (p. 410).  ‘The old notion of truth reappears,’ he adds—­ that notion being, of course, that when a belief is true, its object does exist.

It is, of course, bound to exist, on sound pragmatic principles.  Concepts signify consequences.  How is the world made different for me by my conceiving an opinion of mine under the concept ‘true’?  First, an object must be findable there (or sure signs of such an object must be found) which shall agree with the opinion.  Second, such an opinion must not be contradicted by anything else I am aware of.  But in spite of the obvious pragmatist requirement that when I have said truly that something exists, it shall exist, the slander which Mr. Russell repeats has gained the widest currency.

Mr. Russell himself is far too witty and athletic a ratiocinator simply to repeat the slander dogmatically.  Being nothing if not mathematical and logical, he must prove the accusation secundum artem, and convict us not so much of error as of absurdity.  I have sincerely tried to follow the windings of his mind in this procedure, but for the life of me I can only see in it another example of what I have called (above, p. 249) vicious abstractionism.  The abstract world of mathematics and pure logic is so native to Mr. Russell that he thinks that we describers of the functions of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathematical terms and functions.  A mathematical term, as a, b, c, x, y, sin., log., is self-sufficient, and terms of this sort, once equated, can be substituted for one another in endless series without error.  Mr. Russell, and also Mr. Hawtrey, of whom I shall speak presently, seem to think that in our mouth also such terms as ‘meaning,’ ‘truth,’ ‘belief,’ ‘object,’ ‘definition,’ are self-sufficients with no context of varying relation that might be further asked about.  What a word means is expressed by its definition, isn’t it?  The definition claims to be exact and adequate, doesn’t it?  Then it can be substituted for the word—­since the two are identical—­can’t it?  Then two words with the same definition can be substituted for one another, n’est—­ce pas?  Likewise two definitions of the same word, nicht wahr, etc., etc., till it will be indeed strange if you can’t convict some one of self-contradiction and absurdity.