emphasized, or hardly recognized, by
professional critics. The difference of attitude can probably be easily
explained. The epistemological universe of discourse is so highly
technical that only those who have been trained in the history of
thought think in terms of it. It did not occur, accordingly, to
non-technical readers to interpret the doctrine that the meaning and
validity of thought are fixed by differences made in consequences and in
satisfactoriness, to mean consequences in personal feelings. Those who
were professionally trained, however, took the statement to mean that
consciousness or mind in the mere act of looking at things modifies
them. It understood the doctrine of test of validity by consequences to
mean that apprehensions and conceptions are true if the modifications
affected by them were of an emotionally desirable tone.

Prior discussion should have made it reasonably clear that the source of
this misunderstanding lies in the neglect of temporal considerations.
The change made in things by the self in knowing is not immediate and,
so to say, cross-sectional. It is longitudinal--in the redirection given
to changes already going on. Its analogue is found in the changes which
take place in the development of, say, iron ore into a watch-spring, not
in those of the miracle of transubstantiation. For the static,
cross-sectional, non-temporal relation of subject and object, the
pragmatic hypothesis substitutes apprehension of a thing in terms of the
results in other things which it is tending to effect. For the unique
epistemological relation, it substitutes a practical relation of a
familiar type:--responsive behavior which changes in time the
subject-matter to which it applies. The unique thing about the
responsive behavior which constitutes knowing is the specific difference
which marks it off from other modes of response, namely, the part played
in it by anticipation and prediction. Knowing is the act, stimulated by
this foresight, of securing and averting consequences. The success of
the achievement measures the standing of the foresight by which response
is directed. The popular impression that pragmatic philosophy means that
philosophy shall develop ideas relevant to the actual crises of life,
ideas influential in dealing with them and tested by the assistance they
afford, is correct.

Reference to practical response suggests, however, another
misapprehension. Many critics have jumped at the obvio