My bedroom is above my library.  Does the ‘aboveness’ here mean aught that is different from the concrete spaces which have to be moved-through in getting from the one to the other?  It means, you may say, a pure topographic relation, a sort of architect’s plan among the eternal essences.  But that is not the full aboveness, it is only an abbreviated substitute that on occasion may lead my mind towards truer, i.e., fuller, dealings with the real aboveness.  It is not an aboveness ante rem, it is a post rem extract from the aboveness in rebus.  We may indeed talk, for certain conveniences, as if the abstract scheme preceded, we may say ’I must go up stairs because of the essential aboveness,’ just as we may say that the man ’does prudent acts because of his ingrained prudence,’ or that our ideas ‘lead us truly because of their intrinsic truth.’  But this should not debar us on other occasions from using completer forms of description.  A concrete matter of fact always remains identical under any form of description, as when we say of a line, now that it runs from left to right, and now that it runs from right to left.  These are but names of one and the same fact, one more expedient to use at one time, one at another.  The full facts of cognition, whatever be the way in which we talk about them, even when we talk most abstractly, stand inalterably given in the actualities and possibilities of the experience-continuum. [Footnote 1:  The ultimate object or terminus of a cognitive process may in certain instances lie beyond the direct experience of the particular cognizer, but it, of course, must exist as part of the total universe of experience whose constitution, with cognition in it, the critic is discussing.] But my critics treat my own more concrete talk as if it were the kind that sinned by its inadequacy, and as if the full continuum left something out.

A favorite way of opposing the more abstract to the more concrete account is to accuse those who favor the latter of ‘confounding psychology with logic.’  Our critics say that when we are asked what truth means, we reply by telling only how it is arrived-at.  But since a meaning is a logical relation, static, independent of time, how can it possibly be identified, they say, with any concrete man’s experience, perishing as this does at the instant of its production?  This, indeed, sounds profound, but I challenge the profundity.  I defy any one to show any difference between logic and psychology here.  The logical relation stands to the psychological relation between idea and object only as saltatory abstractness stands to ambulatory concreteness.  Both relations need a psychological vehicle; and the ‘logical’ one is simply the ‘psychological’ one disemboweled of its fulness, and reduced to a bare abstractional scheme.