quiry and knowing is made in order to renew and reform specific
desires and strivings which, through conflict and consequent
equivocation, have become fruitless and vain; and it must have seen that
the results of the inquiry are true or false as they succeed or fail in
this reformation and renewal.

But once more, it must steadily be kept in view that while the loving
and hating, desiring and striving, which the logical operations are
reforming and renewing, are functions of the nervous system, they are
not functions of the nervous system alone, else the door of subjectivism
again closes upon us. Loving and hating, desiring and striving have
their "objects." Hence any reformation of these functions involves no
less a reformation of their objects. When therefore we say that truth
and error are relevant to desires and strivings, this means relevant to
them as including their objects, not as entitized processes (such are
the pitfalls of language) inclosed in a nervous system or mind. With
this before us the relevance of truth and error to desires and strivings
can never be made the basis for the charge of subjectivism. The
conception of desires as peculiarly individual and subjective is a
survival of the very isolation which is the source of the difficulty
with truth and error. Hence the appeal to this isolation, made alike by
idealism and realism, in charging instrumental logic with subjectivism
is an elementary _petitio_.

Doubtless it will be urged again that the act of knowing is motived
by an independent desire and striving of its own. This is of course
consonant with the neo-realistic atomism, however inconsonant it may be
with the conception of implication which it employs. If we take a small
enough, isolated segment of experience we can find meaning for this
notion, as we may for the idea that the earth is flat and that the sun
moves around the earth. But as consequences accrue we find as great
difficulties with the one as with the other. If the course of events did
not bring us to book, if we could get off with a mere definition of
truth and error we might go on piling up subsistential definitional
logics world without end. But sublime adventurers, logically
unregenerate and uninitiated, will go on sailing westward to the
confusion and confounding of all definitional systems that leave them
out of account.

The conclusion is plain. If logic is to have room in its household for
both truth and error, if it is to