_Pupil: Objection Five._ But your argument requires an absurd identification of truth and verification. To verify ideas is to find out that they were already true; or possessed of the truth relation prior to its discovery in verification. But the pragmatist holds that the act of finding out that ideas are true creates the thing that is found. In short, you confuse the psychology of finding out with the reality found out. _Teacher: Reply._ Many intellectualists have now gone so far as to admit that _verification_ is the testing of a judgment by the consequence it imports, the difference it makes--its working. But they still deny any organic connection between the “antecedent” truth property of ideas and the verification (or “making true”) process. Surely they admit either too much or too little. (i) If an idea about a past event is already true because of some mysterious static correspondence that it possesses to that past event, how in the world can its truth be _proved_ by the _future consequences_ of that idea? Why is it that the intellectualist has not produced any positive theory about the relation of verification to his notion of truth? (ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the experimental working out of a belief, the intellectualist thereby admits that his _own_ theory of truth can be _known_ to be true only as it is verified by its workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready-made static property of judgments _is_ true, how in the world _can_ it be verified by making any specific differences in the course of events? Everywhere we have to proceed _as if_ the pragmatic theory were the right one. (iii) If he admits that the pragmatic theory of verification is true, what meaning remains to the statement that the idea had the truth property in advance? Why, simply that it had the property of _ability to work_--an ability revealed by its actual working. How can a given fact be an objection to the pragmatic theory when that fact has a definitely assignable meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon the anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted as an ultimate, unanalyzable fact? As to your remark about verification being merely psychological, I have something to say. Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various laboratories on various researches, forming hypotheses, experimenting, testing, corroborating, refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for example, recently put an immense pendulum in place in order to repeat and test Foucault’s experiment with reference to the earth’s rotation. Do you regard such verification processes as merely psychological? _Pupil._ I don’t know. Why do you ask?