To this absolute-idealistic demand pragmatism simply opposes its non possumus.  If there is to be truth, it says, both realities and beliefs about them must conspire to make it; but whether there ever is such a thing, or how anyone can be sure that his own beliefs possess it, it never pretends to determine.  That truth-satisfaction par excellence which may tinge a belief unsatisfactory in other ways, it easily explains as the feeling of consistency with the stock of previous truths, or supposed truths, of which one’s whole past experience may have left one in possession.

But are not all pragmatists sure that their own belief is right? their enemies will ask at this point; and this leads me to the

Fifth misunderstanding:  What pragmatists say is inconsistent with their saying so.

A correspondent puts this objection as follows:  ’When you say to your audience, “pragmatism is the truth concerning truth,” the first truth is different from the second.  About the first you and they are not to be at odds; you are not giving them liberty to take or leave it according as it works satisfactorily or not for their private uses.  Yet the second truth, which ought to describe and include the first, affirms this liberty.  Thus the intent of your utterance seems to contradict the content of it.’

General scepticism has always received this same classic refutation.  ‘You have to dogmatize,’ the rationalists say to the sceptics,’ whenever you express the sceptical position; so your lives keep contradicting your thesis.’  One would suppose that the impotence of so hoary an argument to abate in the slightest degree the amount of general scepticism in the world might have led some rationalists themselves to doubt whether these instantaneous logical refutations are such fatal ways, after all, of killing off live mental attitudes.  General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude.  It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than yon can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.  This is why it is so irritating.  Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into a formal proposition,—­he simply chooses it as a habit.  He provokingly hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is not illogical or stupid,—­on the contrary, he often impresses us by his intellectual superiority.  This is the real scepticism that rationalists have to meet, and their logic does not even touch it.