cognitive, and the consequence was punctually drawn that a truth in our eyes could have no relation to any independent reality, or to any other truth, or to anything whatever but the acts which we might ground on it or the satisfactions they might bring.  The mere existence of the idea, all by itself, if only its results were satisfactory, would give full truth to it, it was charged, in our absurd pragmatist epistemology.  The solemn attribution of this rubbish to us was also encouraged by two other circumstances.  First, ideas are practically useful in the narrow sense, false ideas sometimes, but most often ideas which we can verify by the sum total of all their leadings, and the reality of whose objects may thus be considered established beyond doubt.  That these ideas should be true in advance of and apart from their utility, that, in other words, their objects should be really there, is the very condition of their having that kind of utility,—­the objects they connect us with are so important that the ideas which serve as the objects’ substitutes grow important also.  This manner of their practical working was the first thing that made truths good in the eyes of primitive men; and buried among all the other good workings by which true beliefs are characterized, this kind of subsequential utility remains.

The second misleading circumstance was the emphasis laid by Schiller and Dewey on the fact that, unless a truth be relevant to the mind’s momentary predicament, unless it be germane to the ‘practical’ situation,—­meaning by this the quite particular perplexity,—­it is no good to urge it.  It doesn’t meet our interests any better than a falsehood would under the same circumstances.  But why our predicaments and perplexities might not be theoretical here as well as narrowly practical, I wish that our critics would explain.  They simply assume that no pragmatist can admit a genuinely theoretic interest.  Having used the phrase ‘cash-value’ of an idea, I am implored by one correspondent to alter it, ’for every one thinks you mean only pecuniary profit and loss.’  Having said that the true is ‘the expedient in our thinking,’ I am rebuked in this wise by another learned correspondent: 

’The word expedient has no other meaning than that of self-interest.  The pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries.  A philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.’

But the word ‘practical’ is so habitually loosely used that more indulgence might have been expected.  When one says that a sick man has now practically recovered, or that an enterprise has practically failed, one usually means I just the opposite of practically in the literal sense.  One means that, altho untrue in strict practice, what one says is true in theory, true virtually, certain to be true.  Again, by the practical one often means the distinctively concrete, the individual, particular, and effective, as opposed