Montreal, for May, 1904.] that our trust is at any rate untrue when it is made, i. e; before the action; and I seem to remember that he disposes of anything like a faith in the general excellence of the universe (making the faithful person’s part in it at any rate more excellent) as a ‘lie in the soul.’  But the pathos of this expression should not blind us to the complication of the facts.  I doubt whether Professor Taylor would himself be in favor of practically handling trusters of these kinds as liars.  Future and present really mix in such emergencies, and one can always escape lies in them by using hypothetic forms.  But Mr. Taylor’s attitude suggests such absurd possibilities of practice that it seems to me to illustrate beautifully how self-stultifying the conception of a truth that shall merely register a standing fixture may become.  Theoretic truth, truth of passive copying, sought in the sole interests of copying as such, not because copying is good for something, but because copying ought schlechthin to be, seems, if you look at it coldly, to be an almost preposterous ideal.  Why should the universe, existing in itself, also exist in copies?  How can it be copied in the solidity of its objective fulness?  And even if it could, what would the motive be?  ‘Even the hairs of your head are numbered.’  Doubtless they are, virtually; but why, as an absolute proposition, ought the number to become copied and known?  Surely knowing is only one way of interacting with reality and adding to its effect.

The opponent here will ask:  ’Has not the knowing of truth any substantive value on its own account, apart from the collateral advantages it may bring?  And if you allow theoretic satisfactions to exist at all, do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she admits them at all?’ The destructive force of such talk disappears as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in what the intellectual satisfactions consist.

Are they not all mere matters of consistency—­and emphatically not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind’s copies of it, but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the mind’s own experienceable world?  And are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that do develop mental habits—­habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow ‘law’?  If this were so, what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit as such, and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these.  In point of fact, this seems to have been the probable case.  At