What constitutes the relation known as truth, I now say, is just the existence in the empirical world of this fundamentum of circumstance surrounding object and idea and ready to be either short-circuited or traversed at full length.  So long as it exists, and a satisfactory passage through it between the object and the idea is possible, that idea will both be true, and will have been true of that object, whether fully developed verification has taken place or not.  The nature and place and affinities of the object of course play as vital a part in making the particular passage possible as do the nature and associative tendencies of the idea; so that the notion that truth could fall altogether inside of the thinker’s private experience and be something purely psychological, is absurd.  It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms.

But the ‘intellectualistic’ position, if I understand Mr. Pratt rightly, is that, altho we can use this fundamentum, this mass of go-between experience, for testing truth, yet the truth-relation in itself remains as something apart.  It means, in Mr. Pratt’s words, merely ’this simple thing that the object of which one is thinking is as one thinks it.’

It seems to me that the word ‘as,’ which qualifies the relation here, and bears the whole ‘epistemological’ burden, is anything but simple.  What it most immediately suggests is that the idea should be like the object; but most of our ideas, being abstract concepts, bear almost no resemblance to their objects.  The ‘as’ must therefore, I should say, be usually interpreted functionally, as meaning that the idea shall lead us into the same quarters of experience as the object would.  Experience leads ever on and on, and objects and our ideas of objects may both lead to the same goals.  The ideas being in that case shorter cuts, we substitute them more and more for their objects; and we habitually waive direct verification of each one of them, as their train passes through our mind, because if an idea leads as the object would lead, we can say, in Mr. Pratt’s words, that in so far forth the object is as we think it, and that the idea, verified thus in so far forth, is true enough.

Mr. Pratt will undoubtedly accept most of these facts, but he will deny that they spell pragmatism.  Of course, definitions are free to every one; but I have myself never meant by the pragmatic view of truth anything different from what I now describe; and inasmuch as my use of the term came earlier than my friend’s, I think it ought to have the right of way.  But I suspect that Professor Pratt’s contention is not solely as to what one must think in order to be called a pragmatist.  I am cure that he believes that the truth-relation has something more in it than the fundamentum which I assign can account for.  Useful to test truth by, the matrix of circumstance, be thinks, cannot found the truth-relation in se, for that is trans-empirical and ‘saltatory.’