Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe’s rationality.

Lecture VII

Pragmatism and Humanism

What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound.  For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain.  All the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role.  By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers.  The Truth:  what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!  I read in an old letter—­from a gifted friend who died too young—­these words:  “In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong.”  How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth!  At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system.  It never occurs to most of us even later that the question ‘what is the truth?’ is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law.

Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey.  But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results.  Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of men’s experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up.  Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law.  Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law.  Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste:—­and presto, a new idiom is made.  Previous truth; fresh facts:—­and our mind finds a new truth.