Neither content nor motive can be
imagine for it. It is an absolutely meaningless abstraction.
[Footnote: I am not forgetting that Professor Rickert long ago gave
up the whole notion of truth being founded on agreement with
reality. Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth,
and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic
flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in
his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of
rationalism when dealing with this subject. Rickert deals with part
of the pragmatistic position under the head of what he calls
'Relativismus.' I cannot discuss his text here. Suffice it to say
that his argumentation in that chapter is so feeble as to seem
almost incredible in so generally able a writer.]
Surely in this field of truth it is the pragmatists and not the
rationalists who are the more genuine defenders of the universe's
rationality.
Lecture VII
Pragmatism and Humanism
What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth
sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the
notion of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and
complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to
propound.
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