They do so, according to the critics, by making the truth of our beliefs consist in their verifiability, and their verifiability in the way in which they do work for us.  Professor Stout, in his otherwise admirable and hopeful review of Schiller in Mind for October, 1897, considers that this ought to lead Schiller (could he sincerely realize the effects of his own doctrine) to the absurd consequence of being unable to believe genuinely in another man’s headache, even were the headache there.  He can only ‘postulate’ it for the sake of the working value of the postulate to himself.  The postulate guides certain of his acts and leads to advantageous consequences; but the moment he understands fully that the postulate is true only (!) in this sense, it ceases (or should cease) to be true for him that the other man really has a headache.  All that makes the postulate most precious then evaporates:  his interest in his fellow-man ’becomes a veiled form of self-interest, and his world grows cold, dull, and heartless.’

Such an objection makes a curious muddle of the pragmatist’s universe of discourse.  Within that universe the pragmatist finds some one with a headache or other feeling, and some one else who postulates that feeling.  Asking on what condition the postulate is ‘true’ the pragmatist replies that, for the postulator at any rate, it is true just in proportion as to believe in it works in him the fuller sum of satisfactions.  What is it that is satisfactory here?  Surely to believe in the postulated object, namely, in the really existing feeling of the other man.  But how (especially if the postulator were himself a thoroughgoing pragmatist) could it ever be satisfactory to him not to believe in that feeling, so long as, in Professor Stout’s words, disbelief ’made the world seem to him cold, dull, and heartless’?  Disbelief would seem, on pragmatist principles, quite out of the question under such conditions, unless the heartlessness of the world were made probable already on other grounds.  And since the belief in the headache, true for the subject assumed in the pragmatist’s universe of discourse, is also true for the pragmatist who for his epitemologizing purposes has assumed that entire universe, why is it not true in that universe absolutely?  The headache believed in is a reality there, and no extant mind disbelieves it, neither the critic’s mind nor his subject’s!  Have our opponents any better brand of truth in this real universe of ours that they can show us? [Footnote:  I see here a chance to forestall a criticism which some one may make on Lecture iii of my Pragmatism, where, on pp. 96-100, I said that ‘God’ and ‘Matter’ might be regarded as synonymous terms, so long as no differing future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions.  The passage was transcribed from my address at the California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673.  I had no sooner given the address