The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that all truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human attitudes and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or “independent” truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it were, before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths were once “plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth is “made” just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on. Insistence, we might say, upon this one note, along with the entire line of reflection that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds us, the main burden of James’s book upon _Pragmatism_. Equally characteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to his doctrine of the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed distinction,” he tells us, “between the empirical values of the unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought.” And to Schiller, again, this same thought is the beginning of everything in philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of this doctrine of the “formation” of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do at least two things that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing: (1) distinguish adequately “truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish adequately truth from error. Whether these two things be, or be not, the consequences of the doctrine in question [and we shall return[110] to the point] we may perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious with the teaching of psychology about the nature of our ideas as mental habits, or about thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity. It is in harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be truth that some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for some reasons or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying their search and their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must remain such in spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there may be in the idea of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression men understand, it would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or facts of which we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then there can have been no time in which God can be imagined to have been ignorant of these or any other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth as opposed to falsehood. And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being “made” truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato[111] spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.[112]