It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to follow the inner workings of the processes by which truth is first identified with some superior type of Reality, and then this Truth is taken as the criterion of the truth of ideas; while all the time it is held that truth is something already possessed by ideas as purely intellectual. But there seems to be some ground for believing that this identification is due to a twofold confusion, one having to do with ideas, and the other with things. As to the first point: After an idea is made true, we naturally say, in retrospect, “it _was_ true all the time.” Now this truism is quite innocuous as a truism, being just a restatement of the fact that the idea has, as matter of fact, worked successfully. But it may be regarded not as a truism but as furnishing some additional knowledge; as if it were, indeed, the dawning of a revelation regarding truth. Then it is said that the idea worked or was verified because it was already inherently, just as idea, the truth; the pragmatist, so it is said, making the error of supposing that it is true because it works. If one remembers that what the experimentalist means is that the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same thing--this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth but its nature--it is hard to see the point of this statement. A man under peculiarly precarious circumstances has been rescued from drowning. A by-stander remarks that now he is a saved man. “Yes,” replies some one, “but he was a saved man all the time, and the process of rescuing, while it gives evidence of that fact, does not constitute it.” Now even such a statement as pure tautology, as characterizing the entire process in terms of its issue, is objectionable only in the fact that, like all tautology, it seems to say something but does not. But if it be regarded as revealing the earlier condition of affairs, apart from the active process by which it was carried to a happy conclusion, such a statement would be monstrously false; and would declare its falsity in the fact that, if acted upon, the man would have been left to drown. In like fashion, to say, _after the event_, that a given idea was true all the time, is to lose sight of what makes an idea an idea, its hypothetical character; and thereby deliberately to transform it into brute dogma--something to which no canon of verification can ever be applied. The intellectualist almost always treats the pragmatic account as if it were, from the standpoint of the pragmatist as well as from his own, a denial of the existence of truth, while it is nothing but a statement of its nature. When the intellectualist realizes this, he will, I hope, ask himself: What, then, on the pragmatic basis is meant by the proposition that an idea is true all the time? If the statement that an idea was true all the time has no meaning except that the idea was one which as matter of fact succeeded through action in