on facts.  Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon.  Yet this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it would illustrate Mr. Russell’s observation, rather than refute it.  For we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking, that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify.  Thus the pragmatist’s reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences.  Personal experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is concerned with.  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.”  Sensations and ideas are really distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without; of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).