382 F. C. S. SCHILLER : authority that some of these utterances really were derived from- sources alien to it and more akin to my own views. Perhaps we may agree to call these dicta pseudo-pragmatic and expect to find them extensively modified in the next edition of Prof. Taylor's book.. II. The earlier part of Prof. Taylor's article challenges me to give N a pragmatic explanation of some choice specimens of ' useless ' knowledge, and urges some objections which I shall have great- pleasure in meeting. But before taking up these matters, I must correct some misapprehensions of Prof. Taylor's concerning points, of secondary importance. First as to his inaccuracies in quotation. I only referred io- them in passing (N.S., 55, p. 353), and they are worth a mention only because he had thought fit to censure Prof. James for citing the McGill University Magazine as the McGill Quarterly. 1 One of these moreover has become so habitual with our critics that I do> not wonder that Prof. Taylor has difficulty in discerning its exist- ence. He glibly criticises on page 60 "the doctrine that ' the true is the useful,' " as if that were identical with the assertion that 1 the true is useful ' and I had not found it necessary to draw out the formal implications of this latter in Humanism, page 38. Not only that, but a little lower down Prof. Taylor indulges in the very ' simple conversion of an A proposition ' which I had depre- cated in advance, when he infers that " all useful things are true things ". As I had also pointed out, such conversion would have- involved us in a denial of useful fictions.' 2 The other looked more invidious. I had said 3 that the disguise of Mephistopheles as a mediaeval devil had apparently deceived "all the other characters in Faust, except the Lord," and all Goethe's readers except myself. Prof. Taylor thereupon remarked that I shared, by my own confession, " with the Supreme Being- the unique distinction of being the sole person in the universe to have fathomed the inner meaning of Goethe's Faust ". That is he attributed to me a claim to share with the Deity what I had really professed to share with Goethe. The difference and the inaccuracy are, I should think, fairly obvious. For ' Der Herr ' in Goethe's Faust is the Deity as little as the Absolute in Prof. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics is the ultimate explanation of the universe. However Prof. Taylor wholly disarms any resent- ment I might have felt by now explaining that he was making a joke ! But that I of all men should thereupon be charged with curtailing any philosopher's liberty to make jokes ! I hope on the contrary that Prof. Taylor will make more ' jokes ' and better ones. Still it is worth remembering that even in jesting it is better to make the cap fit. Secondly I must disabuse Prof. Taylor of a notion that a merely l Phil. Rev., xiv., 265. * Humanism, p. 37. 3 Ibid., p. 168.
