It is in failing to distinguish between these two that James involves himself, I believe, in most of his difficulties, and it is in the recognition and explicit indication of this difference that Dewey differentiates himself from James. We may pass on to cite specific instances in which James uses each of these criteria. We will find, of course, that there are passages which can be interpreted as meaning either value or fulfillment, but there are many in which the use of value as a criterion seems unmistakable.
The following quotations may be instanced: “If theological views prove to have value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relation to the other truths that have also to be acknowledged”. For example, in so far as the Absolute affords comfort, it is not sterile; “it has that amount of value; it performs a concrete function. I myself ought to call the Absolute true ‘in so far forth’, then; and I unhesitatingly now do so”. (p.72).
“On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build out and determine it so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths”. (p. 299).
“The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons”. (p. 76).
“Empirical psychologists … have denied the soul, save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life. They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into so much small-change value in the way of ‘ideas’ and their connections with each other. The soul is good or ‘true’ for just so much, but no more”. (p. 92, italics mine).
“Since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious…. Whenever such extra truths become practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that ’it is useful because it is true’ or that it is ‘true because it is useful’. Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing…. From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worth while to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while”. (pp. 204-205, italics mine).
“To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically!… An idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will——hold true of that reality”. (pp. 212-213).
“‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the ‘right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course”. (p. 222).
We may add a passage with the same bearing, from “The Meaning of Truth”. In this quotation James is retracting the statement made in the University of California Address that without the future there is no difference between theism and materialism. He says: “Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern men’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, and so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remain so for definite pragmatic reasons”. (p. 189, notes).
The contrast between ‘intellectual’ and ‘practical’ seems to make his position certain. If truth is tested by practical workings, as contrasted with intellectual workings, it cannot be said to be limited to fulfilled expectation.