Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/404

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390 F. C. S. SCHILLER : PRAGMATISM AND PSEUDO-PRAGMATISM. As for the phrase " pro tanto true " which Prof. Taylor suspects of dishonest 'hedging,' it was simply intended to convey a warn- ing that our first predications of ' truth ' are rarely our last, as our proximate are rarely our final ends. ' True ' like ' good ' is pre- dicated at different levels, and as we proceed from the lower to the higher purposes, a valuation made at a lower level is not of necessity sustained. It is this process which gives rise to the methodological principles, which abound in all the sciences, and may be called ' truths ' or ' fictions ' according to the standpoint from which they are regarded. This exhausts the points in Prof. Taylor's article which I can think relevant to the issue, though some have had to be treated more briefly than their importance demands. But I hope I may have succeeded in making it clear that if pragmatist epistemology is more revolutionary, it is also more systematic and adequate, than its humble beginnings in Dr. Peirce's magazine article ap- peared to portend. And it resembles natural products, and differs from the artificial ' systems ' of individual philosophers, also in

this that it possesses the capacity of growth.

F. C. S. SCHILLER. socially valuable nor are his interests always harmonious with those of society. The ' good ' and the ' true ' anw are not always so rti/l, as Prof. Taylor might have remembered from Aristotle. Usually the social valuations prevail over the individual, and we are conventionally obliged to call ' good ' and ' true ' what may be ' bad ' and ' false ' for us. Far more complicated cases, which it is interesting to work out, arise how- ever in connexion with the ' transvaluation ' of old values and the estab- lishment of new ones,