we do. For beliefs have to be acted on, and the results of the action
rightly react on the beliefs. The pragmatic test is practically
adequate, and is the only one available. That it brings out the risk of
action only brings out its superiority to a theory which cannot get
started at all until it is supplied with absolute certainty, and
meantime can only idly rail at all existing human truths.

We have in all this consistently referred the truth of ideas to
individual experiences for verification. This evidently makes all truths
in some sense dependent upon the personality of those who assert and
accept them. Intellectualist logic, on the other hand, has always
proclaimed that mental processes, if true, are 'independent' of the
idiosyncrasies of particular minds. Ideas have a _fixed_ meaning, and
cohere in bodies of 'universal' truth, quite irrespective of whether any
particular mind harbours them or not. This is not only a contention
fatal to the pragmatic claims, but also bound up with other assumptions
of Formal Logic. So it becomes necessary to inquire whether this Logic
is a success, and so can coherently abstract from the personality of the
knower and the particular situations that incite him to know.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: Not even 'I lie,' which is meaningless as it stands, _Cf._
Dr. Schiller's _Formal Logic_, p. 373.]

[Footnote D: This same difficulty reappears in various forms, as _e.g._,
in a recent theory which makes the truth of a judgment lie in its
asserting a relation between different objects, and not in the existence
of those objects themselves. This formula also applies as evidently to
false judgments as to true. It, too, brings no independent evidence of