_Teacher: Reply._ Your objection combines and confuses two things. To disentangle them is to answer the objection. (1) The notion of transcendence has a double meaning; first, it denotes that which lies inherently and essentially beyond experience. It is interesting to note that the opponents of pragmatism have been forced by the exigencies of their hostility to resuscitate a doctrine supposedly dead: the doctrine of unexperienceable, unknowable “Things in Themselves.” And as if this were not enough, they identify Truth with relationship to this unknowable. Thereby in behalf of the notion of Truth in general, they land in scepticism with reference to the possibility of any truth in particular. The pragmatist _is_ bound to deny _such_ transcendence. (2) That he is thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduction of every existence to the purely mental, follows only if experience means only mental states. The critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine that experience is made up of states of mind, of sensations and ideas. It is then for _him_ to decide how, on _his_ basis, he escapes subjective idealism, or “mentalism.” The pragmatist starts from a much more commonplace notion of experience, that of the plain man who never dreams that to experience a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to substitute a mental state for it. More particularly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience is a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness. To criticise the pragmatist by reading into him exactly the notion of experience that he denies and replaces, may be psychological and unregenerately “pragmatic,” but it is hardly “intellectual.” _Pupil: Objection Three._ You remind me, curiously enough, of a contention of my old instructor to the effect that the pragmatist, when criticised, always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and subjectivism, he falls back on things independent of ideas, adducing them in order to pass upon the truth or falsity of the latter. But thereby he only covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard. Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of science and a clamorous reiteration, in new phraseology, of what all philosophers hold. _Teacher: Reply._ Your words have indeed a familiar sound. Apparently, the average intellectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth as a Relation at Large, without specification or analysis, that any attempt at a concrete statement of just what the relationship is appears to be a denial of the relation itself; in which case, he interprets an occasional reminder from the pragmatist that the latter is, after all, attempting to specify the nature of the relation, to be a surrender of the pragmatist’s own case, since it admits after all that there is some relation!