A fair illustration of his meaning here would be his own characteristic attitude, so far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, to the so-called “theistic” proofs that have been part of the stock in trade of rational theology. A “necessary being” and a “whole of truth” and the “Absolute”[4] are not, he would hold, what the average man understands by God; they have hardly any perceptible effect upon life and conduct--the all-important matter in the thought of God as he conceives it. Only those notions, he would have it, which can be interpreted by the thought of the “difference” they make to our practical conduct are real notions at all--“Providence,” say, or “God” as the guarantor of the reality and the permanence of the moral order, and so on. The “soul,” again, he would hold, “is good for just so much and no more.” And a similar thing, too, would be true about Berkeley’s “matter,” or about the “matter” of the materialists.[5] This latter, for instance, cannot possibly do all it is claimed to be able to do in the way of an explanation of the order of the world and the phenomena of life. Then again, James has written a great many pages upon the so-called deeper view of human nature (as inclusive of will and “emotion” in addition to mere thought) taken by Pragmatism in comparison with that entertained by Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return to this point. He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair interpretation of Pragmatism to take it as a plea for believing what you like, as was said above. Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the “parts with the parts,” and the “parts with the whole.” Beliefs must not clash with other beliefs, the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion of the sensible order and that of the ideal order. By “consequences,” too, he contends we may mean intellectual or theoretical consequences as well as practical consequences. He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, raised the question of the nature of Truth, attaining to such important results as the following: (1) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-made truth; (2) the “copy-theory” of truth is unintelligible.[6] We shall later be obliged to examine the more controversial positions that (3) truth is not an end in itself, but a means towards vital satisfaction; (4) truth is the “expedient” in the way of thinking, as the right is the expedient[7] in the way of acting, and so on.