they do not constitute it. It is numerically additional to them,
prior to them, explanatory OF them, and in no wise to be explained
BY them, we are incessantly told. The first point for our enemies to
establish, therefore, is that SOMETHING numerically additional and
prior to the workings is involved in the truth of an idea. Since the
OBJECT is additional, and usually prior, most rationalists plead IT,
and boldly accuse us of denying it. This leaves on the bystanders
the impression--since we cannot reasonably deny the existence of the
object--that our account of truth breaks down, and that our critics
have driven us from the field. Altho in various places in this
volume I try to refute the slanderous charge that we deny real
existence, I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that
the existence of the object, whenever the idea asserts it 'truly,'
is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work
successfully, if it work at all; and that it seems an abuse
of language, to say the least, to transfer the word 'truth' from the
idea to the object's existence, when the falsehood of ideas that
won't work is explained by that existence as well as the truth of
those that will.

I find this abuse prevailing among my most accomplished adversaries.
But once establish the proper verbal custom, let the word
'truth' represent a property of the idea, cease to make it something
mysteriously connected with the object known, and the path opens
fair and wide, as I believe, to the discussion of radical empiricism
on its merits. The truth of an idea will then mean only its
workings, or that in it which by ordinary psychological laws sets up
those workings; it will mean neither the idea's object, nor anything
'saltatory' inside the idea, that terms drawn from experience cannot
describe.