Anti-Prag.:—­Where? where?  There is no ’where’—­it simply obtains, absolutely obtains.

Prag.:—­Not in any one’s mind?

Anti-Prag.:—­No, for we agreed that no actual knower of the truth should be assumed.

Prag.:—­No actual knower, I agree.  But are you sure that no notion of a potential or ideal knower has anything to do with forming this strangely elusive idea of the truth of the facts in your mind?

Anti-Prag.:—­Of course if there be a truth concerning the facts, that truth is what the ideal knower would know.  To that extent you can’t keep the notion of it and the notion of him separate.  But it is not him first and then it; it is it first and then him, in my opinion.

Prag.:—­But you still leave me terribly puzzled as to the status of this so-called truth, hanging as it does between earth and heaven, between reality and knowledge, grounded in the reality, yet numerically additional to it, and at the same time antecedent to any knower’s opinion and entirely independent thereof.  Is it as independent of the knower as you suppose?  It looks to me terribly dubious, as if it might be only another name for a potential as distinguished from an actual knowledge of the reality.  Isn’t your truth, after all, simply what any successful knower would have to know in case he existed?  And in a universe where no knowers were even conceivable would any truth about the facts there as something numerically distinguishable from the facts themselves, find a place to exist in?  To me such truth would not only be non-existent, it would be unimaginable, inconceivable.

Anti-Prag.:—­But I thought you said a while ago that there is a truth of past events, even tho no one shall ever know it.

Prag.:—­Yes, but you must remember that I also stipulated for permission to define the word in my own fashion.  The truth of an event, past, present, or future, is for me only another name for the fact that if the event ever does get known, the nature of the knowledge is already to some degree predetermined.  The truth which precedes actual knowledge of a fact means only what any possible knower of the fact will eventually find himself necessitated to believe about it.  He must believe something that will bring him into satisfactory relations with it, that will prove a decent mental substitute for it.  What this something may be is of course partly fixed already by the nature of the fact and by the sphere of its associations.  This seems to me all that you can clearly mean when you say that truth pre-exists to knowledge.  It is knowledge anticipated, knowledge in the form of possibility merely.

Anti-Prag.:—­But what does the knowledge know when it comes?  Doesn’t it know the truth?  And, if so, mustn’t the truth be distinct from either the fact or the knowledge?