So obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic authors ‘makes me tired.’  ’How can a deweyite discriminate sincerity from bluff?’ was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where I reported on Dewey’s Studies.  ’How can the mere [Footnote:  I know of no ‘mere’ pragmatist, if MERENESS here means, as it seems to, the denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist’s thought.] pragmatist feel any duty to think truly?’ is the objection urged by Professor Royce.  Mr. Bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his own doctrine, ’he must hold any idea, however mad, to be the truth, if any one will have it so.’  And Professor Taylor describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases and calling it truth.

Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men’s thinking actually goes on seems to me most surprising.  These critics appear to suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft of our experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere.  Even tho there were compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be no pole for them to point to.  There must be absolute sailing-directions, they insist, decreed from outside, and an independent chart of the voyage added to the ‘mere’ voyage itself, if we are ever to make a port.  But is it not obvious that even tho there be such absolute sailing-directions in the shape of pre-human standards of truth that we ought to follow, the only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human equipment.  The ‘ought’ would be a brutum fulmen unless there were a felt grain inside of our experience that conspired.  As a matter of fact the DEVOUTEST believers in absolute standards must admit that men fail to obey them.  Waywardness is here, in spite of the eternal prohibitions, and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is no warrant against unlimited error in rebus being incurred.  The only real guarantee we have against licentious thinking is the CIRCUMPRESSURE of experience itself, which gets us sick of concrete errors, whether there be a trans-empirical reality or not.  How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to think?  He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no means of guessing what it wants of him except by following the humanistic clues.  The only truth that he himself will ever practically accept will be that to which his finite experiences lead him of themselves.  The state of mind which shudders at the idea of a lot of experiences left to themselves, and that augurs protection from the sheer name of an absolute, as if, however inoperative, that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is like the mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a social tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to puff, and say ‘Parliament or Congress ought to make a law against it,’ as if an impotent decree would give relief.

All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture of experience.  Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine.