obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification.  Truth ante rem means only verifiability, then; or else it is a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the name of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation.  Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing’s: 

Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz,
“Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen,
Dass grad’ die Reichsten in der Welt,
Das meiste Geld besitzen?”

Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle ‘wealth’ as something distinct from the facts denoted by the man’s being rich.  It antedates them; the facts become only a sort of secondary coincidence with the rich man’s essential nature.

In the case of ‘wealth’ we all see the fallacy.  We know that wealth is but a name for concrete processes that certain men’s lives play a part in, and not a natural excellence found in Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie, but not in the rest of us.

Like wealth, health also lives in rebus.  It is a name for processes, as digestion, circulation, sleep, etc., that go on happily, tho in this instance we are more inclined to think of it as a principle and to say the man digests and sleeps so well because he is so healthy.

With ‘strength’ we are, I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory of the herculean performances of his muscles.

With ‘truth’ most people go over the border entirely, and treat the rationalistic account as self-evident.  But really all these words in th are exactly similar.  Truth exists ante rem just as much and as little as the other things do.

The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between habit and act.  Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and digesting.  But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man always lifting weights.  All such qualities sink to the status of ‘habits’ between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities.  But those activities are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals.

‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.  Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily.  Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.