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Updated: July 3, 2025
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future.
Downrightness and sententiousness are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity in fact, all forms of genuine expression help make literature. You know the genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or personality behind the language.
Arnold complains of his want of concreteness. The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's, that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a moralizing discourse or sermon.
The absolute world, the all-real-and-all-good, is boldly construed in terms of the historical process itself, with all its concreteness and immediacy. Endless detail, contrast, and even contradiction may be brought under the form of aesthetic value. The very flux of experience, the very struggles and defeats of life, are not without their picturesqueness and dramatic quality.
On the other hand, the dramatist is undoubtedly aided in his great aim of creating characters by holding in mind certain actual people who have been selected to represent them; and what the novelist gains in range and freedom of characterization, he is likely to lose in concreteness of delineation.
Among the most formidable-sounding onslaughts on the attempt to introduce some concreteness into our notion of what the truth of an idea may mean, is one that has been raised in many quarters to the effect that to make truth grow in any way out of human opinion is but to reproduce that protagorean doctrine that the individual man is 'the measure of all things, which Plato in his immortal dialogue, the Thaeatetus, is unanimously said to have laid away so comfortably in its grave two thousand years ago.
And there flashed before her with ridiculous concreteness the thought: 'I've got three hundred a year of my own! Then the whole feeling left her, just as in dreams a mordant sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache, whose cause is forgotten, behind. "There's the gong, Horace," she said. "Cecil Tharp is here to dinner. I asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn't feel up to it.
A longing for concreteness has befogged our fantasy. Even so excellent an actor as Mr. Forbes-Robertson cannot read the great speech beginning, "Look here, upon this picture and on this," in which Hamlet obviously refers to two imaginary portraits in his mind's eye, without pointing successively to two absurd caricatures that are daubed upon the scenery.
We may assume, for convenience and for concreteness, that the lesson is division of fractions. There will be substantial agreement that the principle involved in this subject can be taught in one recitation period. The reasons for some of the steps in the process may come later, but the child should be able to find his way to the correct answer in a single period.
The entire quarrel of the intellectualist with him is over his concreteness, intellectualism contending that the vaguer and more abstract account is here the more profound.
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