to the abstract, general, and inert.  To speak for myself, whenever I have emphasized the practical nature of truth, this is mainly what has been in my mind.  ‘Pragmata’ are things in their plurality; and in that early California address, when I described pragmatism as holding that the meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, whether passive or active, expressly added these qualifying words:  the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular than in the fact that it must be active,—­by ‘active’ meaning here ‘practical’ in the narrow literal sense. [Footnote:  The ambiguity of the word ‘practical’ comes out well in these words of a recent would-be reporter of our views:  ’Pragmatism is an Anglo-Saxon reaction against the intellectualism and rationalism of the Latin mind....  Man, each individual man is the measure of things.  He is able to conceive one but relative truths, that is to say, illusions.  What these illusions are worth is revealed to him, not by general theory, but by individual practice.  Pragmatism, which consists in experiencing these illusions of the mind and obeying them by acting them out, is a philosophy without words, a philosophy of gestures and of acts, which abandons what is general and olds only to what is particular.’ (Bourdeau, in Journal des. debats, October 89, 1907.)] But particular consequences can perfectly well be of a theoretic nature.  Every remote fact which we infer from an idea is a particular theoretic consequence which our mind practically works towards.  The loss of every old opinion of ours which we see that we shall have to give up if a new opinion be true, is a particular theoretic as well as a particular practical consequence.  After man’s interest in breathing freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits, as most of his physical interests do), is his interest in consistency, in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions.  We tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose.  Is the present candidate for belief perhaps contradicted by principle number one?  Is it compatible with fact number two? and so forth.  The particular operations here are the purely logical ones of analysis, deduction, comparison, etc.; and altho general terms may be used ad libitum, the satisfactory practical working of the candidate—­idea consists in the consciousness yielded by each successive theoretic consequence in particular.  It is therefore simply idiotic to repeat that pragmatism takes no account of purely theoretic interests.  All it insists on is that verity in act means verifications, and that these are always particulars.  Even in exclusively theoretic matters, it insists that vagueness and generality serve to verify nothing.

Eighth misunderstanding:  Pragmatism is shut up to solipsism.