has, in each case, brought him into closer touch with a reality felt at the moment to verify just that idea.  Each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was able to set up.  These ‘workings’ differ in every single instance, they never transcend experience, they consist of particulars, mental or sensible, and they admit of concrete description in every individual case.  Pragmatists are unable to see what you can possibly mean by calling an idea true, unless you mean that between it as a terminus a quo in some one’s mind and some particular reality as a terminus ad quem, such concrete workings do or may intervene.  Their direction constitutes the idea’s reference to that reality, their satisfactoriness constitutes its adaptation thereto, and the two things together constitute the ‘truth’ of the idea for its possessor.  Without such intermediating portions of concretely real experience the pragmatist sees no materials out of which the adaptive relation called truth can be built up.

The anti-pragmatist view is that the workings are but evidences of the truth’s previous inherent presence in the idea, and that you can wipe the very possibility of them out of existence and still leave the truth of the idea as solid as ever.  But surely this is not a counter-theory of truth to ours.  It is the renunciation of all articulate theory.  It is but a claim to the right to call certain ideas true anyhow; and this is what I meant above by saying that the anti-pragmatists offer us no real alternative, and that our account is literally the only positive theory extant.  What meaning, indeed, can an idea’s truth have save its power of adapting us either mentally or physically to a reality?

How comes it, then, that our critics so uniformly accuse us of subjectivism, of denying the reality’s existence?  It comes, I think, from the necessary predominance of subjective language in our analysis.  However independent and elective realities may be, we can talk about them, in framing our accounts of truth, only as so many objects believed-in.  But the process of experience leads men so continually to supersede their older objects by newer ones which they find it more satisfactory to believe in, that the notion of an absolute reality inevitably arises as a grenzbegriff, equivalent to that of an object that shall never be superseded, and belief in which shall be endgueltig.  Cognitively we thus live under a sort of rule of three:  as our private concepts represent the sense-objects to which they lead us, these being public realities independent of the individual, so these sense-realities may, in turn, represent realities of a hypersensible order, electrons, mind-stuff.  God, or what not, existing independently of all human thinkers.  The notion of such final realities, knowledge of which would be absolute truth, is an outgrowth of our cognitive