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how we pass from individual claims to social values, and attribute to them an objective validity. The bricks out of which the temple of Truth is built are the individual judgments which supply the material. Every one is continually making them. But of these a large proportion are half-baked, or broken, or of the wrong shapes. So these have to be rejected. They may still seem to their makers subjectively ‘true,’ but they are objectively useless. Whoever, on the other hand, has the skill to devise a form of brick which is useful finds hosts of imitators. He becomes an architectonic authority, and is called in to mould or re-mould the bricks of others. And so dominant patterns arise which prevail and attain an objective validity. But this validity is the reward of value and the result of selections based on experience. The ‘validity’ of a claim to truth is neither logically nor etymologically other than its ‘strength.’ There is no need to presuppose any inaccessible supercelestial archetype which ratifies and sanctifies by a suprasensible communion, the human imitations we inexplicably make. Still less do we need any deus ex machina supernaturally to establish by his fiat any initial ‘commonness’ of truth. We do not even need any ‘independent’ object magically authenticating its ‘true copy’ in our thoughts.[1] All we need is that there should be de facto differences in the value, and therefore in the subsequent validity, of different people’s judgments. And of these we have, of course, abundance.
It is noticeable, however, that Protagoras is represented as declining to call these superior values ‘truths’. They are ‘better’ but not ‘truer’. If so, he did not yet perceive that
- ↑ Lest I should hereabouts be unintelligently charged with denying ‘objective reality’ altogether, I must append a note to this remark. The only sense (out of many) in which a Humanist theory of knowledge does away with ‘independent objects’ is the utterly nugatory one in which the ‘object’ is made so ‘independent’ as to transcend human cognition altogether: all the other senses of ‘objectivity,’ it expounds and explains, each in its proper place. It is most unfortunate that both ‘realists’ and ‘absolute idealists’ should apparently have piqued themselves on, quite irrationally, affirming just this superfluous absurdity, and on tying all the legitimate senses of ‘objectivity’ on to it. Cf. my Studies in Humanism, pp. 439, 461-62.
