motion of pity or love, because we have felt it; we know
that what we call tigers exist in India, because acquaintances have
seen them, and direct experience has taught us that their evidence is
satisfactory, and if we went to India their testimony could be found
true by the evidence of our own senses. "What becomes our warrant for
calling anything reality? The only reply is--the faith of the present
critic or inquirer. At every moment of his life he finds himself
subject to a belief in _some_ realities, even though his realities of
this year should prove to be his illusions of the next." "_The most we
can claim is, that what we say about cognition may be counted as true
as what we say about anything else_." Nothing is true for him unless
it has reference to the world which we know, which we accept on faith,
by the practical evidence of our senses, or, it might be added, our
desires, our aspirations, our intuitions. Nothing is ruled out so long
as it can be pinned down at any moment to what is real, to what is
individual. "Demonstration in the last resort" is to the senses.
Contemned though they may be by some thinkers, these sensations
are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first
and last limits, the _terminus a quo_ and the _terminus ad quem_
of the mind. To find such sensational _termini_ should be our
aim with all higher thought. They end discussion, they destroy
the false conceit of knowledge, and without them we are all at
sea with each other's meaning. If two men act alike on a
percept, they believe themselves to feel alike about it; if not,
they may suspect they know it in differing ways. We can never be
sure we understand each other till we are able to bring the
matter to this test. This is why metaphysical discussions are so
much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of
a sensational kind.
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
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