Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/497

Rh majority vote. It is a relation, that antedates experience, between our opinions and an independent something which the pragmatist account ignores, a relation which, though the opinions of individuals should to all eternity deny it, would still remain to qualify them as false. To talk of opinions without referring to this independent something, the antipragmatist assures us, is to play Hamlet with Hamlet's part left out.

But when the pragmatist speaks of opinions, does he mean any such insulated and unmotived abstractions as are here supposed? Of course not, he means men's opinions in the flesh, as they have really formed themselves, opinions surrounded by their causes and the influences they obey and exert, and along with the whole environment of social communication of which they are a part. The "experience" which the pragmatic definition postulates is the independent something which the anti-pragmatist accuses him of ignoring. Already have men grown unanimous in the opinion that such experience is "of" an independent reality, the existence of which all opinions must acknowledge, in order to be true. Already do they agree that in the long run it is useless to resist experience's pressure; that the more of it a man has, the better position he stands in, in respect of truth; that some men, having had more experience, are therefore better authorities than others; that some are also wiser by nature and better able to interpret the experience they have had; that it is the part of wisdom to compare notes, to discuss, and to follow the opinion of our betters; and that the more systematically and thoroughly the comparison and weighing of opinions is pursued, the truer the opinions that survive are likely to be. When the pragmatist talks of opinions, it is opinions as they thus concretely and livingly and interactingly and correlatively exist that he has in mind; and when the anti-pragmatist tries to floor him because the word opinion can also be taken abstractly and as if it had no environment, he simply ignores the soil out of which the whole discussion grows. His weapons cut the air and strike no blow. No one gets wounded in the war against caricatures of belief and skeletons of opinion of which the German onslaughts upon "Relativismus" consist. Refuse to use the word opinion abstractly, keep it in its real environment, and the withers of pragmatism remain unwrung.

That men do exist who are "opinionated," in the sense that their opinions are self-willed, is unfortunately a fact that must be admitted, no matter what one's notion of truth in general may be. But that this fact makes it impossible for truth to form itself authentically out of the life of "opinion," is what no critic has yet proved. Truth may well consist of certain opinions, and does indeed consist of nothing but opinions, though not every opinion need be true. No pragmatist needs to dogmatize about the consensus of opinion in the future being right—he need only postulate that it will probably contain more of truth than any one's opinion now.