II

A still further obstacle, I suspect, stands in the way of my account's

acceptance. Like Dewey and like Schiller, I have had to say that

the truth of an idea is determined by its satisfactoriness. But

satisfactoriness is a subjective term, just as idea is; and truth

is generally regarded as 'objective.' Readers who admit that

satisfactoriness is our only MARK of truth, the only sign that we

possess the precious article, will still say that the objective relation

between idea and object which the word 'truth' points to is left out of

my account altogether. I fear also that the association of my poor name

with the 'will to believe' (which 'will,' it seems to me, ought to play

no part in this discussion) works against my credit in some quarters.

I fornicate with that unclean thing, my adversaries may think, whereas

your genuine truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan heroics, and feel as

if truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of death to

all our satisfactions. Such divergences certainly prove the complexity

of the area of our discussion; but to my mind they also are based on

misunderstandings, which (tho with but little hope of success) I will

try to diminish by a further word of explanation.

First, then, I will ask my objectors to define exactly what SORT of

thing it is they have in mind when they speak of a truth that shall be

absolute, complete and objective; and then I will defy them to show me

any conceivable standing-room for such a kind of truth outside the terms

of my own description. It will fall, as I contend, entirely within the

field of my analysis.

To begin with, it must obtain between an idea and a reality that is the

idea's object; and, as a predicate, it must apply to the idea and not

to the object, for objective realities are not TRUE, at least not in the

universe of discourse to which we are now confining ourselves, for there

they are taken as simply BEING, while the ideas are true OF them. But we

can suppose a series of ideas to be successively more and more true

of the same object, and can ask what is the extreme approach to being

absolutely true that the last idea might attain to.

The maximal conceivable truth in an idea would seem to be that it should

lead to an actual merging of ourselves with the object, to an utter

mutual confluence and identification. On the common-sense level

of belief this is what is supposed really to take place in

sense-perception. My idea of this pen verifies itself through

my percept; and my percept is held to BE the pen for the time

being--percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as

identical. But the physiology of the senses has criticised common sense

out of court, and the pen 'in itself' is now believed to lie beyond my

momentary percept. Yet the notion once suggested, of what a completely

consummated acquaintance with a reality might be like, remains over for

our speculative purposes. TOTAL CONFLUX OF THE MIND WITH THE REALITY

would be the absolute limit of truth, there could be no better or more

satisfying knowledge than that.

Such total conflux, it is needless to say, is ALREADY EXPLICITLY

PROVIDED FOR, AS A POSSIBILITY, IN MY ACCOUNT OF THE MATTER. If an idea

should ever lead us not only TOWARDS, or UP TO, or AGAINST, a reality,

but so close that we and the reality should MELT TOGETHER, it would be

made absolutely true, according to me, by that performance.

In point of fact philosophers doubt that this ever occurs. What happens,

they think, is only that we get nearer and nearer to realities,

we approximate more and more to the all-satisfying limit; and the

definition of actually, as distinguished from imaginably, complete and

objective truth, can then only be that it belongs to the idea that

will lead us as CLOSE UP AGAINST THE OBJECT as in the nature of our

experience is possible, literally NEXT to it, for instance.

Suppose, now, there were an idea that did this for a certain objective

reality. Suppose that no further approach were possible, that nothing

lay between, that the next step would carry us right INTO the reality;

then that result, being the next thing to conflux, would make the idea

true in the maximal degree that might be supposed practically attainable

in the world which we inhabit.

Well, I need hardly explain that THAT DEGREE OF TRUTH IS ALSO PROVIDED

FOR IN MY ACCOUNT OF THE MATTER. And if satisfactions are the marks of

truth's presence, we may add that any less true substitute for such a

true idea would prove less satisfactory. Following its lead, we should

probably find out that we did not quite touch the terminus. We should

desiderate a closer approach, and not rest till we had found it.

I am, of course, postulating here a standing reality independent of the

idea that knows it. I am also postulating that satisfactions grow pari

passu with our approximation to such reality. [Footnote 1: Say, if

you prefer to, that DISsatisfactions decrease pari passu with

such approximation. The approximation may be of any kind

assignable--approximation in time or in space, or approximation in kind,

which in common speech means 'copying.'] If my critics challenge this

latter assumption, I retort upon them with the former. Our whole notion

of a standing reality grows up in the form of an ideal limit to the

series of successive termini to which our thoughts have led us and

still are leading us. Each terminus proves provisional by leaving us

unsatisfied. The truer idea is the one that pushes farther; so we

are ever beckoned on by the ideal notion of an ultimate completely

satisfactory terminus. I, for one, obey and accept that notion. I can

conceive no other objective CONTENT to the notion of ideally perfect

truth than that of penetration into such a terminus, nor can I conceive

that the notion would ever have grown up, or that true ideas would ever

have been sorted out from false or idle ones, save for the greater

sum of satisfactions, intellectual or practical, which the truer ones

brought with them. Can we imagine a man absolutely satisfied with an

idea and with all its relations to his other ideas and to his sensible

experiences, who should yet not take its content as a true account of

reality? The matter of the true is thus absolutely identical with the

matter of the satisfactory. You may put either word first in your ways

of talking; but leave out that whole notion of SATISFACTORY WORKING or

LEADING (which is the essence of my pragmatistic account) and call truth

a static logical relation, independent even of POSSIBLE leadings or

satisfactions, and it seems to me you cut all ground from under you.

I fear that I am still very obscure. But I respectfully implore those

who reject my doctrine because they can make nothing of my stumbling

language, to tell us in their own name--und zwar very concretely and

articulately!--just how the real, genuine and absolutely 'objective'

truth which they believe in so profoundly, is constituted and

established. They mustn't point to the 'reality' itself, for truth is

only our subjective relation to realities. What is the nominal

essence of this relation, its logical definition, whether or not it be

'objectively' attainable by mortals?

Whatever they may say it is, I have the firmest faith that my account

will prove to have allowed for it and included it by anticipation, as

one possible case in the total mixture of cases. There is, in short,

no ROOM for any grade or sort of truth outside of the framework of

the pragmatic system, outside of that jungle of empirical workings and

leadings, and their nearer or ulterior terminations, of which I seem to

have written so unskilfully.