I fear that the ‘humanistic’ developments of pragmatism may cause a certain difficulty here.  We get at one truth only through the rest of truth; and the reality, everlastingly postulated as that which all our truth must keep in touch with, may never be given to us save in the form of truth other than that which we are now testing.  But since Dr. Schiller has shown that all our truths, even the most elemental, are affected by race-inheritance with a human coefficient, reality per se thus may appear only as a sort of limit; it may be held to shrivel to the mere place for an object, and what is known may be held to be only matter of our psyche that we fill the place with.  It must be confessed that pragmatism, worked in this humanistic way, is compatible with solipsism.  It joins friendly hands with the agnostic part of kantism, with contemporary agnosticism, and with idealism generally.  But worked thus, it is a metaphysical theory about the matter of reality, and flies far beyond pragmatism’s own modest analysis of the nature of the knowing function, which analysis may just as harmoniously be combined with less humanistic accounts of reality.  One of pragmatism’s merits is that it is so purely epistemological.  It must assume realities; but it prejudges nothing as to their constitution, and the most diverse metaphysics can use it as their foundation.  It certainly has no special affinity with solipsism.

As I look back over what I have written, much of it gives me a queer impression, as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that readers might well laugh at my pomposity.  It may be, however, that concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious.  The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing.  It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it.  Dr. Schiller, with his two ‘practical’ aspects of truth, (1) relevancy to situation, and (2) subsequential utility, is only filling the cup of concreteness to the brim for us.  Once seize that cup, and you cannot misunderstand pragmatism.  It seems as if the power of imagining the world concretely might have been common enough to let our readers apprehend us better, as if they might have read between our lines, and, in spite of all our infelicities of expression, guessed a little more correctly what our thought was.  But alas! this was not on fate’s programme, so we can only think, with the German ditty:—­

   “Es waer’ zu schoen gewesen, Es hat nicht sollen sein.”

IX

The meaning of the word truth [Footnote:  Remarks at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Cornell University, December, 1907.]