The Meaning of Truth
https://archive.org/stream/themeaningoftrut00jameuoft/themeaningoftrut00jameuoft_djvu.txt But if our own private vision of the paper be con
sidered in abstraction from every other event,
as if it constituted by itself the universe (and
it might perfectly well do so, for aught we can
understand to the contrary), then the paper
seen and the seeing of it are only two names for
one indivisible fact which, properly named,
is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experi
ence. The paper is in the mind and the mind
is around the paper, because paper and mind
are only two names that are given later to the
one experience, when, taken in a larger world
of which it forms a part, its connections
are traced in different directions.
The opponent here will ask : Has not the
knowing of truth any substantive value on its
own account, apart from the collateral advan
tages it may bring ? And if you allow theoretic
satisfactions to exist at all, do they not crowd
the collateral satisfactions out of house and
home, and must not pragmatism go into
bankruptcy, if she admits them at all ? The
destructive force of such talk disappears as
soon as we use words concretely instead of
abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good
pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic
needs are known as and in what the intellect-
ual satisfactions consist.
Are they not all mere matters of consistency
- and emphatically not of consistency between \
an absolute reality and the mind s copies of it, ] but of actually felt consistency among judg
ments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the
minds own experienceable world? And are/
not both our need of such consistency and
our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of
the natural fact that we are beings that do
develop mental habits habit itself proving \
adaptively beneficial in an environment where
the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, /
recur.