(2) The counterpart assumption to that of pure aboriginal “mental states” is, of course, that of an Absolute Reality, fixed and complete in itself, of which our “mental states” are bare transitory hints, their true meaning and their transcendent goal being the Truth _in rerum natura_. If the organ and medium of knowing is a self-inclosed order of existence different in kind from the Object to be known, then that Object must stand out there in complete aloofness from the concrete purpose and procedure of knowing it. But if we go back to the knowing as a natural occurrence, capable of description, we find that just as a smell does not mean Rose in general (or anything else at large), but means a _specific_ group of qualities whose experience is intended and anticipated, so the function of knowing is always expressed in connections between a given experience and a specific possible wanted experience. The “rose” that is meant in a particular situation _is_ the rose of that situation. When this experience is consummated, it is achieved as the fulfilment of the conditions in which just _that_ intention was entertained--not as the fulfilment of a faculty of knowledge or a meaning in general. Subsequent meanings and subsequent fulfilments may increase, may enrich the consummating experience; the object or content of the rose as known may be other and fuller next time and so on. But we have no right to set up “a rose” at large or in general as the object of the knowing odor; the object of a knowledge is always strictly correlative to that particular thing which means it. It is not something which can be put in a wholesale way over against that which cognitively refers to it, as when the epistemologist puts the “real” rose (object) over against a merely phenomenal or empirical rose which _this_ smell happens to mean. As the meaning gets more complex, fuller, more finely discriminated, the object which realizes or fulfils the meaning grows similarly in quality. But we cannot set up a rose, an object of fullest, complete, and exhaustive content as that which is really meant by any and every odor of a rose, whether it consciously meant to mean it or not. The test of the cognitional rectitude of the odor lies in the _specific_ object which it sets out to secure. This is the meaning of the statement that the import of _each_ term is found in its relationship to the other. It applies to object meant as well as to the meaning. Fulfilment, completion are always relative terms. _Hence the criterion of the truth or falsity of the meaning, of the adequacy, of the cognitional thing lies within the relationships of the situation and not without._ The thing that means another by means of an intervening operation either succeeds or fails in accomplishing the operation indicated, while this operation either gives or fails to give the object meant. Hence the truth or falsity of the original cognitional object. IV