TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. 91 "two" is identical with " the only even prime number," or that six and four are ten, because it suits my convenience that these things should be so. I simply see that they are so, and there is really no more to be said about the matter. (5) Finally, Mr. Schiller claims to have caught me in the very act of lapsing into the crude empiricism which is, it seems, all that Pragmatism has to offer by way of a theory of knowledge. In proof of this alleged inconsistency three sentences of mine are quoted. The first is the saying that " the real is experience and nothing but experience," and this sentence at least is, I claim, absolutely irrelevant for the purpose to which my critic puts it. For empiricism is not a theory as to what reality consists of, but a doctrine of the method to be pursued in investigating reality. Hence it would be quite possible to maintain that nothing is real but experience, and yet to hold that this conclusion itself must be based on other than empirical grounds, in fact, to be at once an experientialist in one's metaphysic and a rationalist in one's logic. And this is the very position I have attempted, I do not know with what success, to defend. The other two quotations are more relevant, but their whole meaning is seriously perverted by my critic's exegesis. In one I say that proof of an ultimate truth can only be given by making trial of it, a doctrine which, until en- lightened by Mr. Schiller, I had always vaguely supposed myself to have got from reflexion upon the Aristotelian doctrine of the vovs which is TWV e<r^aTwj/ ITT a/A^drepa, 1 and the connexion of ' dialectic ' with the axioms. The statement does no doubt at first sight look like empiricism, but Mr. Schiller has concealed the all- important point that the kind of trial referred to in the context is a purely logical and a priori one, and consists in the attempt to dis- cover whether the denial of the suggested principle leads to logical contradiction. Whether this is after all the correct theory of the logical nature of axioms I need not now inquire. It is enough to point out the utter difference in kind between this procedure and that of a " radical empiricism " which rejects all form of proof beyond the a posteriori comparison of theory with the stream of apprehended events. The third quotation is to the effect that the true character of a scientific method can only be discovered by the actual use of it. Reference to the context again shows that the remark has no bear- ing on the points at issue between rationalists and empiricists, but speaks merely of the futility of opening a treatise on any subject by a disquisition on the method to be employed unaccompanied by illustrative examples. The reflexion that you cannot analyse the methods of a science properly until you have them embodied before you in examples, so as to know what it is you are talking about, is a commonplace equally obvious on any theory of method. Or would Mr. Schiller hold that a man might fairly be described 1 See in particular Anal. Post., 100 b ; Topics, A., 101 a, 36 ff. ; PJthics, 1141 a, 1 ff 1 ., 1142 a, 25 ff.
