Another typical book of to-day, again (that of Professor Duncan on the _New Knowledge_ of the new physical science), definitely gives up, for example, the “correspondence”[222] notion of truth, holding that it is meaningless to think of reality as something outside our thought and our experience of which our ideas might be a possible duplicate. This again we readily recognize as an essentially pragmatist contention. So also is the same writer’s rejection of the notion of “absolute truth,”[223] and his confession of the “faith” that is always involved in the thought of completeness or system in our scientific knowledge. “We believe purely as an act of faith and not at all of logic,” he says, “that the universe is essentially determinable thousands of years hence, into some one system which will account for everything and which will be the truth.”[224] Nor would it be at all difficult to find confirmation for the pragmatist philosophy of ideas and thoughts in what we may well think of as the general reflective literature of our time, outside the sphere, as it were, of strictly rational or academic philosophy--in writers like F. D. Maurice, W. Pater, A. W. Benn (who otherwise depreciates what he calls “_ophelism_”), J. H. Newman, Karl Pearson, Carlyle, and others.[225] Take the following, for example, quoted with approval from Herschel by Karl Pearson: “The grand and indeed the only character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion.”[226] The idea again, for example, recently expressed in a public article by such a widely read and cleverly perverse writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw,[227] that “the will that moves us is dogmatic: our brain is only the very imperfect instrument by which we devise practical means for satisfying the will,” might only too naturally be associated with the pragmatist-like anti-intellectualism[228] of Bergson, or, for that part of it, with the deeper “voluntarism” of Schopenhauer. The following quotation taken from Mr. Pater reveals how great may be correspondence between the independent findings of a finely sensitive mind like his, and the positions to which the pragmatists are inclined in respect of the psychology of religious belief. “The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matter of very much the same sort of assent as we give to any assumption in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether these facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of those _natural_ questions of the human mind.”[229] Readers of Carlyle will easily recognize what we might call a more generalized statement of this same truth of Pater’s in the often-quoted words from _Heroes and Hero-Worship_:[230] “By religion I do not mean the church creed which a man professes, the articles of faith which.... But the