The maximal conceivable truth in an idea would seem to be that it should lead to an actual merging of ourselves with the object, to an utter mutual confluence and identification.  On the common-sense level of belief this is what is supposed really to take place in sense-perception.  My idea of this pen verifies itself through my percept; and my percept is held to be the pen for the time being—­ percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as identical.  But the physiology of the senses has criticised common sense out of court, and the pen ‘in itself’ is now believed to lie beyond my momentary percept.  Yet the notion once suggested, of what a completely consummated acquaintance with a reality might be like, remains over for our speculative purposes.  Total conflux of the mind with the reality would be the absolute limit of truth, there could be no better or more satisfying knowledge than that.

Such total conflux, it is needless to say, is already explicitly provided for, as A possibility, in my account of the matter.  If an idea should ever lead us not only towards, or up to, or against, a reality, but so close that we and the reality should melt together, it would be made absolutely true, according to me, by that performance.

In point of fact philosophers doubt that this ever occurs.  What happens, they think, is only that we get nearer and nearer to realities, we approximate more and more to the all-satisfying limit; and the definition of actually, as distinguished from imaginably, complete and objective truth, can then only be that it belongs to the idea that will lead us as close up against the object as in the nature of our experience is possible, literally next to it, for instance.

Suppose, now, there were an idea that did this for a certain objective reality.  Suppose that no further approach were possible, that nothing lay between, that the next step would carry us right into the reality; then that result, being the next thing to conflux, would make the idea true in the maximal degree that might be supposed practically attainable in the world which we inhabit.

Well, I need hardly explain that that degree of truth is also provided for in my account of the matter.  And if satisfactions are the marks of truth’s presence, we may add that any less true substitute for such a true idea would prove less satisfactory.  Following its lead, we should probably find out that we did not quite touch the terminus.  We should desiderate a closer approach, and not rest till we had found it.