[48] It would lead us aside from the point to try to tell just what is the nature of the experienced difference we call truth. Professor James’s recent articles may well be consulted. The point to bear in mind here is just what sort of a thing the empiricist must mean by true, or truer (the noun Truth is, of course, a generic name for all cases of “Trues”). The adequacy of any particular account is not a matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding out what sort of an experience the truth-experience actually is. [49] I say “relatively,” because the transcendentalist still holds that finally the cognition is imperfect, giving us only some symbol or phenomenon of Reality (which _is_ only in the Absolute or in some Thing-in-Itself)--otherwise the curtain-wind fact would have as much ontological reality as the existence of the Absolute itself: a conclusion at which the non-empiricist perhorresces, for no reason obvious to me--save that it would put an end to his transcendentalism. [50] In general, I think the distinction between -_ive_ and -_ed_ one of the most fundamental of philosophic distinctions, and one of the most neglected. The same holds of -_tion_ and -_ing_. [51] What is criticised, now as “geneticism” (if I may coin the word) and now as “pragmatism” is, in its truth, just the fact that the empiricist does take account of the experienced “drift, occasion, and contexture” of things experienced--to use Hobbes’s phrase. [52] Perhaps the point would be clearer if expressed in this way: Except as subsequent estimates of _worth_ are introduced, “real” means only existent. The eulogistic connotation that makes the term Reality equivalent to _true_ or _genuine_ being has great pragmatic significance, but its confusion with reality as existence is the point aimed at in the above paragraph. [53] One does not so easily escape medieval Realism as one thinks. Either every experienced thing has its own determinateness, its own unsubstitutable, unredeemable reality, or else “generals” _are_ separate existences after all. [54] Excepting, of course, some negative ones. One could say that certain views are certainly _not_ true, because, by hypothesis, they refer to nonentities, _i.e._, non-empiricals. But even here the empiricist must go slowly. From his own standpoint, even the most professedly transcendental statements are, after all, real as experiences, and hence negotiate some transaction with facts. For this reason, he cannot, in theory, reject them _in toto_, but has to show concretely how they arose and how they are to be corrected. In a word, his logical relationship to statements that profess to relate to things-in-themselves, unknowables, inexperienced substances, etc., is precisely that of the psychologist to the Zöllner lines.