FullReads

Theoretic truth is thus no relation between our mind and archetypal reality. It falls within the mind, being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects–‘accord’ consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the balance–provided always that we are highly organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not. The amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which their lives are cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we ‘ought’ to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates that do not contradict their subjects. We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others. The form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral profits stop. Such men systematize and classify and schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying. Too often the results, glowing with ‘truth’ for the inventors, seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders. Which is as much as to say that the purely theoretic criterion of truth can leave us in the lurch as easily as any other criterion.

I think that if Mr. Joseph will but consider all these things a little more concretely, he may find that the humanistic scheme and the notion of theoretic truth fall into line consistently enough to yield him also intellectual satisfaction.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] [Reprinted without change from Mind, N. S., vol. XIV, No. 54, April, 1905, pp. 190-198. Pages 245-247, and pp. 261-265, have also been reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 54-57, and pp. 97-100. The present essay is referred to above, p. 203. ED.]

[130] [‘Humanism and Truth’ first appeared in Mind, N. S., vol. XIII, No. 52, October, 1904. It is reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. this article passim. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph’s criticism, entitled “Professor James on ‘Humanism and Truth,'” appeared in Mind, N. S., vol. XIV, No. 53, January, 1905. ED.]

[131] Op. cit., p. 37.

[132] [Cf. above, pp. 241-243.]

[133] Op. cit., p. 32.

[134] [This] Mr. Joseph deals with (though in much too pettifogging and logic-chopping a way) on pp. 33-34 of his article.

[135] Compare some elaborate articles by M. Le Roy and M. Wilbois in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vols. VIII, IX, and X, [1900, 1901, and 1902.]

[136] [Cf. The Meaning of Truth, p. 64.]

[137] [Joseph: op. cit., p. 36.]

[138] Most recently in two articles, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” [See above, pp. 1-91.]

[139] For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring humanism with knowing, I may refer to Prof. Woodbridge’s very able address at the Saint Louis Congress, “The Field of Logic,” printed in Science, N. Y., November 4, 1904.