Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness, into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in a later chapter[148] to this idea of truth as a construction of the mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the correspondence notion. (2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already “fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and “modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.[149] Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate” or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”[150] And it is perhaps this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s[151] book upon Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious as a method.”[152]