(as I will now call it) pragmatism,
walk thenceforward upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual
products are most true which, turning their face towards the Absolute,
come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one.
For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into
the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some
particular wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the
intellectual operation to have been true (as an addition may 'prove'
that a subtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes,
according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only in so
far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.[45]

III

In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted in a general way the
common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which
maintain that this is logically absurd. The usual reason given for its
being absurd is that it assumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand
in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours;
whereas a term taken in a second relation can not logically be the same
term which it was at first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists,
and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid,
that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its
strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be term _M_, asserted to be on
the one hand related to _L_, and on the other to _N_; and let the two
cases of relation be symbolized by _L--M_ and _M--N_ respectively. When,
now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in
the shape _L--M--N_, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in
the _M_, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; that _L--M--N_
logically means two different experiences, _L--M_ and _M--N_, namely;
and that although the Absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior
point of view, read its own kind of unity into _M_'s two editions, yet
as elements in finite experience the two _M_'s lie irretrievably
asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged.

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the
logical into the physical point of view. It would be ea