[In the following essay, Ayres finds Vaihinger's views to be a valuable supplement to the body of Pragmatist works.]

Truth, we have been told again and again by the philosophers, is the object of all thinking. But is it? Thinking is part of living. It would be strange indeed if the object and the reward of thinking were at odds with the necessities of life. A broader definition must take account of the contribution of thinking to living: the object of thinking is to facilitate living. This does not mean that whatever does so is true; but it may mean that any thinking which safeguards or enhances life is successful thinking, to which questions of truth are quite subordinate.

Indeed, that is precisely the contention of this book. Vaihinger's idea, at bottom as simple as it is startling, is that many of the most prominent and fundamental conceptions of human thought are consciously false. As conceptions they have a meaning and a value; but the things they represent do not exist. Nobody supposes that they exist. They are deliberate fabrications which men employ to facilitate their other dealings with actual reality. Vaihinger does not mean hypotheses. Neither does he mean myths. He means acknowledged falsehood. When he insists that far off, divine events are fictions in the minds of thinking people he intends to say not that they are guesses at what may be true, nor that they are legends of dubious though perhaps convincing authenticity, but that they are not true at all even in the minds that hold them. They are consciously imaginative constructs in a region of speculation that is known to be beyond the power of the intellect to establish any sort of truth. The hypothesis is a picture, formulated upon scanty data, perhaps, by constructive imagination, yet intended as the closest approximation of actuality that is possible under the circumstances. If it proves out, it will take its place among the "facts" as a true picture of genuine reality. A myth is a traditional account of certain events no longer subject to verification. But here again its character is determined by the fact that some people take it to be factually true. Fiction, the "als ob," is quite different. It is not a guess at the unknown. The thinker who employs it has no expectation of bringing it to verification. On the contrary, he intends it as an artifice, an intellectual scaffolding that will never solidify into masonry however invaluable it may be in all the building operations that go on in its vicinity.

The fictions which Vaihinger is aiming at are, of course, the sublime make-believes of religion and philosophy. Those matters of faith, about which human thinking has always turned as upon an axis, are myths in the minds of many people. For some they may even seem to be hypotheses. But their most persistent definition has been in terms of faith. Now faith, the belief in things "which you know ain't so," is precisely the artifice of "als ob." It is not a picture of the actual; it is a representation of the necessary. Logically, this discrimination is very simple. Any irrational number illustrates it perfectly. Thus a moment's reflection will reveal to anyone that the number zero (let alone infinity, or the square root of minus one) is a different sort of figure from three or quintillian. Those numbers can be reached by counting physical objects. Not so zero; it appears only through calculation, and there as an artificial entity, like the body of a corporation. For that purpose its meaning is clear; yet as a designation applying to actual objects it must always remain hopelessly absurd. "The milkmaid whistled as she milked her zero cows!" The very absence from the language of the ordinal corresponding to zero (as, third, second, first, "zeroth") shows that our habits, more discriminating than intelligence, have recognized it as a mathematical "as if."

This may seem, for an instant, an undignified interpretation of the highest attainments of the human spirit. But the theory of fiction is as serious as the conceptions with which it deals, and those are, primarily, the "ultimate realities" which mark the furthest excursions of the mind into me region beyond the finite world of material events. The dogmas of the faithful are many and various. Throughout all the flux of human civilization a constant succession of Ultimates has moved unbroken, each claiming to be the final truth and none substantiating the claim except by the internal evidence each, presumably, contains of its own superior reasonableness or authenticity. To this panorama of ultimate realities Vaihinger would apply the philosophy of "als ob" like a chemical resolvent. The reaction is immediate. Any theory of meta-physical (or theological) ultimates proves out at once as a "fictional construct." Among the unenlightened matters of faith may become confused with matters of fact. Vaihinger calls particular attention to the historical metamorphosis that overtakes any philosophy when it becomes widely diffused. Beginning as an intellectual artifice of the enlightened it gradually becomes a legend among illiterates. To the poet the gods are an aid to poesy; to the vulgar they are matters of fact just beyond the reach of immediate verification but no different in essence from any clod.

The theory of the "as if" is exciting enough in itself. But its close resemblance to certain other notions that have been reshaping contemporary thought makes it doubly interesting. This connection between fiction and mythology suggests one affinity. Another one is the unconscious make-believe that psycho-analysis has revealed. The conscious fiction which Vaihinger proposes looks like a new member of a familiar family.

Indeed, we are not wholly unacquainted with it in its own proper garb. The "als ob" is a special case of a general logical theory better known in the United States than in Germany, the "instrumental logic" of the pragmatists. Vaihinger has worked out a special interpretation of the more than rational constructions in which philosophy and theology abound; pragmatism has developed a complete account of the thinking process and a general conception of truth in which the "als ob" takes its place. Says Vaihinger, conscious fiction is not factually true, though it is valuable and significant in human life. Says pragmatism, no truth is true except in relation to the part it plays in human life. Vaihinger has made a most penetrating discrimination between factual truth and, to supply a term, inspirational truth. James and Dewey have exhibited truth not in two colors but in all the shades of the spectrum. The value of Vaihinger's work lies in its significance as supplementary to these other studies in the fictions by which men live. Its chief deficiency is that it has not recognized relationship.