consistency of life. The theory of the method of knowing which is
advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature
is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which
purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its
strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual
resources--of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only
that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to
adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires
to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is
not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the
dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens.
Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by
conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we
live.

Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of
the separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do
with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings
in whose active production they have had no share are practical
rationalists. Those who come in direct contact with things and have to
adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists;
those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a
religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect,
idealists. Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change
received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those
whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve received
truth emphasize the universal and the fixed--and so on. Philosophic
systems in their opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit
formulation of the traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided
segments of experience--one-sided because barriers to intercourse
prevent the experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by
that of others who are differently situated.

In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is
made available in giving direct