all-witness which 'relates' things together by throwing
'categories' over them like a net. The most peculiar and unique,
perhaps, of all these categories is supposed to be the truth-
relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of
them a knower, and of the other a thing known, yet which is itself
contentless experientially, neither describable, explicable, nor
reduceable to lower terms, and denotable only by uttering the name
'truth.'

The pragmatist view, on the contrary, of the truth-relation is that
it has a definite content, and that everything in it is
experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The
'workableness' which ideas must have, in order to be true, means
particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or
possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete
experience. Were this pragmatic contention admitted, one great point
in the victory of radical empiricism would also be scored, for the
relation between an object and the idea that truly knows it, is held
by rationalists to be nothing of this describable sort, but to stand
outside of all possible temporal experience; and on the relation,
so interpreted, rationalism is wonted to make its last most obdurate
rally.

Now the anti-pragmatist contentions which I try to meet in this
volume can be so easily used by rationalists as weapons of
resistance, not only to pragmatism but to radical empiricism also
(for if the truth-relation were transcendent, others might be so
too), that I feel strongly the strategical importance of having
them definitely met and got out of the way. What our critics most
persistently keep saying is that though workings go with truth, yet