In the second lecture of the book Pragmatism, I used the illustration of a squirrel scrambling round a tree-trunk to keep out of sight of a pursuing man:  both go round the tree, but does the man go round the squirrel?  It all depends, I said, on what you mean by going round.’  In one sense of the word the man ‘goes round,’ in another sense he does not.  I settled the dispute by pragmatically distinguishing the senses.  But I told how some disputants had called my distinction a shuffling evasion and taken their stand on what they called ’plain honest English going-round.’

In such a simple case few people would object to letting the term in dispute be translated into its concreter equivalents.  But in the case of a complex function like our knowing they act differently.  I give full concrete particular value for the ideas of knowing in every case I can think of, yet my critics insist that ‘plain honest English knowing’ is left out of my account.  They write as if the minus were on my side and the plus on theirs.

The essence of the matter for me is that altho knowing can be both abstractly and concretely described, and altho the abstract descriptions are often useful enough, yet they are all sucked up and absorbed without residuum into the concreter ones, and contain nothing of any essentially other or higher nature, which the concrete descriptions can be justly accused of leaving behind.  Knowing is just a natural process like any other.  There is no ambulatory process whatsoever, the results of which we may not describe, if we prefer to, in saltatory terms, or represent in static formulation.  Suppose, e.g., that we say a man is ‘prudent.’  Concretely, that means that he takes out insurance, hedges in betting, looks before he leaps.  Do such acts constitute the prudence?  Are they the man qua prudent?

Or is the prudence something by itself and independent of them?  As a constant habit in him, a permanent tone of character, it is convenient to call him prudent in abstraction from any one of his acts, prudent in general and without specification, and to say the acts follow from the pre-existing prudence.  There are peculiarities in his psycho-physical system that make him act prudently; and there are tendencies to association in our thoughts that prompt some of them to make for truth and others for error.  But would the man be prudent in the absence of each and all of the acts?  Or would the thoughts be true if they had no associative or impulsive tendencies?  Surely we have no right to oppose static essences in this way to the moving processes in which they live embedded.