Note 212 — Chapter V · SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

I have not taken into account the argument from origins, because it does not appear relevant. That our intellectual interest in “truth” is historically a derivative from an interest in the “useful,” “science” an offshoot of the arts, is, as we have seen for ourselves, true enough, but it does not follow that the truth which is the ideal of the developed intellect is the same thing as the “useful” from which it has arisen. We rejected the claims of the mechanical postulate to be final truth, not because of their origin in the needs of industrial science, but because, as tested by the standard of final self-consistency, they were unsatisfactory to the intellect.