As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its acceptance.[144] The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas in our minds and the supposed reality outside them--“sensations” say, or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness or with what is outside it--in matter say, or in things. And if the former, how we can ever get to the latter, and _vice versa_. And so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists, parallelists, and so on. Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.” And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism[145] as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism[146] than it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor, than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter[147] when again looking into its theory of truth and reality.