no such reality, and that the satisfactions yet remained:  would they not then effectively work falsehood?  Can they consequently be treated distinctively as the truth-builders?  It is the inherent relation to reality of a belief that gives us that specific truth-satisfaction, compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest humbug.  The satisfaction of knowing truly is thus the only one which the pragmatist ought to have considered.  As a psychological sentiment, the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then only as a concomitant of truth, not as a constituent.  What constitutes truth is not the sentiment, but the purely logical or objective function of rightly cognizing the reality, and the pragmatist’s failure to reduce this function to lower values is patent.’

Such anti-pragmatism as this seems to me a tissue of confusion.  To begin with, when the pragmatist says ‘indispensable,’ it confounds this with ‘sufficient.’  The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to.  If the reality assumed were cancelled from the pragmatist’s universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness.  For him, as for his critic, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about.  Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.  This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited ‘reality’ ab initio, and why, throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemological realist. [Footnote:  I need hardly remind the reader that both sense-percepts and percepts of ideal relation (comparisons, etc.) should be classed among the realities.  The bulk of our mental ‘stock’ consists of truths concerning these terms.]

The anti-pragmatist is guilty of the further confusion of imagining that, in undertaking to give him an account of what truth formally means, we are assuming at the same time to provide a warrant for it, trying to define the occasions when he can be sure of materially possessing it.  Our making it hinge on a reality so ‘independent’ that when it comes, truth comes, and when it goes, truth goes with it, disappoints this naive expectation, so he deems our description unsatisfactory.  I suspect that under this confusion lies the still deeper one of not discriminating sufficiently between the two notions, truth and reality.  Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them.  But I suspect that in the anti-pragmatist mind the two notions sometimes swap their attributes.  The reality itself, I fear, is treated as if ‘true’ and conversely.  Whoso tells us of the one, it is then supposed, must also be telling us of the other; and a true idea must in a manner be, or at least yield without extraneous aid, the reality it cognitively is possessed of.