[112] This is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem of the supposed pre-knowledge of God. Bradley deals with it in the _Mind_ (July 1911) article upon “Some Aspects of Truth.” His solution (as Professor Dawes Hicks notices in the _Hibbert Journal_, January 1912) is the familiar Neo-Hegelian finding, that as a “particular judgment” with a “unique context” my truth is “new,” but “as an element in an eternal reality” it was “waiting for me.” Readers of Green’s _Prolegomena_ are quite ready for this finding. Pragmatists, of course, while insisting on the man-made character of truth, have not as yet come in sight of the difficulties of the divine foreknowledge--in relation to the free purposes and the free discoveries of mortals. [113] There is, it seems to me, a suggestion of this rationalist position in the fact, for example, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent booklet upon _The Problems of Philosophy_ with the following inquiry about knowledge: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” I mean that the initial and paramount importance attached here to this question conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his prevailingly rationalistic and impersonal conception of knowledge and philosophy. [114] In his sympathetic and characteristic review of James’s “Pragmatism” in the _Journ. of Philos._, 1908. [115] See p. 203 (the _note_), and p. 263, where I suggest that no philosophy can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without assumptions of one kind or another. [116] See p. 162. [117] In this attitude Pragmatism is manifestly in a state of rebellion against “Platonism,” if we allow ourselves to think of Pragmatism as capable of confronting Plato. Plato, as we know, definitely subordinates “belief” to “knowledge” and “truth.” “As being is to becoming,” he says, “so is truth to belief” (_Timaeus_, Jowett’s translation). To Plato belief is a conjectural, or imaginative, estimate of reality; it deals rather with “appearance” or “becoming” than with “reality.” “True being” he thinks of as revealed in the Ideas, or the rational entities that are his development and transformation of the “definition” of Socrates. Against all this rationalism Pragmatism (it is enough meantime merely to indicate the fact) would have us return to the common-sense, or the religious, position that it is invariably what we believe in that determines our notion of reality.