Truth, then, for the Pragmatists is that which has "practical consequences." A belief is held to be true when it is "found to work." Transcendent ideas have no validity except as ideas unless they are found to have a "cash value" in practical life, that is to say, unless they refer to, and are operative in, the world of immediate experience. "Reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for 'truth' in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old." You may talk of Absolutes as much as you like, you may contemplate the fundamental categories of the mind, you may dwell upon the a priori conceptions to which all our experiences must conform, but the fact remains, says Professor James, turning his back on all transcendental idealism, "the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine."
The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth—truth saves us from a world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional fools' paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit! When Absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism—as they apprehend it. Just so with us humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy.
I am not here seeking to examine closely, still less to criticise, Professor James' pragmatic doctrines. What I am concerned to show is that we have in him a trained philosopher adopting towards the theory of knowledge a point of view strangely similar to that which Mr. Galsworthy takes up towards the social ethics of modern England. Is it not Mr. Galsworthy's function to "condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems" of morality and etiquette? Professor James' rationalist antagonists are exactly like the administrators of law and order criticised by Sweedle in the play: "They've forgot what human nature's like." Just as your Hegelian wishes for nothing but the perfection of knowledge, and leaves you in an inconceivable, unknowable Absolute, so, according to Falder, who has been in prison, "Nobody wishes you any harm, but they down you all the same." In precisely the same way as Professor James pleads for a view of truth which rests on the unfailing vividness of finite experience, so Mr. Galsworthy pleads for a justice which shall be applicable, not to an infinite number of imaginary cases, but to the individual, to the person whom we might chance to know, and meet, and work with—to the necessitous human being. He pleads for a law which shall be elastic, not rigid; dealing with men, not cases; for which mercy shall come to be a part of the idea of justice. That which is good enough for human beings in their dealings one with another ought not to be too good for the law. Intercourse with concrete reality is Professor James' requirement for the truth of an idea; intercourse with human beings is Mr. Galsworthy's requirement as the basis of social morality and of law. That does not of course mean that the legislator must be acquainted with all those for whom he legislates any more than that we can directly experience the facts of history which we claim to know. But every rule—in knowledge, in morality, in law—must be referable to this test of intercourse. Let your judgment of human beings be such as you would award to those who are sufficiently human to be among your friends. Let it be directed solely towards the well-being of the individual so far as that is consistent with the well-being of society. Again and again Mr. Galsworthy has shown us how stereotyped views, abstractions of the human mind, settle down upon classes and individuals and warp their judgments and their conduct. In Fraternity he showed how the idea of class differences becomes an obsession in the human mind, obliterating the truer idea of human community, of those common qualities in character which are not skin-deep, like class, but fundamental. In Strife he showed how the idea of the rights of an employer, of the rights of a workman, is an abstraction hiding from master and workman the human bond which human intercourse would have revealed. In Justice, again, he showed how that lowest of all existing codes, the legal code, erects a "temple-like" abstraction of the law to which all individuals, however different they may be, however various their requirements, are made to conform.
We may notice that in the cases both of the philosopher and the dramatist there is a return to what I may call a rudimentary common sense. Professor James' views come as a reaction in the course of the long evolution of ideas. If on the one side we had not had thinker after thinker who emphasised the necessity of approaching reality as a relation of the conscious mind, and on the other side sceptics who asserted that there is nothing knowable but the continuum of disconnected sensations which present themselves—a blind array of atoms—there would be no meaning in a thesis like that of Professor James, which refutes the follies of the two extremes, and stands upon a ground which is very nearly a denial of the possibility of philosophy. In like manner Mr. Galsworthy's ethics are only valuable as a chain in the progress of morality and institutions. Primitive society conceived punishment as an antidote to the horrors of unchecked violence. Mediæval law devised fearful penalties for the forger, because forgery was a fearful menace to the stability of a commerce not yet backed by a high commercial morality. But now we have reached the time when we are menaced by the machinery set up by our ancestors. The law works with a violence and a brutality which were invented in, and proper to, an age of violence and brutality; and we are confronted with the daily spectacle of judges compelled to administer an antiquated and ferocious law, which awards to the criminal the double penalty of chastisement and shame. The old barbarism clings to the machine and works havoc. And because it is old, and because we are accustomed to it, we tolerate it. We do not put it to the test, which must be a personal test: How does it work in the case of this individual and of that? Is the application of these rules "satisfactory" when they are made to operate on the human beings for whom they were devised? Has this code any social "cash value" when it is brought to bear on the lawyer's clerk who forged a cheque to save a woman?
I have not considered Professor James' merits as a dialectician, or Mr. Galsworthy's as a dramatist. I have attempted to hint at that quality in them which is called "humanism," humanism in thought, humanism in ethics—the quality which makes men seek to judge ideas, institutions and things by what they are worth to human beings for their most pressing, their most vital needs. It is evident that this same "humanism" is beginning to manifest itself in politics, religion and even literary criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline. It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos and caprice. Chaos, however, is not so much to be feared as those "little provisional fools' paradises of belief" exposed so brilliantly by William James.