that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
rather than a George III."

A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the