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- P r a g m a t i s m ,
A N e w N a m e f o r S o m e
O l d W a y s o f T h i n k i n g
L e c t u r e V
P r a g m a t i s m a n d
C o m m o n S e n s e
- _____________________________________________
- In the last lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the
universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study
of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds. We found many of these
to coexist with kinds of separation equally real. "How far am I verified?" is
the question which each kind of union and each kind of separation asks us here,
so as good pragmatists we have to turn our face towards experience, towards
'facts.'
Absolute oneness remains, but only as an hypothesis, and that hypothesis is
reduced nowadays to that of an omniscient knower who sees all things without
exception as forming one single systematic fact. But the knower in question may
still be conceived either as an Absolute or as an Ultimate; and over against the
hypothesis of him in either form the counter-hypothesis that the widest field of
knowledge that ever was or will be still contains some ignorance, may be
legitimately held. Some bits of information always may escape.
This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so absurd.
Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism, until the facts
shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism, tho originally nothing
but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view. It MAY be
that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as
to be strung along by nothing but the copula AND. They might even come and go
without those other parts suffering any internal change. This pluralistic view,
of a world of ADDITIVE constitution, is one that pragmatism is unable to rule
out from serious consideration. But this view leads one to the farther
hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete 'eternally,' as the
monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to
addition or liable to loss.
It IS at any rate incomplete in one respect, and flagrantly so. The very fact
that we debate this question shows that our KNOWLEDGE is incomplete at present
and subject to addition. In respect of the knowledge it contains the world does
genuinely change and grow. Some general remarks on the way in which our
knowledge completes itself - when it does complete itself - will lead us very
conveniently into our subject for this lecture, which is 'Common Sense.'
To begin with, our knowledge grows IN SPOTS. The spots may be large or small,
but the knowledge never grows all over: some old knowledge always remains what
it was. Your knowledge of pragmatism, let us suppose, is growing now. Later, its
growth may involve considerable modification of opinions which you previously
held to be true. But such modifications are apt to be gradual. To take the
nearest possible example, consider these lectures of mine. What you first gain
from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions,
or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being
added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you
'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and
modify to some slight degree their mass.
You listen to me now, I suppose, with certain prepossessions as to my
competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I suddenly
to break off lecturing, and to begin to sing 'We won't go home till morning' in
a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock, but
it would oblige you to define me differently, and that might alter your opinion
of the pragmatic philosophy, and in general bring about a rearrangement of a
number of your ideas. Your mind in such processes is strained, and sometimes
painfully so, between its older beliefs and the novelties which experience
brings along.
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we
let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old
knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and
tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but
it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co-operates; and
in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning
terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More
usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of
the old.
New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined
and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of
opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all
times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through
all the later changes in men's opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may
not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our
rudimentary caudal appendage, or our other 'vestigial' peculiarities, they may
remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at
certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably
not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance
continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the
key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the
first architect persists - you can make great changes, but you cannot change a
Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you
can't get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly
out.
My thesis now is this, that OUR FUNDAMENTAL WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS ARE
DISCOVERIES OF EXCEEDINGLY REMOTE ANCESTORS, WHICH HAVE BEEN ABLE TO PRESERVE
THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF ALL SUBSEQUENT TIME. They form one great
stage of equilibrium in the human mind's development, the stage of common sense.
Other stages have grafted themselves upon this stage, but have never succeeded
in displacing it. Let us consider this common-sense stage first, as if it might
be final.
In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom
from excentricity, his GUMPTION, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it
means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual
forms or categories of thought. Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our
organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of
apprehending our experiences. It MIGHT be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this)
that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole
as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually
use.
If this sounds paradoxical to anyone, let him think of analytical geometry.
The identical figures which Euclid defined by intrinsic relations were defined
by Descartes by the relations of their points to adventitious co-ordinates, the
result being an absolutely different and vastly more potent way of handling
curves. All our conceptions are what the Germans call denkmittel, means by which
we handle facts by thinking them. Experience merely as such doesn't come
ticketed and labeled, we have first to discover what it is. Kant speaks of it as
being in its first intention a gewuehl der erscheinungen, a rhapsodie der
wahrnehmungen, a mere motley which we have to unify by our wits. What we usually
do is first to frame some system of concepts mentally classified, serialized, or
connected in some intellectual way, and then to use this as a tally by which we
'keep tab' on the impressions that present themselves. When each is referred to
some possible place in the conceptual system, it is thereby 'understood.' This
notion of parallel 'manifolds' with their elements standing reciprocally in
'one-to-one relations,' is proving so convenient nowadays in mathematics and
logic as to supersede more and more the older classificatory conceptions. There
are many conceptual systems of this sort; and the sense manifold is also such a
system. Find a one-to-one relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the
concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you
can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.
The old common-sense way of rationalizing them is by a set of concepts of
which the most important are these:
Thing;
The same or different;
Kinds;
Minds;
Bodies;
One Time;
One Space;
Subjects and attributes;
Causal influences;
The fancied;
The real.
We are now so familiar with the order that these notions have woven for us
out of the everlasting weather of our perceptions that we find it hard to
realize how little of a fixed routine the perceptions follow when taken by
themselves. The word weather is a good one to use here. In Boston, for example,
the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any
weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather
on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous
and chaotic. In point of temperature, of wind, rain or sunshine, it MAY change
three times a day. But the Washington weather-bureau intellectualizes this
disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it
to its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the
local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take
all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather.
They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of permanent
subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or
things, than our common people know of continental cyclones. A baby's rattle
drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out' for him,
as a candle-flame goes out; and it comes back, when you replace it in his hand,
as the flame comes back when relit. The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose
permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive
apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs. Out of
sight, out of mind, with them. It is pretty evident that they have no GENERAL
tendency to interpolate 'things.' Let me quote here a passage from my colleague
G. Santayana's book.
"If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master
arriving after long absence...the poor brute asks for no reason why his master
went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while
lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase - all
that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety,
scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic
verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act
unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together:
you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not
distinguishable from your own life. ...[But] the figures even of that disordered
drama have their exits and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually
discovered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of
events. ...In proportion as such understanding advances each moment of
experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in
life are filled with power and its spasms with resource. No emotion can
overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event
can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to
escape from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly
filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes
room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the
whole." 1)
Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to part
fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive times they made only
the most incipient distinctions in this line. Men believed whatever they thought
with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities
inextricably. The categories of 'thought' and 'things' are indispensable
here - instead of being realities we now call certain experiences only 'thoughts.'
There is not a category, among those enumerated, of which we may not imagine the
use to have thus originated historically and only gradually spread.
That one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its
definite date, that one Space in which each thing has its position, these
abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as
concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space
experiences of natural men! Everything that happens to us brings its own
duration and extension, and both are vaguely surrounded by a marginal 'more'
that runs into the duration and extension of the next thing that comes. But we
soon lose all our definite bearings; and not only do our children make no
distinction between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the whole past being
churned up together, but we adults still do so whenever the times are large. It
is the same with spaces. On a map I can distinctly see the relation of London,
Constantinople, and Pekin to the place where I am; in reality I utterly fail to
FEEL the facts which the map symbolizes. The directions and distances are vague,
confused and mixed. Cosmic space and cosmic time, so far from being the
intuitions that Kant said they were, are constructions as patently artificial as
any that science can show. The great majority of the human race never use these
notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and
DURCHEINANDER.
Permanent 'things' again; the 'same' thing and its various 'appearances' and
'alterations'; the different 'kinds' of thing; with the 'kind' used finally as a
'predicate,' of which the thing remains the 'subject' - what a straightening of
the tangle of our experience's immediate flux and sensible variety does this
list of terms suggest! And it is only the smallest part of his experience's flux
that anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual
instruments. Out of them all our lowest ancestors probably used only, and then
most vaguely and inaccurately, the notion of 'the same again.' But even then if
you had asked them whether the same were a 'thing' that had endured throughout
the unseen interval, they would probably have been at a loss, and would have
said that they had never asked that question, or considered matters in that
light.
Kinds, and sameness of kind - what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for finding our
way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have been absolute.
Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them occurring twice. In
such a world logic would have had no application; for kind and sameness of kind
are logic's only instruments. Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of
that kind's kind, we can travel through the universe as if with seven-league
boots. Brutes surely never use these abstractions, and civilized men use them in
most various amounts.
Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost
everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for
the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or
what, is to blame?" - for any illness, namely, or disaster, or untoward thing.
From this centre the search for causal influences has spread. Hume and 'Science'
together have tried to eliminate the whole notion of influence, substituting the
entirely different DENKMITTEL of 'law.' But law is a comparatively recent
invention, and influence reigns supreme in the older realm of common sense.
The 'possible,' as something less than the actual and more than the wholly
unreal, is another of these magisterial notions of common sense. Criticize them
as you may, they persist; and we fly back to them the moment critical pressure
is relaxed. 'Self,' 'body,' in the substantial or metaphysical sense - no one
escapes subjection to THOSE forms of thought. In practice, the common-sense
DENKMITTEL are uniformly victorious. Everyone, however instructed, still thinks
of a 'thing' in the common-sense way, as a permanent unit-subject that
'supports' its attributes interchangeably. No one stably or sincerely uses the
more critical notion, of a group of sense-qualities united by a law. With these
categories in our hand, we make our plans and plot together, and connect all the
remoter parts of experience with what lies before our eyes. Our later and more
critical philosophies are mere fads and fancies compared with this natural
mother-tongue of thought.
Common sense appears thus as a perfectly definite stage in our understanding
of things, a stage that satisfies in an extraordinarily successful way the
purposes for which we think. 'Things' do exist, even when we do not see them.
Their 'kinds' also exist. Their 'qualities' are what they act by, and are what
we act on; and these also exist. These lamps shed their quality of light on
every object in this room. We intercept IT on its way whenever we hold up an
opaque screen. It is the very sound that my lips emit that travels into your
ears. It is the sensible heat of the fire that migrates into the water in which
we boil an egg; and we can change the heat into coolness by dropping in a lump
of ice. At this stage of philosophy all non-European men without exception have
remained. It suffices for all the necessary practical ends of life; and, among
our own race even, it is only the highly sophisticated specimens, the minds
debauched by learning, as Berkeley calls them, who have ever even suspected
common sense of not being absolutely true.
But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories
may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not
have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to
Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin, achieved their similar triumphs in more recent
times. In other words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric
geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been
verified by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then
from fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all language
rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other
terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so
fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation
that we can observe at work in the small and near.
For all utilitarian practical purposes these conceptions amply suffice; but
that they began at special points of discovery and only gradually spread from
one thing to another, seems proved by the exceedingly dubious limits of their
application to-day. We assume for certain purposes one 'objective' Time that
AEQUABILITER FLUIT, but we don't livingly believe in or realize any such
equally-flowing time. 'Space' is a less vague notion; but 'things,' what are
they? Is a constellation properly a thing? or an army? or is an ENS RATIONIS
such as space or justice a thing? Is a knife whose handle and blade are changed
the 'same'? Is the 'changeling,' whom Locke so seriously discusses, of the human
'kind'? Is 'telepathy' a 'fancy' or a 'fact'? The moment you pass beyond the
practical use of these categories (a use usually suggested sufficiently by the
circumstances of the special case) to a merely curious or speculative way of
thinking, you find it impossible to say within just what limits of fact any one
of them shall apply.
The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has tried to
eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them very technically and
articulately. A 'thing' for instance is a being, or ENS. An ENS is a subject in
which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a substance. Substances are of kinds, and
kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental
and eternal. As terms of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently useful, but
what they mean, apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable
issues, does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance
may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he simply says
that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means.
But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering
function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI, intellects only
curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense level for what in general terms
may be called the 'critical' level of thought. Not merely SUCH intellects
either - your Humes and Berkeleys and Hegels; but practical observers of facts,
your Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have found it impossible to treat the NAIFS
sense-termini of common sense as ultimately real. As common sense interpolates
her constant 'things' between our intermittent sensations, so science
EXTRApolates her world of 'primary' qualities, her atoms, her ether, her
magnetic fields, and the like, beyond the common-sense world. The 'things' are
now invisible impalpable things; and the old visible common-sense things are
supposed to result from the mixture of these invisibles. Or else the whole NAIF
conception of thing gets superseded, and a thing's name is interpreted as
denoting only the law or REGEL DER VERBINDUNG by which certain of our sensations
habitually succeed or coexist.
Science and critical philosophy thus burst the bounds of common sense. With
science NAIF realism ceases: 'Secondary' qualities become unreal; primary ones
alone remain. With critical philosophy, havoc is made of everything. The
common-sense categories one and all cease to represent anything in the way of
BEING; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping
bewilderment in the midst of sensation's irremediable flow.
But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by
purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of
practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate clocks and
accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new medicines and
dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with
Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that such men have invented, defined
as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in
consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce from them a consequence
due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and
presto, the consequence is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical
control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly
exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of
increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that
the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an
organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly
tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will
more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a
bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.
The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its negations than
the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of practical power. Locke,
Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, have all been utterly sterile, so far as shedding
any light on the details of nature goes, and I can think of no invention or
discovery that can be directly traced to anything in their peculiar thought, for
neither with Berkeley's tar-water nor with Kant's nebular hypothesis had their
respective philosophic tenets anything to do. The satisfactions they yield to
their disciples are intellectual, not practical; and even then we have to
confess that there is a large minus-side to the account.
There are thus at least three well-characterized levels, stages or types of
thought about the world we live in, and the notions of one stage have one kind
of merit, those of another stage another kind. It is impossible, however, to say
that any stage as yet in sight is absolutely more TRUE than any other. Common
sense is the more CONSOLIDATED stage, because it got its innings first, and made
all language into its ally. Whether it or science be the more AUGUST stage may
be left to private judgment. But neither consolidation nor augustness are
decisive marks of truth. If common sense were true, why should science have had
to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living
interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and
mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes
and activities into laws of 'functional variation'? Vainly did scholasticism,
common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the
human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for
eternity. Substantial forms (in other words our secondary qualities) hardly
outlasted the year of our Lord 1600. People were already tired of them then; and
Galileo, and Descartes, with his 'new philosophy,' gave them only a little later
their coup de grace.
But now if the new kinds of scientific 'thing,' the corpuscular and etheric
world, were essentially more 'true,' why should they have excited so much
criticism within the body of science itself? Scientific logicians are saying on
every hand that these entities and their determinations, however definitely
conceived, should not be held for literally real. It is AS IF they existed; but
in reality they are like co-ordinates or logarithms, only artificial short-cuts
for taking us from one part to another of experience's flux. We can cipher
fruitfully with them; they serve us wonderfully; but we must not be their
dupes.
There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of
thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their
naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice, all
start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused.
Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic
criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only
knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious
reversion to the common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the
philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According
to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a
more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to
be compared solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true
thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible
reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass. 'Energy' is the
collective name (according to Ostwald) for the sensations just as they present
themselves (the movement, heat, magnetic pull, or light, or whatever it may be)
when they are measured in certain ways. So measuring them, we are enabled to
describe the correlated changes which they show us, in formulas matchless for
their simplicity and fruitfulness for human use. They are sovereign triumphs of
economy in thought.
No one can fail to admire the 'energetic' philosophy. But the hypersensible
entities, the corpuscles and vibrations, hold their own with most physicists and
chemists, in spite of its appeal. It seems too economical to be all-sufficient.
Profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's key-note.
I am dealing here with highly technical matters, hardly suitable for popular
lecturing, and in which my own competence is small. All the better for my
conclusion, however, which at this point is this. The whole notion of truth,
which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the simple duplication
by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand
clearly. There is no simple test available for adjudicating offhand between the
divers types of thought that claim to possess it. Common sense, common science
or corpuscular philosophy, ultra-critical science, or energetics, and critical
or idealistic philosophy, all seem insufficiently true in some regard and leave
some dissatisfaction. It is evident that the conflict of these so widely
differing systems obliges us to overhaul the very idea of truth, for at present
we have no definite notion of what the word may mean. I shall face that task in
my next lecture, and will add but a few words, in finishing the present one.
There are only two points that I wish you to retain from the present lecture.
The first one relates to common sense. We have seen reason to suspect it, to
suspect that in spite of their being so venerable, of their being so universally
used and built into the very structure of language, its categories may after all
be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses (historically
discovered or invented by single men, but gradually communicated, and used by
everybody) by which our forefathers have from time immemorial unified and
straightened the discontinuity of their immediate experiences, and put
themselves into an equilibrium with the surface of nature so satisfactory for
ordinary practical purposes that it certainly would have lasted forever, but for
the excessive intellectual vivacity of Democritus, Archimedes, Galileo,
Berkeley, and other excentric geniuses whom the example of such men inflamed.
Retain, I pray you, this suspicion about common sense.
The other point is this. Ought not the existence of the various types of
thinking which we have reviewed, each so splendid for certain purposes, yet all
conflicting still, and neither one of them able to support a claim of absolute
veracity, to awaken a presumption favorable to the pragmatistic view that all
our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather
than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma? I
expressed this view as clearly as I could in the second of these lectures.
Certainly the restlessness of the actual theoretic situation, the value for some
purposes of each thought-level, and the inability of either to expel the others
decisively, suggest this pragmatistic view, which I hope that the next lectures
may soon make entirely convincing. May there not after all be a possible
ambiguity in truth?
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1)
The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.
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