That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously
its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true,
gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself
then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree
grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.
Now Dewey and Schiller proceed to generalize this observation and to
apply it to the most ancient parts of truth. They also once were
plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also
mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were
novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose
establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying
previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role
whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things
true is the reason why they ARE true, for 'to be true' MEANS only to
perform this marriage-function.
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth
independent; truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to
human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed
superabundantly--or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree,
and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology
and its 'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran
service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity.
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