Some day of course, or even now somewhere in the larger life of the universe, different men’s headaches may become confluent or be ’co-conscious.’  Here and now, however, headaches do transcend each other and, when not felt, can be known only conceptually.  My idea is that you really have a headache; it works well with what I see of your expression, and with what I hear you say; but it doesn’t put me in possession of the headache itself.  I am still at one remove, and the headache ‘transcends’ me, even tho it be in nowise transcendent of human experience generally.  Bit the ‘gulf’ here is that which the pragmatist epistemology itself fixes in the very first words it uses, by saying there must be an object and an idea.  The idea however doesn’t immediately leap the gulf, it only works from next to next so as to bridge it, fully or approximately.  If it bridges it, in the pragmatist’s vision of his hypothetical universe, it can be called a ‘true’ idea.  If it only might bridge it, but doesn’t, or if it throws a bridge distinctly at it, it still has, in the onlooking pragmatist’s eyes, what Professor Pratt calls ‘trueness.’  But to ask the pragmatist thereupon whether, when it thus fails to coalesce bodily with the object, it is really true or has real trueness,—­in other words whether the headache he supposes, and supposes the thinker he supposes, to believe in, be a real headache or not,—­is to step from his hypothetical universe of discourse into the altogether different world of natural fact.

VIII

The pragmatist account of truth and its misunderstanders [Footnote:  Reprint from the Philosophical Review, January, 1908 (vol. xvii, p. 1).]

The account of truth given in my volume entitled Pragmatism, continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that I am tempted to make a final brief reply.  My ideas may well deserve refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in their proper shape.  The fantastic character of the current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism assumes.  Persons who are familiar with a conception move about so easily in it that they understand each other at a hint, and can converse without anxiously attending to their P’s and Q’s.  I have to admit, in view of the results, that we have assumed too ready an intelligence, and consequently in many places used a language too slipshod.  We should never have spoken elliptically.  The critics have boggled at every word they could boggle at, and refused to take the spirit rather than the letter of our discourse.  This seems to show a genuine unfamiliarity in the whole point of view.  It also shows, I think, that the second stage of opposition, which has already begun to express itself in the stock phrase that ’what is new is not true, and what is true not new,’