In the present question, the links of experience sequent upon an idea, which mediate between it and a reality, form and for the pragmatist indeed are, the concrete relation of truth that may obtain between the idea and that reality.  They, he says, are all that we mean when we speak of the idea ‘pointing’ to the reality, ‘fitting’ it, ‘corresponding’ with it, or ‘agreeing’ with it,—­they or other similar mediating trains of verification.  Such mediating events make the idea ‘true.’  The idea itself, if it exists at all, is also a concrete event:  so pragmatism insists that truth in the singular is only a collective name for truths in the plural, these consisting always of series of definite events; and that what intellectualism calls the truth, the inherent truth, of any one such series is only the abstract name for its truthfulness in act, for the fact that the ideas there do lead to the supposed reality in a way that we consider satisfactory.

The pragmatist himself has no objection to abstractions.  Elliptically, and ‘for short,’ he relies on them as much as any one, ending upon innumerable occasions that their comparative emptiness makes of them useful substitutes for the overfulness of the facts he meets, with.  But he never ascribes to them a higher grade of reality.  The full reality of a truth for him is always some process of verification, in which the abstract property of connecting ideas with objects truly is workingly embodied.  Meanwhile it is endlessly serviceable to be able to talk of properties abstractly and apart from their working, to find them the same in innumerable cases, to take them ‘out of time,’ and to treat of their relations to other similar abstractions.  We thus form whole universes of platonic ideas ante rem, universes in posse, tho none of them exists effectively except in rebus.  Countless relations obtain there which nobody experiences as obtaining,—­as, in the eternal universe of musical relations, for example, the notes of Aennchen von Tharau were a lovely melody long ere mortal ears ever heard them.  Even so the music of the future sleeps now, to be awakened hereafter.  Or, if we take the world of geometrical relations, the thousandth decimal of ‘pi’ sleeps there, tho no one may ever try to compute it.  Or, if we take the universe of ‘fitting,’ countless coats ‘fit’ backs, and countless boots ‘fit’ feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones ‘fit’ gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually.  In the same way countless opinions ‘fit’ realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.

For the anti-pragmatist these prior timeless relations are the presupposition of the concrete ones, and possess the profounder dignity and value.  The actual workings of our ideas in verification-processes are as naught in comparison with the ‘obtainings’ of this discarnate truth within them.