[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a suggestive and ingenious book (_The New Word_, by Mr. Allen Upward) lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the meaning of truth, “_firm, established, certain, honest, faithful_,” connecting it with A.S. _tréou_, _tryw_ (“preservation of a compact”), Teut. _trewa_, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., _satyas_ (_verus_), O. Nor. _Sannr_, A.S. _sóth_ (sooth).” All this seems to justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action of a living being in the moment of his action--the _Microcosmos_ as quoted in Eisler, article “_Wahrheit_” in the _Wörterbuch_. The Truth for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal “whole” of truth. [282] As in the Hegelian dialectic. [283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences” and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in the _Revue Philosophique_ (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,” pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought. Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras--that man is the measure of reality--for man. [284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian” rationalist. [285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include “inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it is idle thought.