Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/437

423 gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement. Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world" (pp. 73-4).

To one who takes such an attitude, of course pragmatism must seem a profanation of one of the shrines of the Free Man's Worship. Even if Mr. Russell's antagonism to pragmatism were not well known, the reader who has followed him through the first three essays just mentioned would confidently anticipate the verdict set forth in the next two essays, "Pragmatism," and "William James's Conception of Truth." "Transatlantic Truth" comes in for severe handling, and we all remember Mr. James's protest that pragmatists "affirm nothing as silly as Mr. Russell supposes," and that "the slander which Mr. Russell repeats has gained the widest currency" (The Meaning of Truth, pp. 272 ff.). Whatever be the merits of the question, a more searching examination of the dogmas of pragmatism it would be hard to find. Unfortunately, however, Professor Dewey's version of pragmatism and the modification of Mr. James's version given in The Meaning of Truth are left quite out of the discussion.

The sixth Essay, "The Monistic Theory of Truth," is a very subtle criticism of "the axiom of internal relations," and of the view of truth based upon this axiom.

The last Essay, "On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood," presents Mr. Russell's own view. His doctrine starts from the existence of 'multiple relations': "a relation is 'multiple' if the simplest propositions in which it occurs are propositions involving more than two terms (not counting the relation)" (p. 180). "Take such a proposition as 'A loved B in May and hated him in June,' and let us suppose