The pragmatist thesis, as Dr. Schiller and I hold it,—­I prefer to let Professor Dewey speak for himself,—­is that the relation called ‘truth’ is thus concretely definable.  Ours is the only articulate attempt in the field to say positively what truth actually consists of.  Our denouncers have literally nothing to oppose to it as an alternative.  For them, when an idea is true, it is true, and there the matter terminates; the word ‘true’ being indefinable.  The relation of the true idea to its object, being, as they think, unique, it can be expressed in terms of nothing else, and needs only to be named for any one to recognize and understand it.  Moreover it is invariable and universal, the same in every single instance of truth, however diverse the ideas, the realities, and the other relations between them may be.

Our pragmatist view, on the contrary, is that the truth-relation is a definitely experienceable relation, and therefore describable as well as namable; that it is not unique in kind, and neither invariable nor universal.  The relation to its object that makes an idea true in any given instance, is, we say, embodied in intermediate details of reality which lead towards the object, which vary in every instance, and which in every instance can be concretely traced.  The chain of workings which an opinion sets up is the opinion’s truth, falsehood, or irrelevancy, as the case may be.  Every idea that a man has works some consequences in him, in the shape either of bodily actions or of other ideas.  Through these consequences the man’s relations to surrounding realities are modified.  He is carried nearer to some of them and farther from others, and gets now the feeling that the idea has worked satisfactorily, now that it has not.  The idea has put him into touch with something that fulfils its intent, or it has not.

This something is the man’s object, primarily.  Since the only realities we can talk about are such objects-believed-in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’ means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such.  Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence.  The idea, for example, may be that a certain door opens into a room where a glass of beer may be bought.  If opening the door leads to the actual sight and taste of the beer, the man calls the idea true.  Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the hypothenuse of a triangle, such a relation being, of course, a reality quite as much as a glass of beer is.  If the thought of such a relation leads him to draw auxiliary lines and to compare the figures they make, he may at last, perceiving one equality after another, see the relation thought of, by a vision quite as particular and direct as was the taste of the beer.  If he does so, he calls that idea, also, true.  His idea