“objective spirit,” that is, into dynamic relations between things.  The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself, lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any in heaven?  The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly not psychologism.  But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is pragmatism either.

There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards (justly, I think) as of decisive importance.  Is, namely, the pragmatic account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of knowledge only?  Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence in which, they say, it is not concerned:  first, the dialectical relation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or experience of facts.  There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists to constitute exceptions worth considering.  Dialectical relations, they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects, and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch contingent fact at all.  On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes on some matter of fact, as, for instance, “I feel pain,” or “I expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,” though often true propositions, are not theoretical truths; they are not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate observations.  Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all, perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover, verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not assumed to be truly remembered.  How shall we know that our expectation is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an expectation?  But if we know our past experience directly—­not merely knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led down to the present—­this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic verification or “truth” at all.  I have never been able to discover whether, by that perception of fact which is not “truth” but fact itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the whole series of these apprehensions.  In the latter case, as in the philosophy of M. Bergson,