This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to the charge that the objective reference which is so flagrant a character of our experiences involves a chasm and a mortal leap.  A positively conjunctive transition involves neither chasm nor leap.  Being the very original of what we mean by continuity, it makes a continuum wherever it appears.  Objective reference is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists of process and transition.  Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view.  Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.  The relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are, and the only complaint of the transcendentalist’s with which I could at all sympathize would be his charge that, by first making knowledge to consist in external relations as I have done, and by then confessing that nine-tenths of the time these are not actually but only virtually there, I have knocked the solid bottom out of the whole business, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing.  Only the admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas are self-transcendent and ‘true’ already; in advance of the experiences that are to terminate them, can bring solidity back to knowledge in a world like this, in which transitions and terminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place for applying the pragmatic method.  What would the self-transcendency affirmed to exist in advance of all experiential mediation or termination, be known-as?  What would it practically result in for us, were it true?

It could only result in our orientation, in the turning of our expectations and practical tendencies into the right path; and the right path here, so long as we and the object are not yet face to face (or can never get face to face, as in the case of ejects), would be the path that led us into the object’s nearest neighborhood.  Where direct acquaintance is lacking, ‘knowledge about’ is the next best thing, and an acquaintance with what actually lies about the ’object, and is most closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp.  Ether-waves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never PERCTEPTUALLY terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their really next effects.

Even if our ideas did in themselves possess the postulated self-transcendency, it would still remain true that their putting us into possession of such effects would be the sole cash-value of the self-transcendency for us.  And this cash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et liberatim what our empiricist account pays in.  On pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.  Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don’t differ about the nature of that exalted virtue’s fruits—­fruits for us, of course, humanistic fruits.