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We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the
counting that was not there before. And yet that something was
ALWAYS TRUE. In one sense you create it, and in another sense you
FIND it. You have to treat your count as being true beforehand, the
moment you come to treat the matter at all.

Our stellar attributes must always be called true, then; yet none
the less are they genuine additions made by our intellect to the
world of fact. Not additions of consciousness only, but additions of
‘content.’ They copy nothing that pre-existed, yet they agree with
what pre-existed, fit it, amplify it, relate and connect it with a
‘wain,’ a number-tally, or what not, and build it out. It seems to
me that humanism is the only theory that builds this case out in the
good direction, and this case stands for innumerable other kinds of
case. In all such eases, odd as it may sound, our judgment may
actually be said to retroact and to enrich the past.

Our judgments at any rate change the character of FUTURE reality by
the acts to which they lead. Where these acts are acts expressive
of trust,–trust, e.g., that a man is honest, that our health is
good enough, or that we can make a successful effort,–which
acts may be a needed antecedent of the trusted things becoming true.
Professor Taylor says [Footnote: In an article criticising
Pragmatism (as he conceives it) in the McGill University
Quarterly published at Montreal, for May, 1904.] that our trust is
at any rate UNTRUE WHEN IT IS MADE, i. e; before the action; and I
seem to remember that he disposes of anything like a faith in the
general excellence of the universe (making the faithful person’s
part in it at any rate more excellent) as a ‘lie in the soul.’
But the pathos of this expression should not blind us to the
complication of the facts. I doubt whether Professor Taylor would
himself be in favor of practically handling trusters of these kinds
as liars. Future and present really mix in such emergencies, and one
can always escape lies in them by using hypothetic forms. But Mr.
Taylor’s attitude suggests such absurd possibilities of practice
that it seems to me to illustrate beautifully how self-
stultifying the conception of a truth that shall merely register a
standing fixture may become. Theoretic truth, truth of passive
copying, sought in the sole interests of copying as such, not
because copying is GOOD FOR SOMETHING, but because copying ought
schlechthin to be, seems, if you look at it coldly, to be an
almost preposterous ideal. Why should the universe, existing in
itself, also exist in copies? How CAN it be copied in the solidity
of its objective fulness? And even if it could, what would
the motive be? ‘Even the hairs of your head are numbered.’ Doubtless
they are, virtually; but why, as an absolute proposition, OUGHT the
number to become copied and known? Surely knowing is only one way of
interacting with reality and adding to its effect.

The opponent here will ask: ‘Has not the knowing of truth any
substantive value on its own account, apart from the collateral
advantages it may bring? And if you allow theoretic satisfactions to
exist at all, do they not crowd the collateral satisfactions out of
house and home, and must not pragmatism go into bankruptcy, if she
admits them at all?’ The destructive force of such talk disappears
as soon as we use words concretely instead of abstractly, and ask,
in our quality of good pragmatists, just what the famous
theoretic needs are known as and in what the
intellectual satisfactions consist.