The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter of the systematization of first principles,[242] and little too that is satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing situation.” Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation. In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge--a thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles generally. There is a suggestion here and there in their writings that, as Schiller[243] puts it, there can be no coherent system of postulates except as rooted in personality, and that there are postulates at every stage of our development. What this statement means is that there are “points of view” about reality that are incidental to the stage of our natural life (as beings among other beings), others to the stage of conscious sensations and feelings, still others to that of our desires and thoughts, to our aesthetic appreciation, to our moral life, and so on. But, as I have already said, there is little attempt on the part of the pragmatists to distinguish these different stages or planes of experience adequately from one another.