in pragmatism, is insincere.  If we said nothing in any degree new, why was our meaning so desperately hard to catch?  The blame cannot be laid wholly upon our obscurity of speech, for in other subjects we have attained to making ourselves understood.  But recriminations are tasteless; and, as far as I personally am concerned, I am sure that some of the misconception I complain of is due to my doctrine of truth being surrounded in that volume of popular lectures by a lot of other opinions not necessarily implicated with it, so that a reader may very naturally have grown confused.  For this I am to blame,—­likewise for omitting certain explicit cautions, which the pages that follow will now in part supply.

First misunderstanding:  Pragmatism is only A re-editing of positivism.

This seems the commonest mistake.  Scepticism, positivism, and agnosticism agree with ordinary dogmatic rationalism in presupposing that everybody knows what the word ‘truth’ means, without further explanation.  But the former doctrines then either suggest or declare that real truth, absolute truth, is inaccessible to us, and that we must fain put up with relative or phenomenal truth as its next best substitute.  By scepticism this is treated as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, while positivism and agnosticism are cheerful about it, call real truth sour grapes, and consider phenomenal truth quite sufficient for all our ‘practical’ purposes.

In point of fact, nothing could be farther from all this than what pragmatism has to say of truth.  Its thesis is an altogether previous one.  It leaves off where these other theories begin, having contented itself with the word truth’s definition.  ’No matter whether any mind extant in the universe possess truth or not,’ it asks, ‘what does the notion of truth signify ideally?’ ’What kind of things would true judgments be in case they existed?’ The answer which pragmatism offers is intended to cover the most complete truth that can be conceived of, ‘absolute’ truth if you like, as well as truth of the most relative and imperfect description.  This question of what truth would be like if it did exist, belongs obviously to a purely speculative field of inquiry.  It is not a theory about any sort of reality, or about what kind of knowledge is actually possible; it abstracts from particular terms altogether, and defines the nature of a possible relation between two of them.

As Kant’s question about synthetic judgments had escaped previous philosophers, so the pragmatist question is not only so subtile as to have escaped attention hitherto, but even so subtile, it would seem, that when openly broached now, dogmatists and sceptics alike fail to apprehend it, and deem the pragmatist to be treating of something wholly different.  He insists, they say (I quote an actual critic), ’that the greater problems are insoluble by human intelligence, that our need of knowing truly is artificial and illusory, and that our reason, incapable of reaching the foundations of reality, must turn itself exclusively towards action.’  There could not be a worse misapprehension.