One word more, ere I end this preface. A distinction is sometimes
made between Dewey, Schiller and myself, as if I, in supposing
the object's existence, made a concession to popular prejudice which
they, as more radical pragmatists, refuse to make. As I myself
understand these authors, we all three absolutely agree in admitting
the transcendency of the object (provided it be an experienceable
object) to the subject, in the truth-relation. Dewey in
particular has insisted almost ad nauseam that the whole meaning of
our cognitive states and processes lies in the way they intervene in
the control and revaluation of independent existences or facts. His
account of knowledge is not only absurd, but meaningless, unless
independent existences be there of which our ideas take account, and
for the transformation of which they work. But because he and
Schiller refuse to discuss objects and relations 'transcendent' in
the sense of being ALTOGETHER TRANS-EXPERIENTIAL, their critics
pounce on sentences in their writings to that effect to show that
they deny the existence WITHIN THE REALM OF EXPERIENCE of objects
external to the ideas that declare their presence there. [Footnote:
It gives me pleasure to welcome Professor Carveth Read into the
pragmatistic church, so far as his epistemology goes. See his
vigorous book, The Metaphysics of Nature, 2d Edition, Appendix A.
(London, Black, 1908.) The work What is Reality? by Francis Howe
Johnson (Boston, 1891), of which I make the acquaintance only while
correcting these proofs, contains some striking anticipations of the
later pragmatist view. The Psychology of Thinking, by Irving
E. Miller (New York, Macmillan Co., 1909), which has just
appeared, is one of the most convincing pragmatist document yet
published, tho it does not use the word 'pragmatism' at all. While I
am making references, I cannot refrain from inserting one to the