standard--consistency--is final within theory, the more germane and the more urgent is the question: What then in the concrete is theory?
and of what nature _is_ the material consistency which is the test of its formal consistency?[23] Take the instance of a man who wishes to deny the criterion of self-consistency in thinking. Is he refuted by pointing to the “fact” that eternal reality is eternally self-consistent? Would not his obvious answer to such a mode of refutation be: “What of it? What is the relevancy of that proposition to my procedure in thinking here and now? Doubtless absolute reality may be a great number of things, possibly very sublime and precious things; but what I am concerned with is a particular job of thinking, and until you show me the intermediate terms which link that job to the asserted self-consistent character of absolute reality, I fail to see what difference this doubtless wholly amiable trait of reality has to make in what I am here and now concerned with. You might as well quote any other irrelevant fact, such as the height of the Empress of China.” We take another tack in dealing with the man in question. We call his attention to his specific aim in the situation with reference to which he is thinking, and point out the conditions that have to be observed if that aim is to fulfil itself. We show that if he does not observe the conditions imposed by his aim his thinking will go on so wildly as to defeat itself. It is to consistency of means with the end of the concrete activity that we appeal. “Try thinking,” we tell such a man, “experiment with it, taking pains sometimes to have your reasonings consistent with one another, and at other times deliberately introducing inconsistencies; then see what you get in the two cases and how the result reached is related to your purpose in thinking.” We point out that since that purpose is to reach a settled conclusion, that purpose will be defeated unless the steps of reasoning are kept consistent with one another. We do not appeal from the mere consistency of the reasoning process--the intellectual aspect of the matter--to an absolute self-consistent reality; but we appeal from the material character of the end to be reached to the type of the formal procedure necessary to accomplish it.
With all our heart, then, the standard of thinking is absolute (that is final) within thinking. But what is thinking? The standard of blacksmithing must be absolute within blacksmithing, but what is blacksmithing? No prejudice prevents acknowledging that blacksmithing is one practical activity existing as a distinct and relevant member of a like system of activities: that it is because men use horses to transport persons and goods that horses need to be shod. The ultimate criterion of blacksmithing is producing a good shoe, but the nature of a good shoe is fixed, not by blacksmithing, but by the activities in which horses are used. The end is ultimate (absolute) for the operation, but this very finality is evidence that the operation is not absolute and self-inclosed, but is related and responsible. Why must the fact that the end of thinking is ultimate for thought stand on any different footing?
Let us then, by way of experiment, follow this suggestion. Let us assume that among real objects in their values and significances, real oppositions and incompatibilities exist; that these conflicts are both troublesome in themselves, and the source of all manner of further difficulties--so much so that they may be suspected of being the source of all man’s woe, of all encroachment upon and destruction of value, of good. Suppose that thinking is, not accidentally but essentially, a way, and the only way that proves adequate, of dealing with these predicaments--that being “in a hole,” in difficulty, is the fundamental “predicament” of intelligence. Suppose when effort is made in a brute way to remove these oppositions and to secure an arrangement of things which means satisfaction, fulfilment, happiness, that the method of brute attack, of trying directly to force warrings into peace fails; suppose then an effort to effect the transformation by an indirect method--by inquiry into the disordered state of affairs and by framing views, conceptions, of what the situation would be like were it reduced to harmonious order. Finally, suppose that upon this basis a plan of action is worked out, and that this plan, when carried into overt effect, succeeds infinitely better than the brute method of attack in bringing about the desired consummation. Suppose again this indirection of activity is precisely what we mean by thinking. Would it not hold that harmony is the end and the test of thinking? that observations are pertinent and ideas correct just in so far as, overtly acted upon, they succeed in removing the undesirable, the inconsistent.
But, it is said, the very process of thinking makes a certain assumption regarding the nature of reality, viz., that reality is self-consistent. This statement puts the end for the beginning. The assumption is not that “reality” _is_ self-consistent, but that by thinking it may, for some special purpose, or as respects some concrete problem, attain greater consistency. Why should the assumption regarding “reality” be other than that specific realities with which thought is concerned are _capable of receiving_ harmonization? To say that thought must assume, in order to go on, that reality already possesses harmony is to say that thought must begin by contradicting its own direct data, and by assuming that its concrete aim is vain and illusory. Why put upon thought the onus of introducing discrepancies into reality in order just to give itself exercise in the gymnastic of removing them? The assumption that concrete thinking makes about “reality” is that things just as they exist may acquire _through activity, guided by thinking_, a certain character which it is excellent for them to possess; and may acquire it more liberally and effectively than by other methods. One might as well say that the blacksmith could not think to any effect concerning iron, without a Platonic archetypal horseshoe, laid up in the heavens. His thinking also makes an assumption about present, given reality, viz., that this piece of iron, through the exercise of intelligently directed activity, may be shaped into a satisfactory horseshoe. The assumption is practical: the assumption that a specific thing may take on in a specific way a specific needed value. The test, moreover, of this assumption is practical; it consists in acting upon it to see if it will do what it pretends it can do, namely, guide activities to the required result. The assumption about reality is not something in addition to the idea, which an idea already in existence makes; some assumption about the possibility of a change in the state of things as experienced _is_ the idea--and its test or criterion is whether this possible change can be effected when the idea is acted upon in good faith.
In any case, how much simpler the case becomes when we stick by the empirical facts. According to them there is no wholesale discrepancy of existence and meaning; there is simply a “loosening” of the two when objects do not fulfil our plans and meet our desires; or when we project inventions and cannot find immediately the means for their realization. The “collisions” are neither physical, metaphysical, nor logical; they are moral and practical. They exist between an aim and the means of its execution. Consequently the object of thinking is not to effect some wholesale and “Absolute” reconciliation of meaning and existence, but to make a specific adjustment of things to our purposes and of our purposes to things at just the crucial point of the crisis. Making the utmost concessions to Mr. Bradley’s account of the discrepancy of meaning and existence in our experience, to his statement of the relation of this to the function of judgment (as involving namely an explicit _statement_ at once of the actual sundering and the ideal union) and to his account of consistency as the goal and standard, there is still not a detail of the account that is not met amply and with infinitely more empirical warrant by the conception that the “collision” in which thinking starts and the “consistency” in which it terminates are practical and human.
III This brings us explicitly to the question of truth, “truth” being confessedly the end and standard of thinking. I confess to being much at a loss to realize just what the intellectualists conceive to be the relation of truth to ideas on one side and to “reality” on the other.
My difficulty occurs, I think, because they describe so little in analytical detail; in writing of truth they seem rather to be under a strong emotional influence--as if they were victims of an uncritical pragmatism--which leaves much of their thought to be guessed at. The implication of their discussions assigns three distinct values to the term “truth.” On the one hand, truth is something which characterizes ideas, theories, hypotheses, beliefs, judgments, propositions, assertions, etc.,--anything whatsoever involving _intellectual_ statement. From this standpoint a criterion of truth means the test of the worth of the intellectual intent, import, or claim of any intellectual statement as intellectual. This is an intelligible sense of the term truth. In the second place, it seems to be assumed that a certain kind of reality is already, apart from ideas or meanings, Truth, and that _this_ Truth is the criterion of that lower and more unworthy kind of truth that may be possessed or aimed at by ideas.
But we do not stop here. The conception that _all_ truth must have a criterion haunts the intellectualist, so that the reality, which, as contrasted with ideas, is taken to be The Truth (and the criterion of _their_ truth) is treated as if it itself had to have support and warrant from some other Reality, lying back of it, which is _its_ criterion. This, then, gives the third type of truth, _The Absolute Truth_. (Just why this process should not go on indefinitely is not clear, but the necessity of infinite regress may be emotionally prevented by always referring to this last type of truth as Absolute).
Now this scheme may be “true,” but it is not self-explanatory or even easily apprehensible. In just what sense, truth is (1) that to which ideas as ideas lay claim and yet is (2) Reality which as reality is the criterion of truth of ideas, and yet again is (3) a Reality which completely annuls and transcends all reference to ideas, is not in the least clear to me: nor, till better informed, shall I believe it to be clear to any one.
In his more strictly logical discussions, Mr. Bradley sets out from the notion that truth refers to intellectual statements and positions as such. But the Truth soon becomes a sort of transcendent essence on its own account. The identification of reality and truth on page 146 may be a mere casual phrase, but the distinction drawn between validity and absolute truth (p. 362), and the discussion of Degrees of Truth and Reality, involve assumptions of an identity of truth and reality. Truth in this sense turns out to be the criterion for the truth, the truth, that is, of ideas. But, again (p. 545), a distinction is made between “Finite Truth,” that is, a view of reality which would completely satisfy intelligence as such, and “Absolute Truth,” which is obtained only by _passing beyond intelligence_--only when intelligence as such is absorbed in some Absolute in which it loses its distinctive character.
It would advance the state of discussion, I am sure, if there were more explicit statements regarding the relations of “true idea,” “truth,” “the criterion of truth” and “reality,” to one another. A more explicit exposition also of the view that is held concerning the relation of verification and truth could hardly fail to be of value.
Not infrequently the intellectualist admits that the process of verification is experimental, consisting in setting on foot various activities that express the intent of the idea and confirm or refute it according to the changes effected. This seems to mean that truth is simply the tested or verified belief as such. But then a curious reservation is introduced; the experimental process _finds_, it is said, that an idea is true, while the error of the pragmatist is to take the process by which truth is _found_ as one by which it is made.
The claim of “making truth” is treated as blasphemy against the very notion of truth: such are the consequences of venturing to translate the Latin “verification” into the English “making true.”
If we face the bogie thus called up, it will be found that the horror is largely sentimental. Suppose we stick to the notion that truth is a character which belongs to a meaning so far as tested through action that carries it to successful completion. In this case, to make an idea true is to modify and transform it until it reaches this successful outcome: until it initiates a mode of response which in its issue realizes its claim to be the method of harmonizing the discrepancies of a given situation. The meaning is remade by constantly acting upon it, and by introducing into its content such characters as are indicated by any resulting failures to secure harmony. From this point of view, verification and truth are two names for the same thing. We call it “verification” when we regard it as process; when the development of the idea is strung out and exposed to view in all that makes it true.
We call it “truth” when we take it as product, as process telescoped and condensed.
Suppose the idea to be an invention, say of the telephone. In this case, is not the verification of the idea and the construction of the device which carries out its intent one and the same? In this case, does the truth of the idea mean anything else than that the issue proves the idea can be carried into effect? There are certain intellectualists who are not of the absolutist type; who do not believe that all of men’s aims, designs, projects, that have to do with action, whether industrial, social, or moral in scope, have been from all eternity registered as already accomplished in reality. How do such persons dispose of this problem of the truth of practical ideas?
Is not the truth of _such_ ideas an affair of _making_ them true by constructing, through appropriate behavior, a condition that satisfies the requirements of the case? If, in this case, truth means the effective capacity of the idea “to make good,” what is there in the logic of the case to forbid the application of analogous considerations to any idea?
I hear a noise in the street. It suggests as its meaning a street-car.
To test this idea I go to the window and through listening and looking intently--the listening and the looking being modes of behavior--organize into a single situation elements of existence and meaning which were previously disconnected. In this way an idea is made true; that which was a proposal or hypothesis is no longer merely a propounding or a guess. If I had not reacted in a way appropriate to the idea it would have remained a mere idea; at most a candidate for truth that, unless acted upon upon the spot, would always have remained a theory. Now in such a case--where the end to be accomplished is the discovery of a certain order of facts--would the intellectualist claim that apart from the forming and entertaining of some interpretation, the category of truth has either existence or meaning? Will he claim that without an original practical uneasiness introducing a practical aim of inquiry there must have been, whether or no, an idea? Must the world for some purely intellectual reason be intellectually reduplicated? Could not that occurrence which I now identify as a noisy street-car have retained, so far as pure intelligence is concerned, its unidentified status of being mere physical alteration in a vast unidentified complex of matter-in-motion? Was there any _intellectual_ necessity that compelled the event to arouse just this judgment, that it meant a street-car? Was there any physical or metaphysical necessity? Was there any necessity save a need of characterizing it for some purpose of our own? And why should we be mealy-mouthed about calling this need practical? If the necessity which led to the formation and development of an intellectual judgment was purely objective (whether physical or metaphysical) why should not the thing have also to be characterized in countless millions of other ways; for example, as to its distance from some crater in the moon, or its effect upon the circulation of my blood, or upon my irascible neighbor’s temper, or bearing upon the Monroe Doctrine? In short, do not intellectual positions and statements mean new and significant events in the treatment of things?
It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow the inner workings of the processes by which truth is first identified with some superior type of Reality, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion of the truth of ideas; while all the time it is held that truth is something already possessed by ideas as purely intellectual. But there seems to be some ground for believing that this identification is due to a twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, and the other with things. As to the first point: After an idea is made true, we naturally say, in retrospect, “it _was_ true all the time.” Now this truism is quite innocuous as a truism, being just a restatement of the fact that the idea has, as matter of fact, worked successfully. But it may be regarded not as a truism but as furnishing some additional knowledge; as if it were, indeed, the dawning of a revelation regarding truth.
Then it is said that the idea worked or was verified because it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth; the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error of supposing that it is true because it works. If one remembers that what the experimentalist means is that the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same thing--this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth but its nature--it is hard to see the point of this statement. A man under peculiarly precarious circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. “Yes,” replies some one, “but he was a saved man all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it.” Now even such a statement as pure tautology, as characterizing the entire process in terms of its issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like all tautology, it seems to say something but does not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier condition of affairs, apart from the active process by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such a statement would be monstrously false; and would declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, the man would have been left to drown. In like fashion, to say, _after the event_, that a given idea was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes an idea an idea, its hypothetical character; and thereby deliberately to transform it into brute dogma--something to which no canon of verification can ever be applied. The intellectualist almost always treats the pragmatic account as if it were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well as from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, while it is nothing but a statement of its nature. When the intellectualist realizes this, he will, I hope, ask himself: What, then, on the pragmatic basis is meant by the proposition that an idea is true all the time? If the statement that an idea was true all the time has no meaning except that the idea was one which as matter of fact succeeded through action in achieving its intent, mere reiteration that the idea was true all the time or it could not have succeeded, does not take us far.[24] On the side of things, _reality_ is identified with truth; then on the principle that two things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other, truth as idea and truth as reality are taken to be one and the same thing. Wherever there is an improved or tested idea, an idea which has made good, there is a concrete existence in the way of a completed or harmonized situation. The same activity which proves the idea constructs an inherently satisfied situation out of an inherently dissentient one,--for it is precisely the capacity of the idea as an aim and method of action to determine such transformation that is the criterion of its truth. Now unless all the elements in the situation are held steadily in view, the specific way in which the harmonized reality affords the criterion of truth (namely, through its function of being the last term of a process of active determination) is lost from sight; and the achieved existence in its merely existent character, apart from its practical or fulfilment character, is treated as The Truth. But when the reality is thus separated from the process by which it is achieved, when it is taken just as given, it is neither truth nor a criterion of truth. It is a state of facts like any other. The achieved telephone is a criterion of the validity of a certain prior idea in so far as it is the fulfilment of activities that embody the nature of that idea, but just as telephone, as a machine actually in existence, it is no more truth nor criterion of truth than is a crack in the wall or a cobble-stone on the street.
The intervening term that mediates and completes the confusion of truth with ideas on one hand and “reality” on the other, is, I think, the fact that ideas after they have been tested in action are employed in the development and grounding of further beliefs. There are cases in which an idea ceases to exist as idea as soon as it is made true; this is so as matter of fact and it is impossible to conceive any reason why it should not be so in point of theory. Such is the case, I take it, with a large part--possibly the major portion--of the ideas that mediate the smaller and transient crises of daily practice.
I cannot imagine the situation in which the truth to which I have referred above--the verification of a certain idea about a certain noise--would ever function again as truth--save as I have given it a function in this paper by using it as a corroboration of a certain theory. Such ideas mostly cease, giving way to a matter-of-fact status: say, the perception of the noisy street-car. One at the time may say “My idea regarding that noise was a true idea”; or one may not even go so far as that, he may just stop with the eventual perception.
But the tested idea need not ever recur as a factor of proof in any other problem. Such, however, is conspicuously not the case with our scientific ideas. In its first value, the idea or hypothesis of gravitation entertained by Newton, stood, when verified, on exactly the same level as the hypothesis regarding the noise in the street.
Theoretically, that truth might have been so isolated that its truth character would disappear from thought as soon as a certain factual condition was ascertained. But practically quite the opposite has happened. The idea operates in many other inquiries, and operates no longer as mere idea, but as _proved_ idea. Such truths get an “eternal” status;--one irrespective of application just now and here, because there are so many nows and heres in which they are useful. Just as to say an idea was true all the time is a way of saying _in retrospect_ that it has come out in a certain fashion, so to say that an idea is “eternally true” is to indicate _prospective_ modes of application which are indefinitely anticipated. Its meaning, therefore, is strictly pragmatic. It does not indicate a property inherent in the idea as intellectualized existence, but denotes a property of use and employment. Always at hand when needed is a good enough eternal for reasonably minded persons.
IV I have gone from the very general considerations which occupied us in the earlier portions of this article to matters which relatively at least are specific. I conclude with a summary in the hope that it may bind together the earlier and the later parts of this paper.
1. The condition which antecedes and provokes any particular exercise of reflective knowing is always one of discrepancy, struggle, “collision.” This condition is practical, for it involves the habits and interests of the organism, an agent. This does not mean that the struggle is merely personal, or subjective, or psychological. The agent or individual is one factor in the situation--not the situation something subsisting in the individual. The individual has to be identified in the situation, before any situation can be referred--as in psychology--to the individual. But the discrepancy calls out and controls reflective knowing only as the fortunes of an agent are implicated in the crisis. Certain elements stand out as obstacles, as interferences, as deficiencies--in short as unsatisfactory and as requiring something for their completion. Other elements stand out as wanted--as required, as a satisfaction which does not exist. This clash (an accompaniment of all desire) between the given and the wanted, between the present and the absent, is at once the root and the type of that peculiar paradoxical relation between existence and meaning which Bradley insists upon as the essence of judgment. It is not irrational in the sense that we are dealing with appearance wholesale, but it is non-rational--an evidence that we are dealing with a practical affair.
2. The intellectual or reflective and logical is a _statement_ of this conflict: an attempt to describe and define it. It is, as it were, the practical clash held off at arm’s length for inspection and investigation. In this way brute blind reaction against the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is suspended. Action is turned into the channel of observing, of inferring, of reasoning, or defining means and end. It is this change in the quality of activity, from directly overt, to indirect, or inquiring with view to stating, that constitutes the _specific_ nature of reflective practice to which Mr.
Bradley calls attention. The discovery of the nature of the conflict supplies materials for the fact or existence side of the judgement.
The conception or projection of the object in which the conflict would be terminated furnishes material for the meaning side of the judgment. It is ideal because anticipatory, just as the fact side is existential, because reminiscent or recording. Hence the two are necessarily both distinguished from and yet referred to each other: only through location of a problem can a solution be conceived; only in reference to the intent of finding a solution can the elements of a problem be selected and interpreted. In origin and in destiny, this correlative determination of existence and meaning is tentative and experimental. The aim of the subject of the judgment is not to include all possible reality, but to select those elements of a reality that are useful in locating the source and nature of the difficulty in hand. The aim of the predicate is not to bunch all possible meaning and refer it in one final act indiscriminately to all existence, but to state the standpoint and method through which the difficulty of the particular situation may most effectively be dealt with. The selection of what is relevant to the characterization of the problem and the projection of the method of dealing with it are theoretic, hypothetic, intellectual:--that is, they are tentative ways of viewing the matter for the sake of guiding, economizing, and freeing the activities through which it may _really_ be dealt with.
3. The criterion of the worth of the idea is thus the capacity of the idea (as a definition of the end or outcome in terms of what is likely to be serviceable as a method) to operate in fulfilling the object for the sake of which it was projected. Capacity of operation in this fashion is the test, measure, or criterion of truth. Hence the criterion is practical in the most overt sense of that term. We may, if we choose, regard the object in which the idea terminates through its use in guiding action, as the criterion; but if we so choose, it is at our peril that we forget that this object serves as criterion in its capacity of fulfilment and not as sheer objective existence.
4. Difficulties overlap; problems recur which resemble each other in the kind of treatment they demand for solution. Various modes of activity with their respective ends, going on at some time more or less independently, get organized into single comprehensive systems of behavior. The solution of one problem is found to create difficulties elsewhere; or the truth that is made in the solution of one problem is found to afford an effective method of dealing with questions arising apparently from unallied sources. Thus certain tested ideas in performing a constant or recurrent function secure a certain permanent status. The prospective use of such truths, the satisfaction that we anticipate in their employ, the assurance of control that we feel in their possession, becomes relatively much more important than the circumstances under which they were first made true. In becoming permanent resources, such tested ideas get a generalized energy of position. They are truths in general, truths “in themselves” or in the abstract, truths to which positive value is assigned on their own account. Such truths are the “eternal truths” of current discussion.
They naturally and properly add to their intellectual and to their practical worth a certain esthetic quality. They are interesting to contemplate, and their contemplation arouses emotions of admiration and reverence. To make these emotions the basis of assigning peculiar inherent sanctity to them apart from their warrant in use, is simply to give way to that mood which in primitive man is the cause of attributing magical efficacy to physical things. Esthetically such truths are more than instrumentalities. But to ignore both the instrumental and the esthetic aspect, and to ascribe values due to an instrumental and esthetic character to some interior and _a priori_ constitution of truth is to make fetishes of them.
We may not exaggerate the permanence and stability of such truths with respect to their recurring and prospective use. It is only relatively that they are unchanging. When applied to new cases, used as resources for coping with new difficulties, the oldest of truths are to some extent remade. Indeed it is only through such application and such remaking that truths retain their freshness and vitality. Otherwise they are relegated to faint reminiscences of an antique tradition. Even the truth that two and two make four has gained a new meaning, has had its truth in some degree remade, in the development of the modern theory of number. If we put ourselves in the attitude of a scientific inquirer in asking what is the meaning of truth _per se_, there spring up before us those ideas which are actively employed in the mastery of new fields, in the organization of new materials. This is the essential difference between truth and dogma; between the living and the dead and decaying. Above all, it is in the region of moral truth that this perception stands out. Moral truths that are not recreated in application to the urgencies of the passing hour, no matter how true in the place and time of their origin, are pernicious and misleading, _i.e._, false. And it is perhaps through emphasizing this fact, embodied in one form or another in every system of morals and in every religion of moral import, that one most readily realizes the character of truth.
A SHORT CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH[25] _Pupil._ I am desirous, respected teacher, of forming an independent judgment concerning the novel theory of truth that you are said to profess. My eagerness is whetted because the theory as expounded to me by my old teacher, Professor Purus Intellectus, so obviously contravenes common sense, science, and philosophy that I do not understand how it can be advanced in good faith by any reasonable man.
_Teacher._ As you are already somewhat acquainted with the theory (or at least with what it purports to be), perhaps if you will set forth in order your objections, it will appear that the theory that you are acquainted with is not advanced by any reasonable persons, and that by understanding the theory as it is you will also be led to embrace it.
_Pupil: Objection One._ Pragmatism makes truth a subjective affair, namely the satisfaction afforded individuals by ideas, while everybody knows that the truth of ideas depends upon their relation to things.
_Teacher: Reply._ If I were to reply that I hold to existences independent of ideas, existences prior to, synchronous with, and subsequent to ideas, that might seem to you to express only my personal opinion and to have no logical connection with pragmatism. So I beg to remind you that, according to pragmatism, ideas (judgments and reasonings being included for convenience in this term) are attitudes of response taken toward extra-ideal, extra-mental things. Instinct and habit express, for instance, modes of response, but modes inadequate for a progressive being, or for adaptation to an environment presenting novel and unmastered features. Under such conditions, ideas are their surrogates. The origin of an idea is thus in some empirical, extra-mental situation which provokes ideas as modes of response, while their meaning is found in the modifications--the “differences”--they make in this extra-mental situation. Their validity is in turn measured by their capacity to effect the transformation they intend. Origin, content, and value--all alike are extra-ideational. The satisfaction upon which the pragmatist dwells is just the better adjustment of living beings to their environment effected by transformations of the environment through forming and applying ideas.
_Pupil: Objection Two._ But, as I understand it and as you have yourself confessed in your language, these external things, while they may be external to the particular idea in question, are _empirical_; they are just other experiences and so mental after all. You hold, I have been informed, that truth is an _experienced_ relation, instead of a relation between experience and what transcends it; why then be mealy-mouthed (pardon my eagerness if it leads me astray) in admitting that the whole business is intra-mental?
_Teacher: Reply._ Your objection combines and confuses two things.
To disentangle them is to answer the objection. (1) The notion of transcendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes that which lies inherently and essentially beyond experience. It is interesting to note that the opponents of pragmatism have been forced by the exigencies of their hostility to resuscitate a doctrine supposedly dead: the