the world is so framed that when men have true ideas of realities, consequential utilities ensue in abundance; and no one of our critics, I think, has shown as concrete a sense of the variety of these utilities as he has; but he reiterates that, whereas such utilities are secondary, we insist on treating them as primary, and that the connaissance objective from which they draw all their being is something which we neglect, exclude, and destroy.  The utilitarian value and the strictly cognitive value of our ideas may perfectly well harmonize, he says—­and in the main he allows that they do harmonize—­but they are not logically identical for that.  He admits that subjective interests, desires, impulses may even have the active ‘primacy’ in our intellectual life.  Cognition awakens only at their spur, and follows their cues and aims; yet, when it is awakened, it is objective cognition proper and not merely another name for the impulsive tendencies themselves in the state of satisfaction.  The owner of a picture ascribed to Corot gets uneasy when its authenticity is doubted.  He looks up its origin and is reassured.  But his uneasiness does not make the proposition false, any more than his relief makes the proposition true, that the actual Corot was the painter.  Pragmatism, which, according to M. Hebert, claims that our sentiments make truth and falsehood, would oblige us to conclude that our minds exert no genuinely cognitive function whatever.

This subjectivist interpretation of our position seems to follow from my having happened to write (without supposing it necessary to explain that I was treating of cognition solely on its subjective side) that in the long run the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, much as the good is the expedient in the way of our behavior!  Having previously written that truth means ’agreement with reality,’ and insisted that the chief part of the expediency of any one opinion is its agreement with the rest of acknowledged truth, I apprehended no exclusively subjectivistic reading of my meaning.  My mind was so filled with the notion of objective reference that I never dreamed that my hearers would let go of it; and the very last accusation I expected was that in speaking of ideas and their satisfactions, I was denying realities outside.  My only wonder now is that critics should have found so silly a personage as I must have seemed in their eyes, worthy of explicit refutation.

The object, for me, is just as much one part of reality as the idea is another part.  The truth of the idea is one relation of it to the reality, just as its date and its place are other relations.  All three relations consist of intervening parts of the universe which can in every particular case be assigned and catalogued, and which differ in every instance of truth, just as they differ with every date and place.