The contrary opinion has been maintained by idealists and a certain election agent with whom I once had to deal and who remarked that something slipped his mind and then went out of his head altogether. At some period, then, a remembrance was in his head and out of his mind; his mind was not, then, wholly within his head. Also, one is sometimes assured that with certain people "out of sight is out of mind." What is in their minds is therefore in sight, and cannot therefore be inside their heads. CHAPTER XIV THE PRAGMATIST THEORY OF TRUTH The pragmatist theory that "truth" is a belief which works well sometimes conflicts with common-sense and not with logic. It is commonly supposed that it is always better to be sometimes right than to be never right. But this is by no means true. For example, consider the case of a watch which has stopped; it is exactly right twice every day. A watch, on the other hand, which is always five minutes slow is never exactly right. And yet there can be no question but that a belief in the accuracy of the watch which was never right would, on the whole, produce better results than such a belief in the one which had altogether stopped. The pragmatist would, then, conclude that the watch which was always inaccurate gave truer results than the one which was sometimes accurate. In this conclusion the pragmatist would seem to be correct, and this is an instance of how the false premisses of pragmatism may give rise to true conclusions. From the text written above the church clock in a certain English village, "Be ye ready, for ye know not the time," it would be concluded that the clock never stopped for a period as long as twelve hours. For the text is rather a vague symbolical expression of a propositional function which is asserted to be true at all instants. The proposition that a presumably not illiterate and credulous observer of the clock at any definite instant does not know the time implies, then, that the clock is always wrong. Now, if the clock stopped for twelve hours, it would be absolutely right at least once. It must be right twice if it were right at the first instant it stopped or the last instant at which it went;[42] but the second possibility is excluded by hypothesis, and the occurrence of the first possibility--or of the analogous possibility of the stopped clock being right three times in twenty-four hours--does not affect the present question. Hence the clock can never stop for twelve hours. The pragmatist's criterion of truth appears to be far more difficult to apply than the Bellman's,[43] that what he said three times is true, and to give results just as insecure. FOOTNOTES: [42] Both cases cannot occur; the question is similar to that arising in the discussion of the mortality of Socrates (see Chapter XXII). [43] See Appendix K. CHAPTER XV ASSERTION