nd perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
concerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
nominalism was evidently true,