must be more objectively useful--viz., by showing ability to cope with
the situation they were devised to meet. If they fail to harmonize with
the situation they are untrue, however attractive they may be. For ideas
do not function in a void; they have to work in a world of fact, and to
adapt themselves to all facts, though they may succeed in transforming
them in the end.

Nor has an idea to reckon only with facts: it has also to cohere with
other ideas. It must be congruous with the mass of other beliefs held
for good reasons by the thinker who accepts it. For no one can afford to
have a stock of beliefs which conflict too violently with those of his
fellows. If his 'intuitions' contrast too seriously with those of
others, and he acts on them, he will be shut up as a lunatic. If, then,
the 'useful' idea has to approve itself both to its maker and his
fellows without developing limitations in its use, it is clear that a
pragmatic truth is really far less arbitrary and subjective than the
'truths' accepted as absolute, on the bare ground that they seem
'self-evident' to a few intellectualists.

If, however, it be urged that pragmatic truths never grow absolutely
true at all, and that the most prolonged pragmatic tests do not exclude
the possibility of an ultimate error in the idea, there is no difficulty
about admitting this. The pragmatic test yields _practical_, and not
'absolute,' certainty. The existence of absolute certainty is denied,
and the demand for it, in a world which contains only the practical
sort, merely plays into the hands of scepticism. The uncertainty of all
our verificatory processes, however, is not the creation of the
pragmatist, nor is he a god to abolish it. Abstractly, there is always a
doubt about what transcends our immediate experience, and this is why it
is so healthy to have to repudiate so many theoretic doubts in every act