The main interest, however, of pragmatists in their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the truism that all truth is made truth is their hostility (Locke had it in his day) to the supposed rationalist position that there is an “_a priori_” and “objective” truth independent altogether of human activities and human purposes.[113] The particular object of their aversion is what Dewey[114] talks of as “that dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in speaking and writing as if certain ultimate abstractions or concepts could be more real than human purposes and human beings, and as if there could be any contradiction between truth and purpose.” As we shall reflect at a later stage[115] upon the rationalist theory of truth, we may, meantime, pass over this hostility with the remark that it is, after all, only owing to certain peculiar circumstances (those, say, of its conflict with religion and science and custom) in the development of philosophy that its first principles have been regarded by its votaries as the most real of all realities. These devotees tend to forget in their zeal that the pragmatist way of looking upon all supposed first principles--that of the consideration of their utility in and necessity as explanations of our common experience and its realities--is the only way of explaining their reality, even as conceptions. It requires to be added--so much may, indeed, have already been inferred from the preceding chapter--that, apart from their hint about the highest truth being necessarily inclusive of the highest human purposes, it is by no means easy to find out from the pragmatists what they mean by truth, or how they would define it. When the matter is pressed home, they generally confess that their attitude is in the main “psychological” rather than philosophical, that it is the “making” of truth rather than its “nature” or its “contents” or its systematic character that interests them. It is the “dynamical” point of view, as they put it, that is essential to them. And out of the sphere and the associations of this contention they do not really travel. They will tell you what it means to hit upon this particular way of looking upon truth, and how stimulating it is to attempt to do so. And they will give you many more or less artificial and tentative, external, descriptions of their philosophy by saying that ideas are “made for man,” and “not man for ideas,” and so on. But, although they deny both the common-sense view that truth is a “correspondence” with external reality, and the rationalist view that truth is a “coherent system” on its own account, they never define truth any more than do their opponents the rationalists. It is a “commerce” and not a “correspondence,” they contend, a commerce[116] between certain parts of our experience and certain other parts, or a commerce between our ideas and our purposes, but not a commerce with reality, for the