As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its being to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought about in the older notions of scientific truth.  ‘God geometrizes,’ it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclid’s elements literally reproduced his geometrizing.  There is an eternal and unchangeable ‘reason’; and its voice was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent.  So also of the ‘laws of nature,’ physical and chemical, so of natural history classifications—­all were supposed to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate.  The anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was thought.  Up to about 1850 almost every one believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities.  But the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another.  There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us.  We hear scientific laws now treated as so much ‘conceptual shorthand,’ true so far as they are useful but no farther.  Our mind has become tolerant of symbol instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of plasticity instead of rigor.  ‘Energetics,’ measuring the bare face of sensible phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all their changes of ‘level,’ is the last word of this scientific humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding as to the reason for so curious a congruence between the world and the mind, but which at any rate makes our whole notion of scientific truth more flexible and genial than it used to be.

It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either in mathematics, logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of God.  The main forms of our thinking, the separation of subjects from predicates, the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments, are purely human habits.  The ether, as Lord Salisbury said, is only a noun for the verb to undulate; and many of our theological ideas are admitted, even by those who call them ‘true,’ to be humanistic in like degree.

I fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what originally gave the impulse to Messrs. Dewey’s and Schiller’s views.  The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal ‘objectivity,’ as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its ‘elegance’ or its congruity with our residual