Nor has an idea to reckon only with facts: it has also to cohere with other ideas. It must be congruous with the mass of other beliefs held for good reasons by the thinker who accepts it. For no one can afford to have a stock of beliefs which conflict too violently with those of his fellows. If his 'intuitions' contrast too seriously with those of others, and he acts on them, he will be shut up as a lunatic. If, then, the 'useful' idea has to approve itself both to its maker and his fellows without developing limitations in its use, it is clear that a pragmatic truth is really far less arbitrary and subjective than the 'truths' accepted as absolute, on the bare ground that they seem 'self-evident' to a few intellectualists. If, however, it be urged that pragmatic truths never grow absolutely true at all, and that the most prolonged pragmatic tests do not exclude the possibility of an ultimate error in the idea, there is no difficulty about admitting this. The pragmatic test yields _practical_, and not 'absolute,' certainty. The existence of absolute certainty is denied, and the demand for it, in a world which contains only the practical sort, merely plays into the hands of scepticism. The uncertainty of all our verificatory processes, however, is not the creation of the pragmatist, nor is he a god to abolish it. Abstractly, there is always a doubt about what transcends our immediate experience, and this is why it is so healthy to have to repudiate so many theoretic doubts in every act we do. For beliefs have to be acted on, and the results of the action rightly react on the beliefs. The pragmatic test is practically adequate, and is the only one available. That it brings out the risk of action only brings out its superiority to a theory which cannot get started at all until it is supplied with absolute certainty, and meantime can only idly rail at all existing human truths. We have in all this consistently referred the truth of ideas to individual experiences for verification. This evidently makes all truths in some sense dependent upon the personality of those who assert and accept them. Intellectualist logic, on the other hand, has always proclaimed that mental processes, if true, are 'independent' of the idiosyncrasies of particular minds. Ideas have a _fixed_ meaning, and cohere in bodies of 'universal' truth, quite irrespective of whether any particular mind harbours them or not. This is not only a contention fatal to the pragmatic claims, but also bound up with other assumptions of Formal Logic. So it becomes necessary to inquire whether this Logic is a success, and so can coherently abstract from the personality of the knower and the particular situations that incite him to know. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote C: Not even 'I lie,' which is meaningless as it stands, _Cf._ Dr. Schiller's _Formal Logic_, p. 373.]