I think that Dr. Pratt ought to do something more than repeat the name ‘trueness,’ in answer to my pathetic question whether that there be not some constitution to a relation as important as this.  The pathway, the tendency, the corroborating or contradicting progress, need not in every case be experienced in full, but I don’t see, if the universe doesn’t contain them among its possibilities of furniture, what logical material for defining the trueness of my idea is left.  But if it do contain them, they and they only are the logical material required.

I am perplexed by the superior importance which Dr. Pratt attributes to abstract trueness over concrete verifiability in an idea, and I wish that he might be moved to explain.  It is prior to verification, to be sure, but so is the verifiability for which I contend prior, just as a man’s ‘mortality’ (which is nothing but the possibility of his death) is prior to his death, but it can hardly be that this abstract priority of all possibility to its correlative fact is what so obstinate a quarrel is about.  I think it probable that Dr. Pratt is vaguely thinking of something concreter than this.  The trueness of an idea must mean something definite in it that determines its tendency to work, and indeed towards this object rather than towards that.  Undoubtedly there is something of this sort in the idea, just as there is something in man that accounts for his tendency towards death, and in bread that accounts for its tendency to nourish.  What that something is in the case of truth psychology tells us:  the idea has associates peculiar to itself, motor as well as ideational; it tends by its place and nature to call these into being, one after another; and the appearance of them in succession is what we mean by the ‘workings’ of the idea.  According to what they are, does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to light.  These tendencies have still earlier conditions which, in a general way, biology, psychology and biography can trace.  This whole chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things in which new relations, not simply causal, can now be found, or into which they can now be introduced,—­the relations namely which we epistemologists study, relations of adaptation, of substitutability, of instrumentality, of reference and of truth.

The prior causal conditions, altho there could be no knowing of any kind, true or false, without them, are but preliminary to the question of what makes the ideas true or false when once their tendencies have been obeyed.  The tendencies must exist in some shape anyhow, but their fruits are truth, falsity, or irrelevancy, according to what they concretely turn out to be.  They are not ‘saltatory’ at any rate, for they evoke their consequences contiguously, from next to next only; and not until the final result