The particular application of this rigoristic treatment to my own little account of truth as working seems to be something like what follows.  I say ‘working’ is what the ‘truth’ of our ideas means, and call it a definition.  But since meanings and things meant, definitions and things defined, are equivalent and interchangeable, and nothing extraneous to its definition can be meant when a term is used, it follows that who so calls an idea true, and means by that word that it works, cannot mean anything else, can believe nothing but that it does work, and in particular can neither imply nor allow anything about its object or deliverance.  ‘According to the pragmatists,’ Mr. Russell writes, ’to say “it is true that other people exist” means “it is useful to believe that other people exist.”  But if so, then these two phrases are merely different words for the same proposition; therefore when I believe the one, I believe the other’ (p. 400). [Logic, I may say in passing, would seem to require Mr. Russell to believe them both at once, but he ignores this consequence, and considers that other people exist’ and ’it is useful to believe that they do even if they don’t,’ must be identical and therefore substitutable propositions in the pragmatist mouth.]

But may not real terms, I now ask, have accidents not expressed in their definitions? and when a real value is finally substituted for the result of an algebraic series of substituted definitions, do not all these accidents creep back?  Beliefs have their objective ‘content’ or ‘deliverance’ as well as their truth, and truth has its implications as well as its workings.  If any one believe that other men exist, it is both a content of his belief and an implication of its truth, that they should exist in fact.  Mr. Russell’s logic would seem to exclude, ‘by definition,’ all such accidents as contents, implications, and associates, and would represent us as translating all belief into a sort of belief in pragmatism itself—­of all things!  If I say that a speech is eloquent, and explain ‘eloquent’ as meaning the power to work in certain ways upon the audience; or if I say a book is original, and define ‘original’ to mean differing from other books, Russell’s logic, if I follow it at all, would seem to doom me to agreeing that the speech is about eloquence, and the book about other books.  When I call a belief true, and define its truth to mean its workings, I certainly do not mean that the belief is a belief about the workings.  It is a belief about the object, and I who talk about the workings am a different subject, with a different universe of discourse, from that of the believer of whose concrete thinking I profess to give an account.