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PRAGMATISM AND PSEUDO-PEAGMATISM. 381 (5) We come lastly to Prof. Taylor's double criterion of ultimate 'truth and the ' three ' (really two) passages in which his empiricist version thereof is enshrined. The first of these Prof. Taylor holds to be irrelevant because " it would be quite possible to maintain that nothing is real but experience, and yet to hold that this conclusion itself must be based on other than empirical grounds, in fact to be at once an experientialist in one's metaphysic and a rationalist in one's logic," and this is ' in fact his position '. I confess to a gasp. I had not suspected Prof. Taylor of so remarkable an enterprise, especially in a context which seemed to insist only on the priority of immediate psychical experience to thought. And even on reflexion, it strikes one as a singularly infelicitous undertaking. For if the logical grounds of metaphysic are to be rationalistically conceived as "other than empirical," and yet " nothing is real but experience," must not the basis of the system be sought in the unreal? And even if Prof. Taylor does not mean this, but has lapsed into an ambiguous use of the words ' experience ' and ' empirical ' and regards his a priori reasonings as really falling within experience, is he not proposing to make a part of reality the criterion of the whole ? And has he not bound himself to provide an a priori rational deduction of the possibility of all experience ? This is, I believe, what even Hegel is now said to have been unjustly suspected of attempting. Any- how, whether he makes the attempt or not, his doctrine will exemplify one of the most persistent of the failings of intellectual- ism, viz. its tendency to exalt the rational at the expense of every other aspect of reality. The ' second ' passage Prof. Taylor admits looks like empiricism ; but he ' had always vaguely supposed himself to have got it from Aristotle/ and I have 'concealed the all-important point that the trial referred to was purely logical and a priori '. But as before in the case of the postulates, I was concerned with the principle and not with the limitation Prof. Taylor arbitrarily imposed on its use. Once it is admitted as a principle that a claim to truth may be tested by trying how it works when applied, why should its appli- cations be restricted a priori ? Besides to my thinking the dis- tinction between ' a priori ' and ' a posteriori ' is only relative and therefore not here relevant. As for the third passage Prof. Taylor's defence seems to come to a replica of what he said sub (4). For the reasons already stated, it still seems to me to tell distinctly on the empiricist side. Considering Prof. Taylor's explanations as a whole therefore I must repeat that though they are beautifully explicit and psycho- logically quite satisfactory, they are not logically adequate. In other words Prof. Taylor must be acquitted of any intention to be pragmatic, and I must apologise for suspecting him of departing so far from the path of orthodoxy : but I may still hold that he has said things of which the meaning and implications are incon- sistent with his absolutism, and we now have it on his own