The foregoing statements reproduce the essential content of the lecture on Truth in my book pragmatism.  Schiller’s doctrine of ‘humanism,’ Dewey’s ‘Studies in logical theory,’ and my own ’radical empiricism,’ all involve this general notion of truth as ‘working,’ either actual or conceivable.  But they envelop it as only one detail in the midst of much wider theories that aim eventually at determining the notion of what ‘reality’ at large is in its ultimate nature and constitution.

X

The existence of Julius Caesar [Footnote:  Originally printed under the title of ’Truth versus Truthfulness,’ in the Journal of Philosophy.]

My account of truth is purely logical and relates to its definition only.  I contend that you cannot tell what the word ‘true’ means, as applied to a statement, without invoking the concept of the statements workings.

Assume, to fix our ideas, a universe composed of two things only:  imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, and me, saying ‘Caesar really existed.’  Most persons would naively deem truth to be thereby uttered, and say that by a sort of actio in distans my statement had taken direct hold of the other fact.

But have my words so certainly denoted that Caesar?—­or so certainly connoted his individual attributes?  To fill out the complete measure of what the epithet ‘true’ may ideally mean, my thought ought to bear a fully determinate and unambiguous ‘one-to-one-relation’ to its own particular object.  In the ultrasimple universe imagined the reference is uncertified.  Were there two Caesars we shouldn’t know which was meant.  The conditions of truth thus seem incomplete in this universe of discourse so that it must be enlarged.

Transcendentalists enlarge it by invoking an absolute mind which, as it owns all the facts, can sovereignly correlate them.  If it intends that my statement shall refer to that identical Caesar, and that the attributes I have in mind shall mean his attributes, that intention suffices to make the statement true.

I, in turn, enlarge the universe by admitting finite intermediaries between the two original facts.  Caesar had, and my statement has, effects; and if these effects in any way run together, a concrete medium and bottom is provided for the determinate cognitive relation, which, as a pure actio in distans, seemed to float too vaguely and unintelligibly.

The real Caesar, for example, wrote a manuscript of which I see a real reprint, and say ‘the Caesar I mean is the author of that.’  The workings of my thought thus determine both its denotative and its connotative significance more fully.  It now defines itself as neither irrelevant to the real Caesar, nor false in what it suggests of him.  The absolute mind, seeing me thus working towards Caesar through the cosmic intermediaries, might well say:  ’Such workings only specify in detail what I meant myself by the statement being true.  I decree the cognitive relation between the two original facts to mean that just that kind of concrete chain of intermediaries exists or can exist.’