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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

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those ideas which are useful, and, as the result of a process
of natural selection among the psychological processes,
the useful ones become fixed and form in their totality
the true picture of actuality. We have in fact no other
definite criterion for the truth of an idea than that an action
 based on it gives the desired result.
If through the process of selection mentioned above a
certain number of ideas have become permanently fixed because
 they are permanently useful, they build a realm of
theory. A new idea can then be judged according to internal
 criteria as belonging to it or as being contradictory
to it. Since the norms and facts once fixed become the
proofs of others, the single elements of knowledge can mutually
 support and carry each other. But the whole of a
body of knowledge has a validity only in relation to definite
 psycho-physical structures, their conditions of life, and
the requirements of their activities.
Relativism renounces all dogmatic pretension that the
highest abstraction, simplification, or synthesis can close
knowledge. There is no finite system of knowledge, there
is only an infinite process of knowing. For the contention
that things are thus and so related, it substitutes: It is
for our reasoning a practical necessity to act as if things
were thus and so related.!
From this relativistic character of our knowledge it
follows that the objective validity of a hypothesis is not
finally determined merely by its logical coherence within a
system of thought (philosophy), but that a new determination
 is required through a relation with the external world
(science), and vice versa. This mutual dependence of the
two directions of thought is visible in the most general and
in the most specific problems. Should each of the two
methods become dogmatically fixed and claim for itself
1 Phil, des Geldes, pp. 68-73.

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