because it alone would legitimise the
local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).

It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
interest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under
any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a