hinery of science. Yet the fact is
patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
what was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.

Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
probable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or
possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
gaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems
of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincare, turned his subtle
irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
that he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy
in the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that
positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
or theological theory, should innocently suppose th