of the whole associative sequence, actual or potential, is in our mental sight, can we feel sure what its epistemological significance, if it have any, may be.  True knowing is, in fine, not substantially, in itself, or ‘as such,’ inside of the idea from the first, any more than mortality as such is inside of the man, or nourishment as such inside of the bread.  Something else is there first, that practically makes for knowing, dying or nourishing, as the case may be.  That something is the ‘nature’ namely of the first term, be it idea, man, or bread, that operates to start the causal chain of processes which, when completed, is the complex fact to which we give whatever functional name best fits the case.  Another nature, another chain of cognitive workings; and then either another object known or the same object known differently, will ensue.

Dr. Pratt perplexes me again by seeming to charge Dewey and Schiller [Footnote:  Page 200] (I am not sure that he charges me) with an account of truth which would allow the object believed in not to exist, even if the belief in it were true.  ’Since the truth of an idea,’ he writes, ’means merely the fact that the idea works, that fact is all that you mean when you say the idea is true’ (p. 206).  ’When you say the idea is true’—­does that mean true for you, the critic, or true for the believer whom you are describing?  The critic’s trouble over this seems to come from his taking the word ‘true’ irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means ’true for him who experiences the workings.’  ’But is the object really true or not?’—­the critic then seems to ask,—­as if the pragmatist were bound to throw in a whole ontology on top of his epistemology and tell us what realities indubitably exist.  ‘One world at a time,’ would seem to be the right reply here.

One other trouble of Dr. Pratt’s must be noticed.  It concerns the ‘transcendence’ of the object.  When our ideas have worked so as to bring us flat up against the object, next to it, ’is our relation to it then ambulatory or saltatory?’ Dr. Pratt asks.  If your headache be my object, ‘my experiences break off where yours begin,’ Dr. Pratt writes, and ’this fact is of great importance, for it bars out the sense of transition and fulfilment which forms so important an element in the pragmatist description of knowledge—­the sense of fulfilment due to a continuous passage from the original idea to the known object.  If this comes at all when I know your headache, it comes not with the object, but quite on my side of the “epistemological gulf.”  The gulf is still there to be transcended.’ (p. 158).