The ‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge.  It runs on all fours with the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience; and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized together.  Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood.  Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience.  ‘Absolutely’ they are false; for we know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.

When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter was true, even tho no past thinker had been led there.  We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards.  The present sheds a backward light on the world’s previous processes.  They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them.  They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story.

This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future.  Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota.

I have already insisted on the fact that truth is made largely out of previous truths.  Men’s beliefs at any time are so much experience funded.  But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world’s experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day’s funding operations.  So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be—­but still mutation.

Mathematicians can solve problems with two variables.  On the Newtonian theory, for instance, acceleration varies with distance, but distance also varies with acceleration.  In the realm of truth-processes facts come independently and determine our beliefs provisionally.  But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts which re-determine the beliefs accordingly.  So the whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the product of a double influence.  Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely.  The ‘facts’ themselves meanwhile are not true.  They simply are.  Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.