In any case, how much simpler the case becomes when we stick by the empirical facts. According to them there is no wholesale discrepancy of existence and meaning; there is simply a “loosening” of the two when objects do not fulfil our plans and meet our desires; or when we project inventions and cannot find immediately the means for their realization. The “collisions” are neither physical, metaphysical, nor logical; they are moral and practical. They exist between an aim and the means of its execution. Consequently the object of thinking is not to effect some wholesale and “Absolute” reconciliation of meaning and existence, but to make a specific adjustment of things to our purposes and of our purposes to things at just the crucial point of the crisis. Making the utmost concessions to Mr. Bradley’s account of the discrepancy of meaning and existence in our experience, to his statement of the relation of this to the function of judgment (as involving namely an explicit _statement_ at once of the actual sundering and the ideal union) and to his account of consistency as the goal and standard, there is still not a detail of the account that is not met amply and with infinitely more empirical warrant by the conception that the “collision” in which thinking starts and the “consistency” in which it terminates are practical and human. III This brings us explicitly to the question of truth, “truth” being confessedly the end and standard of thinking. I confess to being much at a loss to realize just what the intellectualists conceive to be the relation of truth to ideas on one side and to “reality” on the other. My difficulty occurs, I think, because they describe so little in analytical detail; in writing of truth they seem rather to be under a strong emotional influence--as if they were victims of an uncritical pragmatism--which leaves much of their thought to be guessed at. The implication of their discussions assigns three distinct values to the term “truth.” On the one hand, truth is something which characterizes ideas, theories, hypotheses, beliefs, judgments, propositions, assertions, etc.,--anything whatsoever involving _intellectual_ statement. From this standpoint a criterion of truth means the test of the worth of the intellectual intent, import, or claim of any intellectual statement as intellectual. This is an intelligible sense of the term truth. In the second place, it seems to be assumed that a certain kind of reality is already, apart from ideas or meanings, Truth, and that _this_ Truth is the criterion of that lower and more unworthy kind of truth that may be possessed or aimed at by ideas. But we do not stop here. The conception that _all_ truth must have a criterion haunts the intellectualist, so that the reality, which, as contrasted with ideas, is taken to be The Truth (and the criterion of _their_ truth) is treated as if it itself had to have support and warrant from some other Reality, lying back of it, which is _its_