Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
by other "truths in the plural.
Pages:
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163