I am, of course, postulating here a standing reality independent of the idea that knows it.  I am also postulating that satisfactions grow pari passu with our approximation to such reality. [Footnote 1:  Say, if you prefer to, that DISsatisfactions decrease pari passu with such approximation.  The approximation may be of any kind assignable—­approximation in time or in space, or approximation in kind, which in common speech means ‘copying.’] If my critics challenge this latter assumption, I retort upon them with the former.  Our whole notion of a standing reality grows up in the form of an ideal limit to the series of successive termini to which our thoughts have led us and still are leading us.  Each terminus proves provisional by leaving us unsatisfied.  The truer idea is the one that pushes farther; so we are ever beckoned on by the ideal notion of an ultimate completely satisfactory terminus.  I, for one, obey and accept that notion.  I can conceive no other objective content to the notion of ideally perfect truth than that of penetration into such a terminus, nor can I conceive that the notion would ever have grown up, or that true ideas would ever have been sorted out from false or idle ones, save for the greater sum of satisfactions, intellectual or practical, which the truer ones brought with them.  Can we imagine a man absolutely satisfied with an idea and with all its relations to his other ideas and to his sensible experiences, who should yet not take its content as a true account of reality?  The matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the matter of the satisfactory.  You may put either word first in your ways of talking; but leave out that whole notion of satisfactory working or leading (which is the essence of my pragmatistic account) and call truth a static logical relation, independent even of possible leadings or satisfactions, and it seems to me you cut all ground from under you.

I fear that I am still very obscure.  But I respectfully implore those who reject my doctrine because they can make nothing of my stumbling language, to tell us in their own name—­und zwar very concretely and articulately!—­just how the real, genuine and absolutely ‘objective’ truth which they believe in so profoundly, is constituted and established.  They mustn’t point to the ‘reality’ itself, for truth is only our subjective relation to realities.  What is the nominal essence of this relation, its logical definition, whether or not it be ‘objectively’ attainable by mortals?

Whatever they may say it is, I have the firmest faith that my account will prove to have allowed for it and included it by anticipation, as one possible case in the total mixture of cases.  There is, in short, no room for any grade or sort of truth outside of the framework of the pragmatic system, outside of that jungle of empirical workings and leadings, and their nearer or ulterior terminations, of which I seem to have written so unskilfully.