nion widely represented in all modern discussion, and especially in
the most recent times. My own account of the insight which I refer to
the reason depends not upon simply ignoring this general doctrine
about the limitations of our human knowledge, but upon an effort to
get a rational view of what it is that we mean by human experience. My
result, as I have stated it, may have seemed paradoxical; and I am far
from supposing that my brief sketch could remove this paradoxical
seeming, or could answer all objections. My thesis is essentially
this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is,
and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience
that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a
world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument
for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in
which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a
doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make
any significant assertion.

Now this argument will seem to some of you to have been wholly set
aside by that account of the nature of judgments, of assertions, and
of their truth or falsity, which pragmatism has recently {138}
maintained. A new definition of truth, you will say--or, an old
definition revived and revised; a new clearness also as to the ancient
issues of philosophy; an equally novel recent assimilation of
philosophical methods to those that have long been prominent in
natural science--these things have combined, at the present moment, to
render the Platonic tradition in philosophy and the laborious
deductions of Kant, as well as the speculations of the post-Kantian
idealists, no longer interesting. I ought, you may insist, to have
taken note of this fact before presenting my now antiquated version of
the idealistic doctrine of the reason. I ought to have considered
fairly the pragmatist's theory of truth. I should then have seen that
our human experience may safely be left and must rationally be left,
to fight its own way to salvation without any aid from the idea of an
universal or all-embracing or divine insight.

How does pragmatism view the very problem about the truth and error of
our human opinions which has led me to such far-reaching consequences?
For the first, it is the boast of pragmatists that they deal, by
preference, with what they call "concrete situations," and our
"concrete situation" as human