Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is so far simply another version of modern agnosticism, or of the older doctrine of the “relativity” of human knowledge. There is a great difference, however, between these two things and Pragmatism. A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to maintain---if it could do so logically---that in human volition, we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the “developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes” and in our ideals, and not something different from this. The main reason, however, of the inability of Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this connexion is what we have already complained of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the help that could be afforded to it by (1) Idealism, and by (2) the “normative”[251] view of ethical science. In respect of the first point, we have already suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is inclined in various ways to make much of its “radical empiricism,” its contention that reality must, to begin with, be construed to be what it seems to be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual experience of it.[252] To the biologist, as we put it in our fourth chapter, reality is life; to the physicist it is energy; to the theologian it is the unfolding of the dealings of God with His creatures; to the sociologist it is the sphere of the evolution of the social life of humanity; to the lover of truth it is a “partly intelligible system.” The only rational basis, however, for all this constructive interpretation of reality is the familiar idealist position of the necessary implication of the “subject” in the “object,” the fact that “things” or “existences” are invariably thought of as the elements or component parts in some working system or sphere of reality that is contemplated by some being or beings in reference to some purpose or end. On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon each other. And on this construction of things the susceptibility of everything to the influence of everything else is no less certainly assumed than in the case of the world of life itself. But, as the idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility of separating, either in thought or experimentally, this supposed physical world from the so-called experiences and relations and laws through which it is interpreted and described, even as a world of objects or of forces. This is what Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that “thought” and “being” are the same thing,