purely theoretic notion of truth, and get out of
the pragmatic atmosphere altogether. And with this Mr. Joseph leaves
us--truth is truth, and there is an end of the matter. But he makes a
very pretty show of convicting me of self-stultification in according to
our purely theoretic satisfactions any place in the humanistic scheme.
They crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house and home, he
thinks, and pragmatism has to go into bankruptcy if she recognizes them
at all.

There is no room for disagreement about the facts here; but the
destructive force of the reasoning disappears as soon as we talk
concretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our quality of good
pragmatists, just what the famous theoretic needs are known as and in
what the intellectual satisfactions consist. Mr. Joseph, faithful to the
habits of his party, makes no attempt at characterizing them, but
assumes that their nature is self-evident to all.

Are they not all mere matters of _consistency_--and emphatically _not_
of consistency between an Absolute Reality and the mind's copies of it,
but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and manners
of reacting, in the mind? And are not both our need of such consistency
and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that
we are beings that develop mental _habits_--habit itself proving
adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the
same kinds of objects, recur and follow 'law'? If this were so, what
would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit,
and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point of
fact this seems to have been the probable case. At life's origin, any
present perception may have been 'true'--if such a word could then be
applicable. Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became
'true' whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were
'false' or 'mistaken' reactions. But the same class of objects needs the
same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must
gradually have been established, with a disappointment felt whenever
the results frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ
for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us
a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of
objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situation is
intellectually unsatisfactory. To gain reli