is one that has been raised in many quarters to the effect that to make truth grow in any way out of human opinion is but to reproduce that protagorean doctrine that the individual man is "the measure of all things," which Plato in his immortal dialogue, the Thæatetus, laid away so comfortably in its grave two thousand years ago. The two cleverest brandishers of this objection to make truth concrete, Professors Rickert and Münsterberg, write in German, and "Relativismus" is the name they give to the heresy which they endeavor to uproot.
The first step in their campaign against "Relativismus" is entirely in the air. They accuse relativists—and we pragmatists are typical relativists—of being debarred by their self-adopted principles, not only from the privilege which rationalist philosophers enjoy, of believing that these principles of their own are truth impersonal and absolute, but even of framing the abstract notion of such a truth, in the pragmatic sense of an ideal opinion in which all men might agree, and which no man should ever wish to change. Both charges fall wide of their mark. I myself, as a pragmatist, believe in my own account of truth as firmly as any rationalist can possibly believe in his. And I believe in it for the very reason that I have the idea of truth which my learned adversaries contend that no pragmatist can frame. I expect, namely, that the more fully men discuss and test my account, the more they will agree that it fits, and the less will they desire a change. I may of course be premature in this confidence, and the glory of being truth final and absolute may fall upon some later revision and correction of my scheme, which scheme will then be judged untrue in just the measure in which it departs from that finally satisfactory formulation. To admit, as we pragmatists do, that we are liable to correction (even though we may not expect it) involves the use on our part of an ideal standard. Rationalists themselves are, as modest individuals, sceptical enough to admit the abstract possibility of their own present opinions being corrigible and revisable to some degree, so that the fact that the mere notion of an absolute standard should seem to them so important a thing to claim for themselves and to deny to us is not easy to explain. If, along with the notion of the standard, they could also claim its exclusive warrant for their own fulminations now, it would be important to them indeed. But absolutists like Rickert freely admit the sterility of the notion, even in their own hands. Truth is what we ought to believe, they say, even though no man ever did or shall believe it, and even though we have no way of getting at it save by the usual empirical processes of testing our opinions by one another and by facts. Pragmatically, then, this part of the dispute is idle. No relativist who ever actually walked the earth[1] has denied the constitutive character in his own thinking of the notion of absolute truth. What is challenged by relativists is
- ↑ Of course the bugaboo creature called "the sceptic" in the logic-books, who dogmatically makes the statement that no statement, not even the one he now makes, is true, is a mere mechanical toy-target for the rationalist shooting gallery—hit him and he turns a summersault—yet he is the only sort of relativist whom my colleagues appear able to imagine to exist.
