The pragmatism or pluralism which I defend has to fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees.  To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation any how, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church.  Which side is right here, who can say?  Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths in sight.  I conceive this to be the more strenuous type of emotion; but I have to admit that its inability to let loose quietistic raptures is a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy which I profess.

XII

Professor Hebert on pragmatism [Footnote:  Reprint from the Journal of Philosophy for December 3, 1908 (vol. v, p. 689), of a review of Le Pragmatisme et ses Diverses Formes Anglo-Americaines, by Marcel Hebert. (Paris:  Librairie critique Emile Nourry. 1908.  Pp. 105.)]

Professor Marcel Hebert is a singularly erudite and liberal thinker (a seceder, I believe, from the Catholic priesthood) and an uncommonly direct and clear writer.  His book Le Divin is one of the ablest reviews of the general subject of religious philosophy which recent years have produced; and in the small volume the title of which is copied above he has, perhaps, taken more pains not to do injustice to pragmatism than any of its numerous critics.  Yet the usual fatal misapprehension of its purposes vitiates his exposition and his critique.  His pamphlet seems to me to form a worthy hook, as it were, on which to hang one more attempt to tell the reader what the pragmatist account of truth really means.

M. Hebert takes it to mean what most people take it to mean, the doctrine, namely, that whatever proves subjectively expedient in the way of our thinking is ‘true’ in the absolute and unrestricted sense of the word, whether it corresponds to any objective state of things outside of our thought or not.  Assuming this to be the pragmatist thesis, M. Hebert opposes it at length.  Thought that proves itself to be thus expedient may, indeed, have every other kind of value for the thinker, he says, but cognitive value, representative value, VALEUR de connaissance proprement dite, it has not; and when it does have a high degree of general utility value, this is in every case derived from its previous value in the way of correctly representing independent objects that have an important influence on our lives.  Only by thus representing things truly do we reap the useful fruits.  But the fruits follow on the truth, they do not constitute it; so M. Hebert accuses pragmatism of telling us everything about truth except what it essentially is.  He admits, indeed, that