_Teacher: Reply._ May I recall to your attention the accusation of “shifting ground” when hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I remember correctly, with conceiving truth as a relation of thought and existence; has he not, in your last objection, substituted for this conception an identification of the bare existence or event with truth? Which does he mean? How will he have it? The existence of the Carboniferous age, the discovery of America by Columbus are not truths; they are events. Some conviction, some belief, some judgment with reference to them is necessary to introduce the category of truth and falsity. And since the conviction, the judgment, is as matter of fact subsequent to the event, how can its truth consist in the kind of blank, wholesale relationship the intellectualist contends for? How can the present belief jump out of its present skin, dive into the past, and land upon just the one event (that _as_ past is gone forever) which, by definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder the intellectualist has much to say about “transcendence” when he comes to dealing with the truth of judgments about the past; but why does he not tell us how we manage to know when one thought lands straight on the devoted head of something past and gone, while another thought comes down on the wrong thing in the past? _Pupil._ Well, of course, knowledge of the past is very mysterious, but how is the pragmatist any better off? _Teacher._ The reply to that may be inferred from what has already been said. The past event has left effects, consequences, that are present and that will continue in the future. Our belief about it, if genuine, must also modify action in _some_ way and so have objective effects. If these two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the judgment is true. If perchance the past event had no discoverable consequences or our thought of it can work out to no assignable difference anywhere, then there is no possibility of genuine judgment. _Pupil._ You have, perhaps, anticipated my next objection, which was that upon the pragmatic theory (by which truth is constituted by future consequences) there are no truths about what is past and gone, since in respect to that ideas can make no difference. For, I suppose, you would say that the difference made is in the effects that continue, since ideas may work out to facilitate or to confuse our relations to these effects. Nevertheless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the object of my judgment is something past, not future, while pragmatism makes all objects of judgment future. _Teacher: Reply._ You confuse the content of a judgment with the _reference_ of that content. The content of any idea about yesterday’s rain certainly involves past time, but the distinctive or characteristic aim of judgment is none the less to give this content a future reference and function.