For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
and for which it stands.

It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what