that no statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy—­target for the rationalist shooting-gallery—­ hit him and he turns a summersault—­yet he is the only sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.] has denied the regulative character in his own thinking of the notion of absolute truth.  What is challenged by relativists is the pretence on any one’s part to have found for certain at any given moment what the shape of that truth is.  Since the better absolutists agree in this, admitting that the proposition ‘There is absolute truth’ is the only absolute truth of which we can be sure, [Footnote:  Compare Bickert’s Gegenstand der Erkentniss, pp. 187, 138.  Munsterberg’s version of this first truth is that ’Es gibt eine Welt,’—­see his Philosophie der Werte, pp. 38 and 74 And, after all, both these philosophers confess in the end that the primal truth of which they consider our supposed denial so irrational is not properly an insight at all, but a dogma adopted by the will which any one who turns his back on duty may disregard!  But if it all reverts to ‘the will to believe,’ pragmatists have that privilege as well as their critics.] further debate is practically unimportant, so we may pass to their next charge.

It is in this charge that the vicious abstractionism becomes most apparent.  The antipragmatist, in postulating absolute truth, refuses to give any account of what the words may mean.  For him they form a self-explanatory term.  The pragmatist, on the contrary, articulately defines their meaning.  Truth absolute, he says, means an ideal set of formulations towards which all opinions may in the long run of experience be expected to converge.  In this definition of absolute truth he not only postulates that there is a tendency to such convergence of opinions, to such ultimate consensus, but he postulates the other factors of his definition equally, borrowing them by anticipation from the true conclusions expected to be reached.  He postulates the existence of opinions, he postulates the experience that will sift them, and the consistency which that experience will show.  He justifies himself in these assumptions by saying that they are not postulates in the strict sense but simple inductions from the past extended to the future by analogy; and he insists that human opinion has already reached a pretty stable equilibrium regarding them, and that if its future development fails to alter them, the definition itself, with all its terms included, will be part of the very absolute truth which it defines.  The hypothesis will, in short, have worked successfully all round the circle and proved self-corroborative, and the circle will be closed.

The anti-pragmatist, however, immediately falls foul of the word ‘opinion’ here, abstracts it from the universe of life, and uses it as a bare dictionary-substantive, to deny the rest of the assumptions which it coexists withal.  The dictionary says that an opinion is ‘what some one thinks or believes.’  This definition leaves every one’s opinion free to be autogenous, or unrelated either to what any one else may think or to what the truth may be.