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Now money-making and money values occupy a special place in business enterprise, due to the fact that on economic principles such money value becomes the best test perhaps the only true test of the workableness and success of business efforts.
Similarly, in economics, the science of mankind in its production, distribution and consumption of material things, the test of utility and efficiency is, Will it pay? that being the standard of workableness in the application of that science.
But this seems hardly feasible, seeing that natural selection must continually favour the most workable constitutions, and will only preserve organisms in proportion as they combine general workableness with the special modification. On the other hand, according to Mr. Spencer himself, use-inheritance must often disturb the balance of the constitution.
A man's idea of God may be, and cannot but be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to Someone most alive. That which comes to us through the idea is witness of the Reality behind it. Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries. There is a social attestation of the workableness of faith.
The difference is that when the pragmatists speak of truth, they mean exclusively some thing about the ideas, namely their workableness; whereas when anti-pragmatists speak of truth they seem most often to mean something about the objects.
Pratt denies none of these verifying 'workings' for which I have pleaded, but only insists on their inability to serve as the fundamentum of the truth-relation, it seems that there is really nothing in the line of FACT about which we differ, and that the issue between us is solely as to how far the notion of workableness or verifiability is an essential part of the notion of 'trueness' 'trueness' being Dr.
Are we only to be permitted to defend general principles, on condition that we draw no practical inferences from them? Is every other idea to yield precedence and empire to existing circumstances, and is the immediate and universal workableness of a policy to be the main test of its intrinsic fitness?
The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content, and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The 'workableness' which ideas must have, in order to be true, means particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete experience.
"Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself. Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of believers who have tried it and proved it.
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