“Eh?”
“What that means is this. A thing is true if it turns out in actual practice to be useful, and false if it turns out in actual practice to be useless. I daresay that sounds startling to you at first, but if you think it over quietly for a while you’ll get to see that there’s a good deal in it.”
Meldon puffed at his cigar without speaking. He wished to give Mr. Willoughby an opportunity for meditation. Then he went on—
“The usual illustration—the one you’ll find in all the text-books—is the old puzzle of the monkey on the tree. A man sees a monkey clinging to the far side of a trunk of a tree—I never could make out how he did see it, but that doesn’t matter for the purposes of the illustration. He (the man) determines to go round the tree and get a better look at the monkey. But the monkey creeps round the tree so as always to keep the trunk between him and the man. The question is, whether, when he has gone round the tree, the man has or has not gone round the monkey. The older philosophers simply gave that problem up. They couldn’t solve it, but the pragmatist—”
“Either you or I,” said Mr. Willoughby, feebly, “must be going mad.”
“Your cigar has gone out,” said Meldon. “Don’t light it again. There’s nothing tastes worse than a relighted cigar. Take a fresh one. There are still two in the case and I shall be able to manage along with one more.”
“Would you mind leaving out the monkey on the tree and getting back to the geological survey story?”
“Not a bit. If it bores you to hear an explanation of the pragmatist theory of truth, I won’t go on with it. It was only for your sake I went into it. You can just take it from me that the test of truth is usefulness. That’s the general theory. Now apply it to this particular case. The story I told Higginbotham turned out to be extremely useful—quite as useful as I had any reason to expect. In fact, I don’t see that we could very well have got on without it. I can’t explain to you just how it was useful. If I did, I should be giving away Major Kent, Sir Charles Buckley, Euseby Langton, and perhaps old Thomas O’Flaherty Pat; but you may take it that the utility of the story has been demonstrated.”
Mr. Willoughby made an effort to rally. He reminded himself that he was Cabinet Minister and a great man, that he had withstood the fieriest eloquence of Members for Munster constituencies, and survived the most searching catechisms of the men from Antrim and Down. He called to mind the fact that he had resolutely said “No” to at least twenty-five per cent. of the people who came to him in Dublin Castle seeking to have jobs perpetrated. He tried to realise the impossibility of a mere country curate talking him down. He hardened his heart with the recollection that he was in the right and the curate utterly in the wrong. He sat up as well as he could in the hammock-chair and said sternly—